I am PhD student (I am only get paid with stipend) but it is common practice in academia to use us as universal slave workers.
There is a lab manager (50+ years old) in our group who is working full time and getting good salary and has many sources of income from the university.
He is not my supervisor but that does not stop him from always bullying and micromanaging me.
He started this week with bullying me again and because I was required to use facilities he is managing for my experiments he started to criticise, hurry, and push me to work over limits. The critical point for me was the moment when he said:
“you need to work as hard as you can and if you do not manage to do double norm (he just increased the specific task I got from my supervisor twice!) you will must to work on the weekends.” (to note: I already discussed all the plan of my experiments for the week with supervisor and he was happy) He calls that BS: “optimisation”
The problem is that I am always helping everyone (including him ) and I do not want to conflict (to tell the truth I also afraid to loose my PhD because of unwanted conflicts) So I did not reply anything to his defiant tone. But he was in a negative mood so he was trying to continue bullying and manipulating me, so he added: “do not you want publication in Nature?” (he did not even try to hide that it is a pure nonsense and manipulation) so I sincerely replied: “I do not usually think about such things “
But he continued to push and added – “so you try to show yourself as some kind of free artist who does whatever he wants?” etc.
Just to note again: I never initiate conversations with him and never reply back actively. I just doing my own scientific/experimental/PhD related business, but he enjoying bullying me and say humiliating things.
Some more examples: he likes to ask me reference information like specific experimental numbers (like phase chang temperature of a material etc.) which are not derived from first principles but widely open to be looked in literature, and when I am struggling to give a precise answer he aggressively says (and in a manner that I am stupid) that I am bad specialist if I do not know that.
Also he stays at work many hours (because he does not have other own stuff to do) and always wastes my time with non scientific discussion about random stuff. Also making me stay and listen but not allowing to tell anything back. He also mentions that my status as PhD student is the lowest in group hierarchy.
To summarise, I am objectively not bad specialist: I have many examples when I solved issues and came to correct ideas when his suggestions (which he insists to follow) were wrong.
To summarise, I just wanted to share with you guys, how terrible society is (even scientific)
I think academia is completely corrupted and slavery of most PhD student is a source of power for career oriented scientists.