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Forced gift giving, employee edition

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scrooge

The law school that employs me as a tenure-track faculty member has what I hope is a fairly unusual practice: Each year faculty members — I’m unclear whether this includes the non-tenure-track faculty, who are full-time employees but paid quite a bit less than the tenure-track people — are asked to contribute to a holiday gift for the law school’s staff. I understand the ratio of faculty to staff has become roughly 1:1 (this helps explain skyrocketing tuition among other things) so in effect it’s as if each faculty member is buying a holiday gift for a staff member.

Of course this ends up turning into pretty much a straight cash transfer, in the form of a “Christmas bonus” from the faculty to the staff.

I find this practice distasteful, since:

(a) The faculty are employees not employers. If the powers that be want to take some of the money currently being paid to the faculty and pay it to the staff in the form of higher salaries this should be done directly, not through informal social pressure.

(b) The whole thing has an unpleasant and rather absurd air of noblesse oblige, especially since every year the faculty ends up getting a bunch of cap-doffing thank you emails from the staff, which staff members no doubt feel pressured to send because the social dynamics of the situation.

I suspect a bunch of other people on both sides of this awkward transaction feel the same way, but nobody wants to be that guy (or gal) who says so.

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