Posts Tagged ‘ the economy ’
I have a plea for all of you.
Take 13 minutes of your life. Listen to Bernie Sanders talking about incomes, estate taxes, and tax rates.
I know it may not sound as fun as compulsively checking Facebook, but he does a better job of describing the dire situation we’re in during these 13 minutes than I have heard elsewhere.
Listen to him, and let’s talk.
We need to not only educate people, but figure out what the hell we can do to create change.
School started up again yesterday. This is usually a very exciting time for me because excessive brain exercise=happy. However, I’m suffering from what I’m going to call “recession malaise.” I think a lot of us have this right now – it’s the knowledge that the people in power are screwing us combined with the knowledge that everything could be much worse, so count your blessings.
It’s hard to quell the discontent, though.
As I’ve said before, people in general like to say that we become more conservative with age. It was Winston Churchill who said “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Personally, I see that as both a cop out and as arrogantly self-interested. (As it’s Churchill, I shouldn’t be surprised by the latter).
The older I get, the less patience I have with how business (non-profit, government, education, private industry, whoever) operates. The “tough decisions” rarely affect the bottom lines of the top administration’s remunerations/benefits or those of the people in their peer group. The “tough decisions” always, always, always result in stripped away benefits from low-/middle-wage workers, with a disproportionate burden of layoffs falling upon low-wage workers.
I understand the basic human nature behind these decisions. You want to protect yourself, you want to protect your friends, you want to ensure that – when it’s your colleague’s turn to make a “tough decision” that they spare you. People don’t want to give up the trappings of power or power itself.
It’s still wrong, though. It’s still unethical and immoral. And I know that many people think ethics and morals have nothing to do with business, and I thank them for allowing the financial sector to become what it is today – you know, the financial sector that almost singlehandedly set up the environment that would most easily facilitate an economic collapse. But hey, you can’t even live like a pauper in NYC on a salary of less than a million, right?
The thought process embedded in our organizations by this kind of lunacy – that executives should make obscene amounts more than their underlings – has infiltrated pretty much every aspect of our society, and this is a problem. It means that when terrible times come and a terrible governor makes the worst possible decisions about a great state’s welfare…well, sacrifice becomes the keyword of all state organizations. It’s not proportionate sacrifice, of course, because we operate with an oligarchy and: in good times salaries are justified by the good times and in bad times salaries are justified by how hard it is to retain such valuable employees in bad times.
The entrenchment of power never ends.
And so…malaise…
When I moved back to Minnesota, I had my eyes on the University. I wanted a job at the U for a few reasons: I’m committed to education and enhancing education, I think the University itself is a great school overall, and I knew (despite my protestations to the contrary) that I was shopping for a PhD and a way to pay for it.
The University of Minnesota, like many other universities, provides free tuition to its staff. It’s a fundamental element of an educational organization – encouraging your workforce to be educated helps your organization and drawing smart, ambitious people into your workplace by offering free tuition also helps your organization.
So when faced with the budget problem, what does the University do? The one solid proposal that Bruininks put forth via email on Monday was to cut the tuition benefit to 75%. Other parts of the proposal were not firm and kind of wishy washy (likely a pay freeze, but they have to talk to the unions; maybe closing the U over holidays, but they’re not sure).
Some have said that we as employees shouldn’t feel so entitled to the free tuition, but when I’ve gotten that glossy, 4-color brochure from HR that tells me how much the University actually pays me because of things like tuition reimbursement and therefore justifies them paying us less than market rate for our jobs, I’m expected to view the tuition-reimbursement as compensation.
Now it’s a “gift”? Sorry. No.
The other part of that letter from Bruininks is there was no end-date on that 75%. Which means that there’s no deadline, which means if it passes the Regents, it will stay.
So you have smart, ambitious staff who are stuck (momentarily) due to the market. But I can’t imagine that people who could make more elsewhere will stay as the non-salary aspects of our compensation are stripped away. It’s a bad long-term move.
Additionally, nowhere in that email did Bruininks talk about pay equity. There are a larger number of faculty and administrators at the University who make between $150k-500k than you realize (and a few who make more). These are people who have benefited greatly from the boom times, and they are the ones who should sacrifice now. Cutting the pay of someone who makes that much money will not impact them in the same way that it impacts someone making $30K. And changing the tuition reimbursement is a pay cut that will disproportionately impact people lower on the economic ladder.
Call me a socialist if you want, but I don’t believe that the budget should be balanced on the backs of the lower and middle classes. It doesn’t need to be and it shouldn’t be.
I get so angry at the University sometimes. I see our follies and our waste and our disparities and I really don’t understand why other people don’t call out when the U is visibly acting contrary to its mission and obligations. People are always getting caught up in fear of being honest about things, and I think that does us a disservice. I did post-secondary option at the U, I got my BA from CLA, I taught as an adjunct here, and I’m both a staff member and a graduate student now. My parents and my brother are U alums too. I’ve worked at and studied at other schools (New York University, Brooklyn College) and there are things that the U does better than either, hands down. However, there are also things we do worse.
What I’m saying is that you don’t have to drink the kool aid to be a fierce advocate for the University. I think real advocates for the U are the people who are willing to challenge administrative decisions and who want the U to improve and serve as a model university.
What Bruininks is proposing right now? Not okay. Maybe it’s time for the Minnesota Daily to report on salary information like they have in the past. It’s public data, you know…it might put these decisions in perspective.
And that duty is to tell us this. That NY Times story today about the obscene inflation of college tuition is not exactly news to me. But in the context of our economy and personal debt loads–was there some event that precipitated this ballooning? Did student loans get suddenly (or more progressively) easy to get? Have colleges and universities – like their bloated Wall Street brethren – been rapidly increasing costs on the bubble of consumer debt with the expectation that we could just keep going up, up, up? Have state governments been chipping away at public university funding under the same impression (no need to fund, just take out more loans)?
I would like to know these things. Please now go make magic statistics things happen for me. Okay?
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