I Can’t Even Think of a Title

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Clarissa

August 19, 2016

We had a really great departmental secretary. Intelligent, efficient, organized, kind. Everybody adored her and felt grateful to her for doing a fantastic job.

Then the university fired the secretary at the neighboring poli-sci department and told our secretary to pick up her duties in addition to her own. Meaning, she’d have to do two jobs. For the same ridiculous salary of $26,000. (Clarification for foreign readers: you can’t live on it.)

So what do you think happened? Duh, she found a better job. Because anything will be better than this crap. But hey, it’s all good because the university will now be able to save on her salary, too. Her job and that of the poli-sci’s fired secretary will be done by professors. For free! Yippee!

Of course, we are allowed to try to hire a new secretary but can you imagine anybody with any sort of a choice taking that job offer?

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12 responses to “I Can’t Even Think of a Title”

David Gendron

August 19, 2016

You can live with 26K (Unless if you’re a single mother), but I agree. It sucks!

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 19, 2016
  
  She’s in her late fifties but still. What a shit thing to do.
  
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2. Shakti
  
  August 21, 2016
  
  Ha, ha, ha, no.
  Assuming 2000 hours a year (fifty 40 hour weeks per year, no paid vacation), it works out to $13/hr before payroll taxes. There is no saving or room for financial error or surprises on that income. And her health insurance must be through the roof since she’s over 50. With the governor refusing to have a budget, and the state employees’ health insurance claims being denied (still?), I doubt even if they kept the other secretary that she’d have stayed. Exchange health insurance is so expensive.
  
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Dreidel

August 19, 2016

“You can live [in America?] with 26K.”

WHERE??

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 19, 2016
  
  Not even around here, you can’t.
  
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  1. David Gendron
    
    August 19, 2016
    
    Probably that I underestimate the cost of housing in your town. But in Québec, I would be very comfortable with 26K if I would have no kids.
    
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Vic Crain

August 19, 2016

There are places where you can rent an apartment for $600/month, but you wouldn’t want to be there. In any case, academia is one of the last vestiges of secretaries, which have been gone from most corporate environments for many years (except for C-level executives). Some companies have robots that deliver mail. Employees at all levels are expected to be proficient at Microsoft Office. The interesting question is which jobs will vaporize next.

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matt

August 20, 2016

We might be in solidarity on this was, as shocking as that is.

Whenever budget cuts happen the upper management never (rarely) thinks to cut their salary or eliminiate positions, instead they cut out lower jobs or make them crappier.

Getting rid of one high placed admin (a VP or high level admin) could easily be $100,000-150k. That would spare making 6 lower cuts of secretaries as you describe, which affects dozens or hundreds of professors, and all that pain / disfunction results from the top protecting themselves. Saw it all the time when consulting for Fortune 500 companies (at all 7 fortune 500 that i spent meaningful time at).

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1. Clarissa
  
  August 20, 2016
  
  Better yet, eliminating the entire Office for Institutional Diversity or Office of Academic Improvement would save tons of money and free up tons of time that these useless diversity officers keep wasting. I fume whenever I think how many resources are wasted on all these Ethics Commissions and State Compliance offices.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    August 20, 2016
    
    “eliminating the entire Office for Institutional Diversity or Office of Academic Improvement would save tons of money”
    
    Do you know where the money funding those comes from? The pay for particular positions sections of staff at state institutions tends to not be very simple.
    The funding for one position might be from an easy-to-cut (or overly strained) source while the money for another position might be either hard to cut or not affect university finances at all.
    
    The two offices you mention sound like make work jobs programs and it might be that funding them doesn’t come directly from the university (that is eliminating them wouldn’t mean more money for other parts of the university).
    
    Ever since finding out about potemkin companies I’m starting to see many, many state funded jobs as, essentially, employment programs meant to give people busy work in otherwise meaningless jobs.
    
    Memories of working in a bureaucracy funded by the state (in an office that dealt with accounts) doesn’t help. Half of what we did was duplicating what other people did before us in the paperwork trail and the other half was duplicated by people after us . And funding was always feast or famine – we had all kinds of money for things we didn’t need but couldn’t get some stuff we did because that had to be paid from accounts that were empty.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      August 20, 2016
      
      Yes, you are absolutely right, the system is set up in a way that there are tons of waste that are impossible to get under control and, as a result, really useful positions and programs get eliminated.
      
      I understand that it’s about employing the otherwise unemployable but it’s so ridiculous to get rid of a truly stellar worker to ensure that more useless people get fake jobs.
      
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    2. matt
      
      August 21, 2016
      
      Very good point about where the money is coming from for certain jobs that likely protect those jobs.
      
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