MIT graduate students vote to unionize

As someone who just finished their PhD, I fear these unionization efforts will have the exact opposite effect that the students are aiming for. In particular, many universities provide subsidized housing in some of the most expensive places in the US. Housing is not a bargainable. The direct consequence is that universities will kick graduate students out of the housing, replace them with undergrad students to pay for the 10% wage increase. So the grad students get the 10% raise with a 50% housing increase. Grad students really are not in a position to bargain for much as they work 20 hours to earn their salaries which is most often teaching. They can easily be replaced with a lecturer whose full time equivalent already matches PhD stipends at this tier of universities. At least the last time I saw the numbers. Furthermore, who wants to lose a year of PhD when they already take so long to complete? Striking would really lower your lifetime earnings by delaying your real earnings another year. Furthermore, many other union benefits are moot in the PhD setting. Grievances with your supervisor are irrelevant because you're supervisor cannot be replaced. Or, again, the pain of replacement is burdened by the student.

The democratic process is the democratic process and so I respect their decision but grad students unionizing is really more complex than the workforce. In particular, the union is turning over every 5-8 years. It is quite possible no one wants the union after those who voted it in and don't have a choice not to join. Your PhD is defined by your advisor and my #1 advice to future PhD students is to pick your school based on advisor before location and other things. What this means is that your choice to "join" the union is incredibly overshadowed by external forces.

Again, as someone who went through this very recently, the problem is the power imbalance between the institution and the students. They have complete control over your supply of labor. That is, many (all?) US universities usually have the policy "any outside job is considered incompatible with full time PhD work and grounds for removal from the program". To me, forcing universities to pay students their prevailing market rate would solve all these issues. The first step towards this would be a cultural shift that allows part time PhD and moving towards PhD students being employees and not students. This would require a massive change to the F1 visas to allow international students to work which really pinpoints the root cause of all of this. PhD students are really in this strange limbo of being neither a student nor an employee. This limbo allows the university to use whichever definition fits their prerogative just like the NCAA. For instance, PhD students want more pay but the university decreases tuition assistance, nothing has changed.

The health of the student union is a very good litmus test for the culture of the university. Anyone looking to study at university in the UK should check out the student union and try to gauge how independent it is from the institution and whether they're actually active as a union or just an extension of the university's student experience department.

Can you find out much about the history of the SU at the intitution?

The names of previous people elected into officer positions?

What sort of jobs do those people have now?

Do you get a feeling like they might have used the officer roles to maneuver into those jobs rather than to actually advocate for students? (hint: SU Officers doing their jobs properly will be in conflict with faculty staff and see the worst of the institution, and therefore are not very likely to want to hang around after graduation)

Are multiple officers taking credit for the same achievement (campaign, event, milestone)?

Is there a good spread across demographics among the officers?

Do they get training? What do they say about their training?

What's going on on their social media? Does it feel like it's being used to market the university?

Source: was an SU rep

Half the reason I'm ambivalent about unionization is that I was involved with the graduate student union when I was in school. The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little, and added a modest amount of overhead, in the form of a union apparatus which fed itself by taking a little bite out of those paychecks every month. To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall, but not a lot. All in all, it really had only a small overall effect on us students, and didn't hurt the university much. It felt like the real winner was the UAW itself, which is the source of my mixed feelings.

The intensity of the competition is severe enough to make it a toxic situation even if the established scientists were completely ethical about it.

The lack of protections for graduate student workers is shocking IMO, especially in student housing.

Grad student workers of course don't get paid vacation, sick time, or anything like that. But you can't even just lower your hours since you're paid with a fixed stipend.

Contracts may be largely 20 hours per week, but they have all kinds of carve-outs where the university can force you to work up to 30/40 hours, like at the start and end of the year and during on-call (which is also 100% unpaid), taking time away from exams.

And universities mismanage the hell out of grad students, such as only giving purchasing power to one person instead of having backups. Or having horrible on-call coverage where you can expect 3+ calls per night, many of which are pointlessly mandated "escalations".

All of these problems can be fixed so easily (time off, on-call pay/coverage), but an enormous administration with a toxic culture of "No" prevents progress.