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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#161

Post by aardvarks »

g_p wrote: post #45

For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students actually have a good bit more power available to them by organising sensibly than you might think. The same is also true for early career postdoctoral research staff. This is because most of the work that actually matters is being done by these individuals, in a very pyramidical structure, but the money stops rolling in without the work that the base o…

It's true that professors rely on grad students/postdocs to do work. And, at least in my experience, advisors are actually pretty good about giving students credit for their work -- having successful students reflects well on the advisor. But a student is even more dependent on their advisor than vice versa. It's not like undergrad where the main thing that matters to your future employment is to collect the diploma, because for most fields the main reason to get a PhD is to continue in academia, and academia right now is an extreme employer's market. The things you need to leave grad school with are 1) impressive recommendation letters, like "best student in N years, reminiscent of at that age", and 2) (lots of) refereed publications. If you manage that, the diploma should be automatic.

Yes, you can push back against advisors who require 12 hrs a day in lab. But if that means you take longer to produce work, your letters might be just good instead of positively glowing, which might mean you fail to launch in academia. Several hundred other people will apply for each tenure track job you apply to; those with "just good" letters tend to get crowded out. The tenured advisor might have a bruised ego because their publication rate has slowed, or be more frazzled because they have to save money and write more proposals, but at least they still have a job.

Also, PIs themselves generally work a lot as well (often the ones insisting on lots of hours from their students think, rightly or wrongly but based on their own experience, that that's the only way to succeed....). I agree academia is broken, but think it's at a deep structural level, and more complicated than schools exploiting students and hanging them out to dry.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#162

Post by asdflawje5qwa35 »

UW Madison teaching assistants were represented by a union [1,2] between 1970 and 2011, when its status was abruptly terminated by conservative political forces in Wisconsin. When the union was active, it was pretty clear that negotiating was not its strength, but the union was always available to help people navigate day-to-day problems that come up. Maybe it is just coincidence, but multiple independent accounts detailing toxic work environments within UW have been reported in recent years.

[1] https://taa-madison.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Associatio...

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#163

Post by rossdavidh »

Unionization usually works when:

1) the workers in question are not easily replaced (for example, specialized skills or long training period before they become productive)

2) the workers in question are not easily able to switch employers, so they need the protection of a union (instead of just switching employers whenever they are unhappy, such that they are normally happy)

There are lots of professions which either do not meet condition 1 or do not meet condition 2. However, grad students would seem to be a classic example of a group ripe for unionization.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#164

Post by jrochkind1 »

I was a graduate student with a research assistantship position at the University of Washington in the mid 2000s, a few years after they unionized and got a contract with the UAW.

By the time I was there, even though it was only a few years after the union struggle, I didn't hear much about the union, at least in my department.

But what I knew it meant was: we had good health insurance, we had a guaranteed minimum stipend, we had the right to actually take vacation during university vacations, and a certain number of sick days. I knew from talking to oother students, that before the union contract, grad students with assistantships didn't necessarily have these things (it depended on department), and sometimes literally got no vacation or allowed sick leave at all.

I was aware of no ways that the presence of a graduate student union harmed the grad students involved -- to the contrary of some suppositions in this thread. Grad student unions exist in dozens of universities, some for years now, so it's possible to look at actual experiences, not just forecasting supposition. I was also aware of no ways the union harmed research or academics at the university (beyond of course costing them more money to treat the grad students right).

I wonder if a few years after I left, most grad students even realized what the union had won for them. The union was not very visible, once the fight for a contract was over.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#165

Post by rossdavidh »

asdflawje5qwa35 wrote: post #162

UW Madison teaching assistants were represented by a union [1,2] between 1970 and 2011, when its status was abruptly terminated by conservative political forces in Wisconsin. When the union was active, it was pretty clear that negotiating was not its strength, but the union was always available to help people navigate day-to-day problems that come up. Maybe it is just coincidence, but multiple independent accounts de…

Did you mean "represented by a union" rather than "repressed by a union"?

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#166

Post by klyrs »

IMTDb wrote: post #102
bjourne wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Because it probably cost a lot more to the institution than it brought to the intended target. A middleman takes the bulk of the additional investment, without providing that much value in itself. And that money came from somewhere, probably partly from profits, but also from other investments (buildings, teaching material, ...). Overall teacher got a little bit more, but both the org and the students lost a lot, com…

At many universities, there's a massive stash of funds: the Athletics Department, which is a completely different organization and therefore off the table.

Also, university administration lover building pyramids of hierarchy. When you add a level to the pyramid, everybody gets a raise. Executive salaries are ludicrous -- and similar to the bank execs in the '08 bailouts, they cut themselves bonuses for "saving money" on handling disasters of their own creation.

By and large, university endowments are treated as separate investment vehicles and are no longer used to ease times of hardship.

Universities have largely been sold out. What was once a venerable public institution is now run like a profit-driven business. Welcome to wal-mart.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#167

Post by spacemanmatt »

klyrs wrote: post #150
_huayra_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unions are generally vehicles of resistance to illegal and/or oppressive actions. HTH.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#168

Post by lnxg33k1 »

sheikheddy wrote: post #114
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #73

I am not sure how to fairly express this concept, so I will write it as it comes, younger generations are kinda fixing all the fuck ups of millennials in terms of working conditions, in a bit maybe they will even get paid overtime, I felt always like my generation was more focused in trying to find someone to blame rather than fighting to fix things, more focused on saying "Ok boomer" or blame "GenX". And I think the…

Do you also believe this pattern will hold as this generation ages? It could be the case that this property is really about young vs old people. Although I hope future generations will be so well off that they'll view the role of menial labor in modern society as something akin to slavery.

That's a nice point, I am not sure, but a while ago here on HN someone posted an article showing stats about uprises going down in a proportional way to ageing of the population, so I am not a scholar of sociology but according to that article the answer to your question should be "no" :(, but maybe there will be young people of new generations who will keep the fight on, if current young generation are able to get fair working conditions which allow them to make kids and families

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#169

Post by logifail »

ModernMech wrote: post #101
temp234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many horror stories about academia waiting to come out. The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy research results and inability to reproduce research. Universities are big business and ought to be regulated just as much as any other big business

Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking and how you'd like to see them implemented?

> Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking [..]

It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another (the PhD student).

Without changing how the entire system works, I'm not sure how you fix that by means of regulation.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#170

Post by spacemanmatt »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #148
dmitriid_y wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's germane.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny

* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Petty_Tyr...

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