“Duke University to Suspend Contributions to Employee Retirement Funds”
Mike LaChance Thursday, May 14, 2020 .
The 10% of salary over $285,000 or whatever is a trivial pay cut for a few people. It is deisgned to obscure the big pay cut for everyone, the size of which isn’t mentioned. Suppose Duke pays 5% of your salary into your pension account. That means everybody is in effect getting a 5% pay cut— even the lowliest lecturer and one-year-cheap-visitor.
How can this be legal— especially for those low-paid workers, who mostly are just hired in the past year or two? Their pay is being cut before the ink is dry on their job offers.
The University can’t even claim financial exigency. Its endowment is $8.5 billion . It has to use that up before it can start breaking contracts, I should think. A private corporation with $8.5 billion in untapped assets can’t break its contracts just because it has a loss this year.
Lawyers, I see a lucrative class-action suit here. If you give me 5%, I’ll figure it out for you.