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MIT graduate students vote to unionize

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Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#211

Post by whimsicalism »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #210
whimsicalism wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment doesn't make sense to me. > 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 negotiatio…

> 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. Are you speaking based on California public sector union law or the federal National Labor Relations Act? The federal…

My only experience with unionization is at private universities in Massachusetts, so I guess I am unfamiliar with how state law plays in for these public sector unions in California.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#212

Post by walkhour »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #207
walkhour wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where more of the workforce is unionized Is this fact coming from the weighted average of how unionized is the workforce in the diferented countries from which workers comes to USA? Is this true for high and low paying jobs? Are the migrants from these countries representative of the workforce of their country? Could you provide proof? My first reaction is to be agnostic upon this claim.

I know from observation that international students are often involved in grad student unionization efforts, especially in leadership positions -- anecdotal but generally noted by anyone else paying attention. The rest is, yes, a theory I have that I don't currently have the data to back up -- and the theory is not just about union density in countries of origin, although that's part of it. But as far as that part, j…

> But I'm definitely not going to convince you of anything in this HN thread

You'd be surprised :). I appreciate your response, it was an interesting read.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#213

Post by AndyMcConachie »

_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…

People who have no experience with academia would think your story is false and outlandish.

People who have experience with academia would think your story is commonplace and borderline uninteresting.

This has been my experience with telling and hearing stories like this.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#214

Post by rajin444 »

logifail wrote: post #169
ModernMech wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused.

The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount of power.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#215

Post by thylacine222 »

ModernMech wrote: post #103
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…

> They do the actual work Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see how naïve this attitude is. There is so much work beyond what grad students are tasked with including getting research funded, staffed, and results out the door. Grad students are cogs in a research machine, cogs that need to constantly be readjusted and recalibrated because they are quite green (sorry, it's true) for a number of…

lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#216

Post by whatever1 »

US Universities have enormous overhead costs. And unfortunately the PhD students / post docs are paying with their blood and sweat for these.

My advisor had to spit 150k to the university to have me as a student (including a 20k fee for lab usage, despite the fact my PhD was a theoretical one).

From that 150k I was taking 22k - 3k of mandatory health insurance. I could barely make it given that I had to pay > 12k per year for rent and utilities (with roommates).

Meanwhile the University would splash money to get athletic coaches or give bonuses to the executives or open branches in dictatorships.

I think unions should focus on university management, because they have been acting unchecked for way too long.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#217

Post by ModernMech »

thylacine222 wrote: post #215
ModernMech wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do the actual work Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see how naïve this attitude is. There is so much work beyond what grad students are tasked with including getting research funded, staffed, and results out the door. Grad students are cogs in a research machine, cogs that need to constantly be readjusted and recalibrated because they are quite green (sorry, it's true) for a number of…

lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.

edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here.

Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion here, who nobody knows, is completely different than writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and calling into question their professional capabilities directly, then doubling down and tripling down on that even after they asked you to stop is just rude and unnecessarily antagonistic. I asked you to make a point a couple times now and you don't have a point to make except to attack me personally, so kindly find someone else to troll.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#218

Post by thylacine222 »

ModernMech wrote: post #217
thylacine222 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.

edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here. Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion here, who nobody knows, is completely different than writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and calling into ques…

i'm sure that your students are very happy to criticize the person that pays them, and who has a complex about them not being deserving enough, to their face

edit: if you expect to be able to use your own anecdotes as evidence against unionization, expect them to actually be interrogated. if this is how you handle conflict with a random person on the internet, i shudder to imagine how you handle conflict with someone who works for you.

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#219

Post by jrochkind1 »

walkhour wrote: post #212
jrochkind1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know from observation that international students are often involved in grad student unionization efforts, especially in leadership positions -- anecdotal but generally noted by anyone else paying attention. The rest is, yes, a theory I have that I don't currently have the data to back up -- and the theory is not just about union density in countries of origin, although that's part of it. But as far as that part, j…

> But I'm definitely not going to convince you of anything in this HN thread You'd be surprised :). I appreciate your response, it was an interesting read.

Reading my post again, I think to be fair we should say that Mexican unions can often definitely be corrupt in a way that doesn't serve the interests of workers. While this could result in people from there being very cynical about and uninterested in unions -- that is often my personal experience with people from former soviet countries -- my personal experience with people from Mexico (totally anecdotal and subjective sense, not proof in any sense) is still that they come from a culture where it's generally understood that collectively organizing as workers -- and collectively organizing for grassroots political power in other ways -- is a good thing, and a culture where they may have some experience doing so, very differently from most people in the USA.

It's just my theory based on my personal observations and thoughts though, yeah!

Re: MIT graduate students vote to unionize

#220

Post by [deleted] »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #152
polygamous_bat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a current graduate student, the sunk cost can sometimes be too high just to up and move advisors. In small places, you will simply not have someone else whose interest align with yours, and even at a place like MIT, the advisors have their own specialty, and especially after your second year at Ph.D. moving or changing advisor can be quite difficult and basically "reset" all your progress. So, a lot of time, the c…

>> the sunk cost can sometimes be too high just to up and move advisors. This isn't really the definition of sunk cost, which is the appearance of having tangible impact on decisions while being independent of the future choice. If it has bearing (as in this case) it's material to the decision and not sunk.

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