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UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

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Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#281

Post by refurb »

epistasis wrote: post #267
refurb wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? They asked their union to represent them along with the other UCSC union members (they are a small part of the members). The union did so, and they are held to that contract.

If somebody bargains on your behalf, and you have no way to reject what they bargained for, can you really say that they acted in your behalf at all?

Sure. That comes with the territory of joining a union. The union negotiates on behalf of all members under the contract.

If they didn't want that arrangement, they shouldn't have joined a union or that union in particular.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#282

Post by saagarjha »

refurb wrote: post #232
saagarjha wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these students are paid part-time to do essentially full-time jobs, and often find it difficult or even impossible take up outside employment.

These graduate students are TAing labs. It's nowhere near a full time job.

You often end up doing 30-40 hours of work, but are only paid for 20.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#283

Post by refurb »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #256
refurb wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the college doing with regards to the withheld grades? Even if they did average all my other work, I'd be pissed I put all that effort into something that has zero impact on my grade. You're acting like the grad students have clean hands here which is clearly not true. They joined the union with the intent they would negotiate on their behalf. The union did so and promised to stop any wildcat strike. The stud…

"e. They joined the union with the intent they would negotiate on their behalf." They didn't have a choice. The union then negotiated against their interests.

Their choice was to either not join the union or join another one.

They likely joined UAW because they were already representing UCSC employees (bargaining power). Along with that comes the fact that union represents all members, not just you.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#284

Post by saagarjha »

readhn wrote: post #221
detaro wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a subset of students: You get deported, because you're on a visa that doesn't exist without your university affiliation.

i bet none of the 54 fired students were on student visas. they are not that dumb, i hope. it was hard enough to get into us school system just to get deported for striking.

A number of the students were in fact international students who may be deported.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#285

Post by valid4life »

saagarjha wrote: post #192
valid4life wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many classes, grades were withheld and then released as the TAs did not want to lose their jobs. My TA was not one of them. For a class that needs tests graded, this isn't as much of an issue, but in my case, the class is a Distributed Systems course and the projects we built are quite extensive. My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructu…

> My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructure as he believes our true grades will never be received from our fired TA. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's asking you to work on grading infrastructure?

Me along with other students who did well on exams + assignments that were graded and given out before the strikes really gained traction.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#286

Post by dntbnmpls »

allovernow wrote: post #139
dntbnmpls wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get paid by market rate; I love how people dismiss injustice with an appeal to "the market" as if the market was a force of nature rather than a manmade and human manipulated entity. Markets are created by a handful of people and affected by laws. And supply and demand is also an man-made creation. For example, by creating laws allowing seasonal migrants, you could affect the wages of farm workers. The same thi…

>than a manmade and human manipulated entity. The market is an emergency force. It isn't determined by a secret cabal of evil capitalists. It may not be a "force of nature" (although that is debatable because it is a direct consequence of natural properties like scarcity), but that doesn't mean it can be simply up and changed. >Markets are created by a handful of people and affected by laws I bake a bunch of bread. Y…

> The market is an emergency force.

Do you mean emergent force?

> It isn't determined by a secret cabal of evil capitalists.

Capitalists? Socialists, communists, monarchs, mercantilists, etc also use laws to create and manipulate "the market". The US, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, EU, etc all create markets. Not all of them are a cabal of evil capitalists. I was talking about markets, not capitalism. Markets exist with or without capitalism. Two people could just form a market as you noted below.

> although that is debatable because it is a direct consequence of natural properties like scarcity

You can force scarcity through laws as well. Coal, fishing, diamonds, etc being examples.

> but that doesn't mean it can be simply up and changed.

It sure as hell can influence it. Which was my point.

> I bake a bunch of bread. You grow a bunch of potatoes. We are both willing to trade. That's a market.

In other words "a manmade and human manipulated entity".

Just because a "cabal of evil capitalists" doesn't say a doctor should make $100,000 doesn't mean that the "market" isn't manmade and manipulated. We could relax laws and allow a flood of doctors from around the world and I suspect doctors' wages would decline. You get the idea?

The market is no more an "emergent force" than the rules of monopoly are an emergent force. No more than cities, governments, etc are emergent forces. They are all man-made structures with levels of human manipulation.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#287

Post by [deleted] »

valid4life wrote: post #115
awinder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened with your grades in those classes? I read the university systems release and this article and couldn’t glean the details. Is that course’s grades still just up in the air?

For many classes, grades were withheld and then released as the TAs did not want to lose their jobs. My TA was not one of them. For a class that needs tests graded, this isn't as much of an issue, but in my case, the class is a Distributed Systems course and the projects we built are quite extensive. My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructu…

[deleted]

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#288

Post by cardiffspaceman »

tssva wrote: post #69
nico_h wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all there is no such thing as a free market. Universities advertise good careers if you go through them, and I am not sure these numbers are as balanced as they could be. Second even if it were, there is a terrible imbalance of power between students, which are distributed actors with little to no individual power and little information or experience, vs a much bigger actor with more information and a lot of…

The graduate students had union protection. They chose to disregard the contract the union had negotiated and membership had ratified in 2018 thus throwing away that union protection.

As far as I can tell according to the article, the union did not support the UCSC strike but it has done some things that support the wildcat strikers, including filing an unfair labor practices suit against the university and openly commenting on the mistreatment of the strikers.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#289

Post by asdff »

baryphonic wrote: post #201
papeda wrote: post #108

There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there are 2 years of masters students and 6 of PhD at any one time, that makes PhD students 60% of “graduate students”. Let’s make this easy by saying 1000 PhD students (if anything I imagine it’s way less than this — as I understand, monetizing masters students has…

The problem from the university's perspective is that while $13M is a low-ish amount of money (by university standards), the university has no reason to believe it would "put the problem to bed." If the university backs down, the strikers will be able to dictate any terms they want in the future, and any such strikes (i.e. illegal ones) would certainly have many more participants. The disruption to university operati…

Grad students at UCSC didn't arbitrarily think the deal they struck isn't good enough anymore, they never thought it was good enough in the first place. 83% of UCSC grad students felt the minimums outlined in the agreement, which was a UC wide agreement and not between UCSC and the UCSC grad students by the way, were insufficient for the growing rents in Santa Cruz.

This 13m number isn't arbitrary. In fact that $1400 per month bump is designed to put UCSC grad students in line with net compensation received by grad students at UC Riverside.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#290

Post by asdff »

sjg007 wrote: post #264
papeda wrote: post #108

There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there are 2 years of masters students and 6 of PhD at any one time, that makes PhD students 60% of “graduate students”. Let’s make this easy by saying 1000 PhD students (if anything I imagine it’s way less than this — as I understand, monetizing masters students has…

The whole grad school equation is foobar. Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly where paid positions exist. They also rely on students obtaining external funding.

Then they take half of said external grant funding as overhead.
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