From my personal interaction with PhDs, basically you have to leave the profession. I'm not kidding. I wish I was. Eventually you'll find a job that may be somewhat related to your interests, in "industry" as it's called, or you'll have to start out in the field where there actually are jobs for STEM graduates: Teaching.
Frankly, I've watched the cheapening happen for the past 15 years, and at first it was schadenfreude. Me, a person with a liberal arts degree, was having a really hard time getting my career going, getting a living wage - and even with a Masters, 10 years of solid work experience, references, technology skills and no piercings, tattoos or felonies. Basically I'm a textbook employee on paper, and it still took me something like 200 applications to "earn" my first career gig.
All the while, people in STEM put me down for having a useless degree. Well, after watching the 2000s tech bubble pop, watching H1-Bs come in and drive down the wage faster than 50 somethings trying to take any job they can just to keep up with their lifestyle (and thereby rob a 20 something of the chance to start gaining the requisite experience), I no longer take solace in how hard it is to be in STEM. It's a family thing now, but fortunately, my experience and my "take no bullshit, this is fucking business" attitude toward employment is very helpful.
I am a creative and intellectual mercenary. I fight for myself. I did not choose this path.
There's pretty much nothing that you can do, I think. At the point where you are a graduate student, you have the least power in the academic hierarchy. You're not going to leave, because programs are generally not transferable and you've already sunk X years into your degree. You have no money and, what's more, you're usually ineligible for getting any money because research agencies only fund in a meaningful way tenured professors. So you're dependent on someone who has been trained to be quite politically ruthless (if not always necessarily competent) and you've a massive sunk cost. Finish your degree as soon as you can and remember that you likely have no friends on faculty - when you finish your degree, they lose cheap, experienced labour ;-)
I left a chemistry program with an MA and managed to be admitted into a physics PhD program. Such things are not impossible, but you'd better have people willing to get your back when the time comes.
I had
a) physics professors at the previous school (UCSB) willing to write letters, make phone calls
b) solid unpublished work that raised some eyebrows
c) professors on the admitting end willing to shepherd my application
From one graduate student to another, do we decide to keep sucking toes and complain about it later or do we actually do something about it?