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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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I think you may be taking this wrong. The problem is that universities are severely underfunded and always have been. They simply don't have the money to pay a living wage to grad students. When forced to do so, some universities have simply dissolved student positions as a response.
The problem isn't the university or this professor. The problem is why we aren't funding these better so that they can pay a reasonable wage.
Stanford is private with an endowment over $35 billion and charges $25 grand per semester for graduate programs. I'm not interested in my tax dollars funding a private college primarily for rich assholes.
Billions of your tax dollars already go there to fund research. That is how universities work, public or private.
I'm aware, that doesn't mean I agree with it or support more money being siphoned from the working class to the elite.
lol elite. Most students are just surviving
This statement is not based on any facts.
You're right, we need to continue concentrating the salaries in the administration department!
You have to understand that the teaching assistants can't teach effectively unless the Dean gets his $50k/year mortgage paid for by the university along with a new car.
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/05/25/examination-growing-number-perks-and-bonuses-college-presidents-essay
Good point!!
Lol, please do tell me more about Stanford's lack of money.
It’s an endowment, they can’t just empty that pool of money they take around 4% of the money each year that they get from investments which ends up being around 10% of their budget
That's still 1.4B a year. They get $1.1 B in tuition a year. That's $2.5B. They have 2300 professors. At $200k salary that's only $0.4B of the $2.5B.
They also have 12.8 square miles of campus to maintain… which requires a lot more than just the 2300 professors. They also have adjunct professors, lab managers, researcher techs, facilities, and a ton of other expenses that are required from an R1 research university.
The grad students while they don’t get a “livable wage” do get their tuition comped and get a housing stipend. Like we can always do better but undergrad students are being done much dirtier than grad students as they are going into huge amounts of debt to try and even afford tuition
Those all fall into the underpaid category too. Adjunct professor is particularly abused.
$2.5B from tuition and endowment, $2.2B in sponsors and $1.6B in donations. $6.3B a year income. 27.4k total employees. If each and every employee was paid $100k, that's $2.7B for salaries.
You and I are the only people in this thread with actual experience at a university. The rest are just looking for places to project their anger and general malaise.
I worked at a university, did research at a university and was a student. There is obviously waste and definitely some amount of grift but the auditing requirements in place to prevent grift are arguably so strict that they cause as much or more waste as they save in grift.