181–190 of 400 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 fo…
> 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. I'm pretty sure people were saying the same things during the early labor movements. "They'll just replace you, they have all the control, you'll just screw up your life." The thing is, they were probably right. For a while it reall…
> How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing the workers?
I alluded to it, but this change requires massive changes at the government level. The first thing I would like to see changed is that universities cannot count waived tuition as a cost of a grad student. Trump actually proposed to tax these waivers taxed at the individual level. Short term, this would have crushed students. But, imagine working for a car dealership and part of your pay was a new car, of course it should be taxed. This tax would have really brought this distortion that this causes in the market. Second, the student-employee limbo needs to be solved. Personally, I think being allowed to pay your PhD tuition should be allowed. That is, if I can make $100k outside, I should be allowed to pay $50k in tuition and work at my own pace. I don't want to advocate for government intervention, but it seems to me that if there is a tuition, that is an implicit admission that that is the price a student would need to pay for the services of being a student. After the university admits me, they should have no control which route I decide to go: TA + research or work + research. This would require rethinking the F1/J1 visa.
Now, why do I think organizing workers won't solve this issue. Because, it does not break the student-employee limbo. As I have pointed out in other comments, PhD students enjoy many benefits of being a student. Chief among them, international students can come here to "study". However, the problem is that your status at the university is dependent on your progress as a student with many programs having hard caps on the number of years to complete certain tasks. This is fundamentally opposed to organized labor because they cannot bargain for changing degree requirements.
Unions can be good. They can be operated poorly and inefficiently too. Good luck to them. Consumer unions seem like a neat idea too.
can't wait for company unions, where they band together to achieve their objectives
Maybe that was the joke you were making though, I can't quite tell.
The problem as I see it is two-fold: one, the academic institution requires publishing to an esteemed journal. And two, the esteemed journal seeks exorbitant fees because they know the institutions want esteemed journals. If a union forced the institutions to stop requiring publishing to esteemed journals, and instead formed boards of reviewers that gave ratings to pre-prints on a donation-based server, then the big publishers would have to adapt dramatically new pricing to compete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Including undergraduates, who are primarily paying consumers, would have muddied the waters. Graduate students are clearly workers under any definition.
Aren't there paid graduate programs in the US?
When I was a graduate student, I always thought I had a good deal, where I learn graduate degree for free, AND got a living stipend for me and my wife. The relationship between me and the university was two folded: I am a customer as a student and an employee at the same time. And I think student was my main role. And my advisor was mostly my teacher, instead of my work boss. I don't think you can turn this relations…
Anyway, depending on when you were a graduate student, it may currently be a lot harder than it used to be to survive financially as a grad student.
Also wanting things like reasonable health insurance and a modicum of days to take off on vacation or sick leave seem reasonable to me. This is not something all grad students at all universities/departments have.
In general, at many large universities, graduate students do most of the teaching (in terms of hours spent on instruction) -- what is bringing in a substantial amount of the university's revenue. And get treated terribly, at the whims of professors, in very financially precarious situations. It does not seem unreasonable to me to organize to try to get a more secure situation. If you look at the actual changes in university budgets, the amount spent on compensating those doing the teaching is a smaller and smaller portion over time, while the amount spent on administrators is higher and higher. So it might be just as accurate to consider money spent on compensating grad students as competing with administrator salaries as with tuition.
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…
Is this unprecedented for grad students?
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…
You had an unusually positive experience with UAW. They own the UC system contract, and negotiated pay caps, lowering grad student pay on some campuses. They also negotiated to discontine coverage for various women's health issues. Just before COVID, UC Santa Cruz went on a wildcat strike because the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living. A bunch of foreign students lost their visas as a resul…
> the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living
...and the graduate student workers voted to approve the contract? Every negotiated contract goes back to the members for approval.
What would this have looked like in the absence of a union? You are saying that with negotiation, UC Santa Cruz got pay below cost of living, but if they didn't have that negotiation, management would have freely paid them more than cost of living? What was the negotiation over?
> In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.
What do you mean? Just get 30% of your members to sign a petition and you can hold an election to change unions. That is literally what organizing is.
If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30% to sign a union replacement card.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The median household income in California is $77.5k [1]. I'll emphasize household. Your 9-month pay was for 20 hours, that means $25k is actually $66.6k annualized which does not include your subsidized housing nor for inflation. The economics just simply is not there. Sure, students might be able to squeak 10-20% in wage increase at the cost of all other university voluntary support such as student group support and…
Sure, you switch out four calculus TAs for calculus with professional TAs. Who is going to TA deep reinforcement learning, or under-actuated robotics, or any of the major-specific courses that takes a lot of relevant knowledge to actually teach properly? Any of the people out there who has the insights to TA these classes thoroughly enough are gonna point and laugh at you if you offer them anything below $200K. Also,…
Funny aside, did you find my thesis? :D.
> Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual "labor"
But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that (unless you are a research assistant). That is "studying" which I keep pointing out is the whole issue. Which feeds back to your point about highly-specific knowledge TAs. The implicit agreement is that the university provides you with the training required to TA these classes in exchange for being a TA. They normally call this waived tuition. That is, they are supplying you with a +50k benefit for free which is how they draw many people to begin with.