171–180 of 400 posts
Coming from Sweden I'm surprised they aren't already. Do you also not have student unions to represent you until you reach undergrad?
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"?
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On the other side of this equation, I think international students comprise a potent reservoir of strikebreakers.
There's a reason why Academia and Big Tech love immigration. And then there's the argument they use to justify why immigration is good, like diversity, inclusion, globalization, ... which may be valid or not. But isn't it just perfect when your objectives are so closely aligned with what is considered morally right. To regard these agents as moral actors instead of self-serving profit seekers is just lunacy.
I think this has been shown to be true in grad student unionization drives in the US.
What's the what with these teamsters, UE & such? What does it mean that they choose to unionize with one of them?
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…
If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...
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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.
Is this unprecedented for grad students?
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…
I suspect a similar kind of student organization is normal in Europe as well as the british commonwealth, at least, but I'm not sure.
It is not how it works in the USA.
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>Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: An argument against a union at MIT came from un-tenured graduate student Kevin Wang : https://thetech.com/2021/10/21/why-we-do-not-need-a-gsu TLDR: he didn't think paying the 1.44% annual union dues (~$620/year) is going to be worth it. He based this on comparing MIT salary increase history to other universities with and without unions.…
It IS interesting to note that if most unions went dues-optional they'd starve from lack of money. If their members were really convinced of the value that tragedy of the commons wouldn't occur.
It’s called a Tragedy for a reason.