Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

edition.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 445 posts

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#151

Post by electricslpnsld »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
hedora wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no clear path to replacing UAW. They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system. The US is a closed shop country, so it is illegal for students to simply cancel their membership in UAW and join a graduate student workers union. I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if i…

Wow being a graduate student is closed-shop in the US?! That’s crazy I never knew that. How does that square with academic and political freedom? A student who researches union abuse must join and fund a union!

Depends on the state and the public/private designation of the university. There is also the (mostly unanswered in the courts) question of whether private university graduate students are primarily employees or students. Read up on the kerfuffles at NYU and Columbia University to see how gnarly this all gets.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#152

Post by asdff »

ajross wrote: post #106
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #101

The 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…

> But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary negotiation.

But many are if every year brings about a new set of graduate students. Perhaps you started your PhD at UCSC 4 years ago, with the understanding that compensation would be different, a wildly different real estate market than today, and under a different agreement by the school.

So yes, future students were not represented at the salary negotiation, and a the same time, students who came to the school before the negotiation came under a different pretext with a different understanding of the local rental economy and graduate compensation that is no longer true today.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#153

Post by yarrel »

nostrebored wrote: post #71
acdha wrote: post #12

I feel like these stories should mention the compensation for the people attacking graduate students for demanding a living wage. Someone making well into 6 figures really doesn’t have a good basis for summarily dismissing that need: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/university-o...

Why should they expect a living wage for sub-demand fields of research? Why do my choices to achieve financial stability override my experience prior to that? When you're from a poor family the decisions that these striking students are making are befuddling.

There's an oversupply of this kind of comment, so I'm not going to read this one.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#154

Post by thanatosmin »

vga805 wrote: post #150
thanatosmin wrote: post #143

I see a lot of discussion about the consequences of TAs withholding grades. This situation is a consequence of poor management at UCSC. Every other university I'm familiar with makes faculty responsible for submitting grades. It's inconceivable to me why TAs would be responsible for grades. TAs should be teaching assistants, not adjunct faculty. Edit: I read "assigning grades" to mean assigning the final grades for t…

Strange. every university im familiar with has grad students teaching courses, not just TAing. i did it myself.

Maybe it's more common than I thought... I've only ever seen TAs teaching discussion sections.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#155

Post by michaericalribo »

thanatosmin wrote: post #143

I see a lot of discussion about the consequences of TAs withholding grades. This situation is a consequence of poor management at UCSC. Every other university I'm familiar with makes faculty responsible for submitting grades. It's inconceivable to me why TAs would be responsible for grades. TAs should be teaching assistants, not adjunct faculty. Edit: I read "assigning grades" to mean assigning the final grades for t…

The operative word here is ‘should be.’ In practice, at the state school where I did my doctorate, more than half of undergrad courses are taught by grad students...academia is a broken system that doesn’t work very well for anyone involved in it

Edit: this was the case in my department, a STEM subject required for graduation in multiple unrelated majors

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#156

Post by asdff »

ajross wrote: post #117
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

On the other hand, what to the grad students at UCSC do if they weren't represented at the bargaining table by their own union in the first place?

The agreement is not one the grad students at UCSC and UCSC, but with the grad students at all UC campuses with the University of California, et al. 83% of UCSC grad students opposed the original UC wide negotiation because the salary minimums did not take into account the rising cost of living in Santa Cruz due to market pressure in the bay area. They are striking without the support of their union because the union never supported their situation in the first place.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#157

Post by dantheman »

csb6 wrote: post #64
csomar wrote: post #61

Earlier 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…

> That's not how it works in the real world. You get paid by market rate; which means if there is someone else accepting a pay cut, you'll get fired and replaced. I agree, that's true. It's almost as if this is an unjust system that devolves into a race to the bottom and inevitable exploitation of workers. And that in the real world, anyone who tries to fight against this system ends up screwed by their employers. I'…

How is it exploitation? These people are students who are compensated while learning -- they're not full time staff. They get a degree at the end.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#158

Post by majos »

dickeytk wrote: post #146
papeda wrote: post #108

There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there are 2 years of masters students and 6 of PhD at any one time, that makes PhD students 60% of “graduate students”. Let’s make this easy by saying 1000 PhD students (if anything I imagine it’s way less than this — as I understand, monetizing masters students has…

Vice seems to indicate that 22k is the minimum salary, not average: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxe45b/graduate-student-s...

I think you’re right, edited. As far as I can tell they’re using this number as a baseline for wage increases so the rest of the comment should still hold.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#159

Post by dantheman »

csb6 wrote: post #66
jdm2212 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Workers are treated as disposable Workers are treated as replaceable when they are in fact easily replaced. Grad students aren't even really workers, though. They're students where teaching responsibilities are part of their professional training, and as with most similar positions (apprenticeships and internships), they aren't especially lucrative and there's a line around the block to replace anyone who quits.

> Grad students aren't even really workers "As part of its commitment to transparency and public accountability, each year the University of California publicly reports employee pay data. The report covers UC's career faculty and staff employees, as well as part-time, temporary and student employees." [1] I think the commonly accepted definition of worker is someone who is an employee and not a manager. Grad students…

They're not workers in the traditional sense. What are other workers get degrees for their work?

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#160

Post by dantheman »

anonsivalley652 wrote: post #119
andrepd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

It's hard to think of universities as the capitalist class.
Post reply on HN