UC Berkeley just cut 500 jobs after a minimum wage increase to $15. Is there a way Bernie's plan could have prevented that?

I'd suggest if you want to read Town Hall to actually look at the information they are citing. Because in the article you are posting, they are flat out lying. Like 100% lying.

That entire article is based off of this one sentence

An estimated $50 million will be saved by eliminating the jobs, Dirks said in the memo, which offered few details.

http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-Berkeley-to-eliminate-500-staff-jobs-7244049.php

Town Hall literally copied some parts word for word, of the article from sfgate and cut out the actual story and changed the title.

UC Berkely has been having financial troubles for a long while now. And is running a huge deficit.


Berkeley, with about 37,000 students, is perennially ranked atop the U.S. News and World Report list of top public universities. State financial support for Berkeley and other UC campuses has risen somewhat recently, but it remains much much lower than it was a generation ago. About 13 percent of Berkeley’s operating revenue came from state appropriations in 2014-2015, down from roughly 50 percent in the 1980s.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/12/uc-berkeley-to-cut-500-positions-in-next-two-years/

Basically, we don't care to give colleges public money anymore like we used to. My college in Washington D.C. had to sell itself to another college because it couldn't keep up with operating costs either, and had massive government funding cut after the Mapplethorpe incident. Around the same time as well. A lot of colleges got screwed over in the 80s and 90s from public funding. Shocker, a lot of them are failing. And it's part of the reason why tuition is insanely high.

This has literally nothing to do with minimum wage going up and Town Hall is using it for propaganda purposes to push a conservative agenda.

I hate to say it like it is, but there isn't anything more than this actually being a problem with conservatives continuing to want to cut spending for public programs like education.

This is what you get in return for 'reduced government spending.' Literally nothing to do with minimum wage.

There are other ways they can cut costs too.

http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/article2642161.html#StatePay&search-d=-1&search-dept=UC%20Berkeley&search-n=20&search-p=0&search-s=pay&search-year=2014&top-year=2015

Sort by total pay.

Head Coach 1.81m

Head Coach 1.8m

Head Coach 1.19m

Head Coach 900k

Athletic Manager 650k

Head Coach 600k

Asst Coach 600k

Dean 500k

Lawyer 600k

A few more asst Coaches 500k 500k 500k 500k

These are yearly salaries.

Their top 140 employees make 300k - 1.8 million a year.

Probably around 80-100 million? for the top 150 employees at UC Berkeley and the want to cut 50 million from their budget, so they play to fire over 500 people. At minimum.

I had to go through 28 pages x 20 per page... 560 employees... at UC Berkeley to see who made over 200k a year.


If we brought back more public funding to colleges it would also give a sort of power over the college to do things like lower their top staff's incomes. But we can't do that because we barely publicly help them.

/r/AskBernieSupporters Thread