UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
111–120 of 445 posts
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#112The most disappointing aspect of this is how many people are locked out from these opportunities because they don't have or come from the family wealth to support living in a place like Santa Cruz while studying full time and TA'ing at such low wages. Something's gotta give, and only people with the means to do so can take the financial hit.
It's... more complicated than that. There is an existing union that represents these people which has negotiated an existing collective bargaining agreement. This strike wasn't authorized. Now... maybe the union cut a bad deal, maybe their representatives aren't faithfully honoring their commitment, maybe there is literal corruption involved. But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary…
Graduate programs are usually filled with a completely new set of students after 2-3 years. The likelihood of students taking similar actions in future years will have no bearing on the actions taken today by those currently enrolled.
Having a union doesn't fundamentally change the un-affordability of accepting below-market wages for skilled labor in a high cost of living area. They might be getting a better deal than they would have otherwise, but clearly there's a disconnect between the UC system, the union, and the students on the premise of today's arrangement and its long term viability.
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The way workers in this country are treated is god-awful, and I'm saddened by the people in this thread who are cheering the firing of these students. I'm not cheering their firing. I'm just explaining why their strike did not work out as they wished. > ask for compensation that reflects the value they bring to the organization That's not how it works in the real world. You get paid by market rate; which means if t…
> You get paid by market rate; I love how people dismiss injustice with an appeal to "the market" as if the market was a force of nature rather than a manmade and human manipulated entity. Markets are created by a handful of people and affected by laws. And supply and demand is also an man-made creation. For example, by creating laws allowing seasonal migrants, you could affect the wages of farm workers. The same thi…
> Also UC Santa Cruz is a public university. Very little chance it is going to be out-competed and put out of business.
Relatively little of the funding for the UC's comes from the state. Tuition is a much larger percentage. So they do have a concern of being out-competed.
https://www.dailycal.org/2018/08/08/2018-uc-accountability-r...
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#114I'm an undergrad at UCSC right now and have found the entire strike to be more detrimental to their cause. They've lost so much undergrad support after disrupting a STEM midterm and shutting down campus causing us to miss the classes we have paid for. I even lost my grades last quarter as my TA was fired ( of the 54 ) and he has refused to hand them over post firing. What it has done to the undergraduates is a little…
Striking when it's convenient is worthless. Perhaps if the students weren't so entitled, they'd understand that solidarity is important and that grades should be handled. Furthermore, you have to realize the university is punishing you to turn you against the grad students... and it appears they have succeeded. If I were an ugrad there, I'd be right there with the grad students. I was an ugrad at another UC where 2/3…
I agree that striking when its convenient is worthless, but at the same time, I have various emails from my direct TAs and the COLA organization as a whole mentioning the intent is to not harm undergrads, but here we are... Additionally, I'm not sure where youre getting the students are "entitled". I work and take loans out in order to go to this school, takes classes, and receive my grades. Am I entitled for wanting what I pay for?
The administration is not withholding grades, the graduates are. I understand that they're doing it as a result of the administration, but why are we (undergraduates) sitting in the middle taking heat from both sides?
I'm happy you would be out there striking as thats your right, but to call me entitled is a tad bit much no? The response on the UCSC subreddit is similar - youre either entitled or a bootlicker if you don't join the cause. I am unsure how that is supposed to make me support the cause?
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#115I'm an undergrad at UCSC right now and have found the entire strike to be more detrimental to their cause. They've lost so much undergrad support after disrupting a STEM midterm and shutting down campus causing us to miss the classes we have paid for. I even lost my grades last quarter as my TA was fired ( of the 54 ) and he has refused to hand them over post firing. What it has done to the undergraduates is a little…
What happened with your grades in those classes? I read the university systems release and this article and couldn’t glean the details. Is that course’s grades still just up in the air?
For many classes, grades were withheld and then released as the TAs did not want to lose their jobs. My TA was not one of them. For a class that needs tests graded, this isn't as much of an issue, but in my case, the class is a Distributed Systems course and the projects we built are quite extensive. My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructure as he believes our true grades will never be received from our fired TA. I took the course as a letter grade class, but currently it is marked as a Pass/No Pass which conveniently is not allowed for major courses. It will be a fun time talking to the advising people on campus.
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Striking when it's convenient is worthless. Perhaps if the students weren't so entitled, they'd understand that solidarity is important and that grades should be handled. Furthermore, you have to realize the university is punishing you to turn you against the grad students... and it appears they have succeeded. If I were an ugrad there, I'd be right there with the grad students. I was an ugrad at another UC where 2/3…
Eh, sounds like the grad students are doing the punishing. Their cause is noble, I'm sure, right up until it interferes with my education (and thus my career path). They need to find a way to exert leverage on the people who can satisfy their demands -- meaning the University -- and not on people who are basically innocent customers.
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Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's... more complicated than that. There is an existing union that represents these people which has negotiated an existing collective bargaining agreement. This strike wasn't authorized. Now... maybe the union cut a bad deal, maybe their representatives aren't faithfully honoring their commitment, maybe there is literal corruption involved. But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary…
Graduate programs are usually filled with a completely new set of students after 2-3 years. The likelihood of students taking similar actions in future years will have no bearing on the actions taken today by those currently enrolled. Having a union doesn't fundamentally change the un-affordability of accepting below-market wages for skilled labor in a high cost of living area. They might be getting a better deal tha…
Obviously no, strikes and labor actions can't change the microeconomics. But regardless of whether or not the wages are sufficient, and whether the agreement is just or not, it's an agreement. Breaking it only hurts things for future students, it doesn't help. Consider the union sitting down to the next contract, how do they negotiate successfully if UCSC doesn't believe their members will honor the agreement?
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
People didn't go to college back then because it was out of reach, they didn't go because they didn't need to. In 1920 you could get into UCLA with a slip of paper signed by your principle certifying you did 4 years of high school; 100% of the people who produced this scrap of paper got into the school. In the 50s, this requirement was stepped up to a $5 application fee and you needed to average a B (1). It wasn't un…
In 1920, less than 20% of Americans completed 4 years of high school. How do you think the average economic status of that group compared to the whole country? As old limits cease to be sufficiently exlusive, new ones are introduced.
If you didn't complete high school that means you joined the labor force instead. You are right that of those who went to college, it perhaps wasn't those with connections to the working class economy and readily available local blue collar job opportunities. That being said, if you didn't want to work with Dad on the factory line at 16, then you just hit the books, graduated, and were virtually guaranteed college admission if you simply completed high school.
People weren't completing high school back then because it was a difficult or a privileged thing to do, they didn't complete high school because they didn't need to complete high school in order to land a job paying a living wage and start a family. For decades, a year of college was something you could pay for with a summertime of part time work, it was not reserved for the rich and elite, but those who simply wanted to go to college.
Now we've structured our economy such that if you want a living wage or a career you can grow, you do need to go to college, and not just any college but a good one, and sometimes more school afterwards. The economic incentives are not the same. For instance, the GI bill was invented to reintegrate returning veterans right back into their life plans when they returned from WWII with little difficulty. Today, the GI bill is used by many as a way to pay for college in the first place, not as a restitution payment for being conscripted to military service like it was after WWII. College is so necessary these days that people are willing to risk a deployment to a warzone to get this scrap of paper, but this wasn't always the case.
Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#119I think this is a wake-up call for these grad students of how the real world works. > Instead of firing TAs who are standing up for a decent standard of living for themselves, UC must sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a cost of living increase. Sitting at the negotiations table where you hold none of the cards means you are not getting the pay increase you are asking for. Striking is for workers who know…
There is a power asymmetry between the worker class and the capitalist class. By that Gilded Age logic, certainly all unqualified workers -- and many qualified ones as is this case -- do not have the right to strike. It's because of that power asymmetry that there are utterly basic protections such as it being illegal to fire strikers, hire scabs, etc. Your "free market" approach makes for a very dystopic world indee…
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Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
#120The most disappointing aspect of this is how many people are locked out from these opportunities because they don't have or come from the family wealth to support living in a place like Santa Cruz while studying full time and TA'ing at such low wages. Something's gotta give, and only people with the means to do so can take the financial hit.
It's... more complicated than that. There is an existing union that represents these people which has negotiated an existing collective bargaining agreement. This strike wasn't authorized. Now... maybe the union cut a bad deal, maybe their representatives aren't faithfully honoring their commitment, maybe there is literal corruption involved. But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary…
All the TAs at that school voted against the deal the union made.