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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#141

Post by chmod600 »

bjourne wrote: post #75
karaterobot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

> To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall , but not a lot. Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain about getting more money?

It's like class-action lawsuits: sure, maybe you get $2.43, but the lawyers are really the beneficiaries. The individual is just used to justify the whole thing.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#142

Post by cycomanic »

timkam wrote: post #123
Rovanion wrote: post #5

Coming from Sweden I'm surprised they aren't already. Do you also not have student unions to represent you until you reach undergrad?

In Sweden, students and graduate students are well-organized/unionized, but the situation for PostDocs and other post-doctoral fixed-term employed academics is dire nonetheless, in particular for immigrants, for whom the fixed-term contracts cause problems with their residence permits, considering recent changes in immigration laws.

And recent changes by the government have actually made it worse. The irony is that the unions have been campaigning for these changes. It's really weird how unions think that requiring that postdocs must get a permanent position after 4 years would somehow lead to them getting those positions, while there is no more funding from the government, so no permanent positions are being created. I mean in our department academic faculty have to find 50% of their salary plus ~80% overhead from external funding. Really universities in Sweden tend to be more like research hotels, with lots of regulations that you have to follow.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#143

Post by bognition »

canjobear wrote: post #96
bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where s…

I doubt that a union could do much against the alleged toxic aspects of academia that you are pointing out. There’s nothing they can do, for example, to change the fact that tenure track jobs are rare, which is what drives a lot of the stress for grad students. More likely they will be involved in labor disputes involving how much TA work the grad students have to do.

Correct but they can advocate for other types of positions and intervene when a university fails to educate students about non academic jobs.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#144

Post by xhkkffbf »

mhh__ wrote: post #85
bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where s…

In an ideal world I think unionization at least has the potential to fight back against the "One bad letter of recommendation and your career is over" aspect. Whether it will work or not I have no idea. There is simply way too many questions on the academia stackexchange about how to confront a superior without making them feel confronted (or wrong). The power dynamic is ugly.

But why? It's a supply and demand issue. When demand is high and supply is low, the hiring committees will definitely look over one or more bad letters. But when supply is high (as it is most of the time thanks to overproduction), well the hiring committee will choose the best package deal.

I'm sure the university will be happy to claim that they'll discount bad letters just because it will be politically helpful, but as long as the hiring committee sees them all, it won't matter. They'll choose the best package.

Not that it matters, because most of this happens by word of mouth. I've seen professors write glowing letters of recommendation to cover their butt. Then they privately bad mouth the person.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#145

Post by caddemon »

bjourne wrote: post #75
karaterobot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

> To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall , but not a lot. Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain about getting more money?

Students voted for this union because of major issues with the entire academic training process, not to get a small salary bump. The presence of the union at other schools has not led to any real attempts to fix the systemic issues, yet it adds another layer of bureaucracy to deal with for any students that want to face these issues.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#147

Post by actually_a_dog »

bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where s…

Forget having their careers destroyed. The fact is that most people who graduate with a PhD will not have an academic career on the tenure track, and it's really easy to see why once you pay attention to what's going on.

The thing is that academia is not a growing field anymore. So, if a professor graduates more than one student, they're feeding a glut of candidates who will be competing for one job at some point. For instance, in the field of engineering as a whole, 7.8 students graduate with PhDs per professor over the length of an average academic career [0]. In environmental engineering, that number is a whopping 19.0! (Also from [0]).

As a graduate student, once you realize the field isn't growing, you can actually see the phenomenon at work. Just look around in all your classes. That same handful of people you see in most of your courses, especially those leading into your intended specialty, those people are probably your competition. Now multiply that by every university in the country that teaches in your specialty. You very quickly come to the conclusion that you'll probably have to wait for someone to either retire or die before you get an academic position, and that's actually 100% the truth.

---

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#148

Post by qzx_pierri »

dmitriid_y wrote: post #70
qzx_pierri wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as human beings run a union, the union will be self serving.

As long as a tyrant is unchallenged, they will remain a tyrant.

What does this reply even mean? Are you seriously comparing the privileged plights within the ranks of academia to victims of a tyrannical ruler?

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#149

Post by xhkkffbf »

j7ake wrote: post #69
some-human wrote: post #20

In the UK, most students are members of their universitys' branch of the National Union of Students.[1] The unions have a big presence on campus and a bar with heavily discounted drinks and organise a lot of the social clubs and events that happen outside of the study. They also negotiate with the university and faculty, fighting for students, and you can get individual advise and help too. Enrolling to the student u…

Phd student salaries in uk are probably the worst in the developed world. The student union in uk hasn’t been doing a good job to make salaries competitive with other countries at the PhD level.

Exactly. Unions end up becoming chums with the university admins. The students come and go but the admins are around a long time. Eventually the university just turns the union into a lower tier of management that effectively keeps all of the students in line. The admins learn which "issues" are favored by the unions and which issues hold sway with union. Then when they want to fire someone, they just frame it as an issue about which the union doesn't care.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#150

Post by klyrs »

_huayra_ wrote: post #54
bognition wrote: post #23

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where s…

We were discussing a potential hire at work a few days ago who suddenly turned down the company's offer for another company despite our team being his "dream place to work" and promising to not make a sudden decision without talking with us first. Turns out he was basically forced to go to this other company by his advisor, who had a lot of funding from this other company, or his advisor would "make graduating very d…

That really sucks but I'm not sure what the connection between this professor's probably illegal action and unionization.
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