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

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

#391

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

saagarjha wrote: post #224
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when she apparently has some already? Where are you seeing that she has roommates? It's not mentioned in the article I read, and I don't see any evidence that the units are shared at https://housing.ucsc.edu/family/ . In fact, it says the rent for a 2br is $1700 a month, the same as what she says she's paying. In any case, the mistake seems to be earlier in the decision-making process, when she decided to become a…

Ok, so now we have a complaint that she shouldn’t have tried to join the program with a child? I think we’re done here.

Genuinely, yes! If you have a child, you need to consider your child's needs and best interests ahead of your own hopes and dreams and desires.

And if that child's needs are better met by taking a decent job in a lower COL area than by working for poverty wages at UCSC, then you should take that job. Your child is more important than your selfish dreams!

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

#392

Post by namdnay »

WalterBright wrote: post #367
akiselev wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a golden parachute.

Golden parachutes are not decided on after the fact. They are agreed upon in advance when they are hired. The only reason companies offer them is to get the best people they can. The person running your investments can make or break you. You're going to hire the best you can, and that's going to cost. And someone with a track record of making it rain is going to know this and know what they're worth. If you want a go…

> And someone with a track record of making it rain

I think you kind of summed it up there... There are better things for a university to be doing than paying rainmakers

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

#393

Post by dragonwriter »

chrisseaton wrote: post #371
dragonwriter wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no clear path to replacing UAW. Sure there is; the rules for decertifying unions and replacing them are not mysterious. > They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system. Because the grad students formed unions and voted to affiliate with UAW, even before their rights to do so were recognized. > I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably s…

> voted to affiliate with UAW But why? They’ve got nothing to do with the car industry.

The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, (UAW for historical reasons) is a broad multi-industry parent union, and has been since something like the 1950s or 1960s; The National Writers Union is part of it, among others.

UAW provided organizing and other support beginning shortly after the first few (unrecognized) campus unions were set up by the grad students.

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

#394

Post by dantheman »

exhilaration wrote: post #378
JamesBarney wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMA has done an amazing job at representing the interests of doctors

But that's a lobbying organization - and yes, a very successful one at all levels of government. They're not involved in pay and contract negotiations at your local hospital.

They've successfully limited the supply of doctors to artificially increase wages.

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

#395

Post by Balgair »

logifail wrote: post #351
Balgair wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sacremento Bee has a database of all the salaries of every state worker, including UCSC professors and admin here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/ Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR.

> Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR Was that the annual base salary? What was the value of the rest of the package?

Go ahead and put her name in yourself! :P

The data set is fairly informative for it's size and publicity.

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

#396

Post by ganoushoreilly »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #268
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually low! Most of the Universities we've explored research grants with wanted 45-65% overhead for the university, then another 10-15 for Research organization, with the remainder sorted between the researchers / company. We found it was actually just cheaper to pay for the research ourselves and hire the students directly for part time work than go through the grant process. I sat on a couple school boards…

> and just targeting students / researchers directly. Sounds like a win-win, yeah? So, sorta happy ending...

To a large degree yes, but a lot of the work would have fared better with a larger pool of people to work on the problem. We have to be more selective in candidates and in turn, we spend more money out of pocket vs wider spread from the grant pool of cash. The original purpose of grants was to spur technology growth and acceleration, now they're just one more notch on the ole' funding universities piece.

We need an overhaul on bloat in state schools at a minimum, then we're good.

The other issue is patent / design ownership arguments, but that's for another day.

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

#397

Post by baryphonic »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #348
valid4life wrote: post #83

I'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…

At the risk of getting banned for this comment, fuck this. I was an undergrad as UCSC and I supported the strikes then, and I support the strike now. Yes the strike interferes with undergrad education, but that is the entire point. I never went to class when a strike was on, just like I would never cross a picket line. Professors deserve to be paid well, and grad students in teaching or TA positions deserve to be pai…

Good for you?

But consider that GP is also paying "absurd tuition." Returning grades is the least UC can do.

Not everyone goes to school to become an activist. No one should begrudge you of your means and desire to skip class in solidarity with the oppressed grad students at probably the top public university system in the world, but not everyone has such privileges.

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

#398

Post by charleslmunger »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #330
asdff wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do you know, the rents are still high. At what point do we realize that an administrator making 600k a year off the backs of people toiling long hours in labs to bring in grant money for the school and coming home to live in tenement conditions isn't the fault of the students, but the administrators making half a million dollars a year? Quite a hill to die on.

An administrator is paid that much because that is how much value they provide to the university system. A graduate student provides minimal value, in fact barely above replacement level. That’s why they are a student. Are you a grad student? And you never took an economics course? This is pretty basic material.

That's a truism. It depends on the administrator, and in general executives and administrators aren't paid on the value they bring, but based on a sort of signalling game with the oversight board that determines their compensation. If pay was really based on value to the system, Chancellors that are fired or denoted under scandal wouldn't keep their pay.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/ar...

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

#399

Post by genuinealgerian »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #348
valid4life wrote: post #83

I'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…

At the risk of getting banned for this comment, fuck this. I was an undergrad as UCSC and I supported the strikes then, and I support the strike now. Yes the strike interferes with undergrad education, but that is the entire point. I never went to class when a strike was on, just like I would never cross a picket line. Professors deserve to be paid well, and grad students in teaching or TA positions deserve to be pai…

Seriously, fuck this. Disrupting the revenue stream IS THE POINT.

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

#400

Post by blaser-waffle »

kortilla wrote: post #324
jdm2212 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. A union-negotiated contract that's better than the one you'd get without the union is, well, better. It might not be "fair" or flawless, but it's still better.

Unless it’s worse. The assumption that forming a union and entering into effectively hostile negotiations with the company will result in a better compensation is unfounded.

I would say it's mostly better most of the time; they can go badly. Obligatory Futurama quote to illustrate the point:

> Hermes: So you're telling me I could fire my whole staff and hire Grunka Lunkas at half the cost?

> Glurmo: That's right. They think they have a good union but they don't. [whispering] They're basically slaves.

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