It was a disaster at Wisconsin. Union favored the 8th year humanities students at the expense of the 1 and 2 year STEM students, and traded cash for benefits that really only affected people with families. Stipends were the lowest in the country among major research universities, and the union refused to let wages rise for in-demand TAs, so a bunch of them went off and got private sector jobs instead, limiting the size of the undergrad population. Scott Walker killed it, and those problems haven't come back.
It was great for us at UC Santa Cruz. The reason I had healthcare during grad school was because the union won it right before I joined. The reason they have a housing stipend now (in the most expensive rental market in the US[1]) is because the union fought for a cost-of-living allowance. We at UCSC didn't always agree with the course of the larger UAW 2685 but they did a lot for us.
I'm not sure what the system was like in the union in Wisconsin but I'm surprised that more STEM students didn't join and change the course of the union if they were that negatively affected. Our union was democratic almost to a fault but maybe the structure in Wisconsin was different.
When was this? Just before the pandemic, the grad students protested at UAW meetings and went on a wildcat strike after UAW ratified a contract the campus voted against.
Later, Janet Nepolitano released police drones and set up barricades to try to shut down the picket lines. Eventually covid ended the drama, but only after some students were deported (I assume. The plan was to deport them, but the story stopped making news once the 2020 lockdowns hit.)
Anyway, the UAW was a similar disaster at UC Berkeley a while back. There weren’t widespread protests, but there were salary caps for grad students, and the union eliminated health care coverage for a number of female problems (over student objections).
The wildcat strike is exactly what I was referring to as "We at UCSC didn't always agree with the course of the larger UAW 2685..."
The wildcat strike was led by the local union leadership after they abdicated their official positions iirc. Having that previous level of organization and identified leadership certainly made organizing wildcat actions easier.
Unions are more than just the highest level of leadership.
Do you have sources for those claims? I don't have any knowledge here; just cursory googling indicates the issue was a lot more complex than UAW being the bad guy.
Female problems? Are you serious, that is a pretty negative way to describe health issues that might apply only to women. Why would you put it that way, it's just kind of dismissive.
> The reason I had healthcare during grad school was because the union won it right before I joined.
I’m sorry if this is weird, but as someone who also went to UCSC for grad school I found this a bit confusing. So I looked it up and you started at UCSC at 2014, yeah?
UCSC grad students had GSHIP coverage for years before that time. I myself was on it when I joined starting in 2009, and there’s plenty of documentation of fights folks had over trying to get better rates and coverage on GSHIP well before both our times: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/05/13/18415831.php (Which personally I thought was pretty good especially after the expansion of airlift coverage which was an unfortunately common problem for UCSC’s location “over the hill” from many tier 1 emergency rooms.)
Maybe I missed something when I was there 2009-2015. But what did the union representation and bargaining bring to the table there?
From a couple years ago, it doesn’t seem to have resulted in anything close to a reasonable or even livable stipend for a researcher. It was bad when I was in grad school, but I was pretty appalled to hear during the wildcat strikes ten years later that despite the increase in costs there didn’t seem to be that much change in the stipend amounts for graduate researchers. The students who were wildcatting out of frustration seemed to have a pretty good reason IMO.
I think that meets a pretty similar pattern of unions focusing on fighting about healthcare while leaving wages to stagnate over years of price increases, which I guess also applies in many unrepresented UC roles and in dynamics elsewhere. I personally didn’t see much difference between UAW’s representation and not when I was there, but I guess I didn’t have a huge point of comparison.
I hope whatever this new swell of support is provides livable stipends for young researchers though. So I hope I’m either wrong or grad student unions are able to win more in bargaining in the future. :)
Nice to see a fellow slug! I think you are correct on the timeline being further back. The narrative I recalled was that there was a major victory around health care fee remission before I joined but it looks as if that was part of the original contract the union negotiated [1].
I spent my final years at UCSC working through the systems they had set up internally (administration meetings with GSA, getting on committees of administrators as a grad student voice, working with on campus housing developers[2]) in order to improve housing availability and cost. We had marginal wins if anything. The strike the next year won everyone thousands of dollars toward housing every year. I understand the nuance of it being a wildcat strike but the entire organizing infrastructure there was from the union.
I agree with your final points and hope stipends will follow upwards in the near future.
I'm confused. The article that you linked says San Francisco is the most expensive rental market. However, you speak about UC Santa Cruz. The campus is about 120 km south. It's a totally different rental market. Do I misunderstand?
It’s an hour and 14 minute drive. It’s not unheard of to commute from there, and it’s far more beautiful than any of the closer beaches, so yes the Bay Area rental prices still apply, in addition to beach community rental prices. As far as calling it SF, some people shorten “The San Francisco Bay Area,” which includes San Jose, to “San Francisco,” and people still know what they mean, though I see why it can be confusing.
I can't know if this is true or false. It reads like it is politically motivated. Can you cite sources to substantiate the many claims you have made here?
I don’t know about Wisconsin, but based on how UAW behaves in California, I’d need strong evidence before I believed they acted in the interest of graduate students in any state.
Here’s the “do what the union agreed to even though your campus voted against it or you will be fired” notice that UC sent to the UC Santa Cruz graduate students:
One thing to keep in mind is that the union is presumably made of their members, and should act in alignment with some decision making process they arrive at together. Bargaining and figuring out goals shouldn’t be something for just the Bargaining Committee to do in a vacuum. If they valued the “wrong” things, then maybe they were still right for the majority in the union.
(I’m a proud technology union member myself, and we are currently in bargaining.)
That is not how UAW works. There is an opaque set of rules that lead to UAW reps being elected, and then the UAW reps will not listen to member concerns unless the members first successfully petition to be heard at a meeting. To be counted in the petition, the people that sign it have to physically show up to the meeting, and the rules are set so that they may have to attend multiple meetings.
At that point the UAW rep is “allowed” to hear the concerns.
Many other things happen that can kill even the most basic common sense request.
Eventually, when it is time to vote on the contract, the UAW rolls the negotiations up into multiple campuses (at least with UC), so it is mathematically impossible for a given campus to block a contract ratification.
This is exactly what happened with UC Santa Cruz in 2020, and the reason UC Berkeley’s health care plan no longer covers a bunch of women’s health issues. (Word has it the union rep suggested that cut, not the administration.)
See my other comments on this thread for links, etc.
Do you know why they choose the UAW? It seems a really strange fit.
The choice of what union to affiliate with, and selecting their rules is something that should have been done carefully, and with the needs of the membership in mind.
This is a real issue. Graduate students are a very heterogenic bunch, with some study domains forfeiting very substantial wage and carreer opportunities by staying at university, and students in other fields have no or comparably very less lucrative prospects outside of academia.
Not differentiating these groups does have a real impact. (I was on the board of a university so had a first row seat to this)
Forming a union is one thing. Actually agreeing what to demand and getting it is another. That seems to be where these things break down. I watched the Amazon union go from popular and "more money, less crazy metrics, more toilet breaks" to "end racism in Amercia" and then no one wanted to risk their jobs to ask for the impossible...
If you mean in AL there was a lot wrong there including massive union busting efforts and a lack of worker education on what unions are, but people who want a union really should choose their union leadership carefully and be ready to replace them if they feel they aren't being represented.
Caused huge attrition of the 1st and 2nd year stem students (i.e. quit with a masters). The union was dominated by humanities students, and they fought for what they wanted, not what the overall membership wanted. Very few STEM folks had any interest in being part of the union, but because so many voted with their feet, it was hopeless to set up a decertifiying petition.
TBH the way you explain it sounds to me like 1st and 2nd year stem students were disengaged and uninterested in solidarity with their academic peers who have less options than them. I'm not even particularly fond of the humanities I just don't understand why you wouldn't fight for the allowance for your peers to start families, god damn!
> I'm not even particularly fond of the humanities I just don't understand why you wouldn't fight for the allowance for your peers to start families, god damn!
What the GP said was that instead of taking a cash option that would benefit all members, they chose benefits that only benefitted parents. It's reasonable to be angry that an alternative that would benefit all members wasn't chosen.
> TAA activists in the Fall of 2008 also turned their eyes again toward attaining Domestic Partner Benefits for TAA members and UW employees. The TAA pushed on the issue, joining the LGBT Campus Center to table on Library Mall during their Coming Out Week, and creating a memorable Bascom Hill display. The TAA then networked into the University’s Domestic Partner Benefit Task Force, and arranged meetings with Governor Doyle’s Office and UW Chancellor Biddy Martin, while activists also spoke with nearly a thousand TAA members about the importance of winning Domestic Partner Benefits. The State Legislature, which in years past had meticulously denied state employees Domestic Partner Benefits, was poised for a sea change in the November elections. The TAA’s Political Education Committee launched an AFT COPE award-winning program, through a vibrant and ambitious series of phone banks and Labor Walks throughout south-central Wisconsin. Though Domestic Partner Benefits were not ultimately won in the 2007-2009 contract, the TAA was responsible in ensuring that the issue would be considered in the 2009-2011 budget.
> As of Sept. 23, 2017, the State of Wisconsin no longer allows the establishment of new domestic partnerships under Chapter 40 of the Wisconsin statutes.
> Carefully review this document if you are in a Chapter 40 domestic partnership established before September 23, 2017 because it contains important information about the benefit changes for established domestic partnerships.
> If you are currently in a domestic partnership that was established under Chapter 40 between Jan. 1, 2010 and Sept. 22, 2017, your domestic partnership remains in force for the Wisconsin Retirement System retirement benefit administered by the Department of Employee Trust Funds. Your domestic partner is also still eligible to be the beneficiary of your life insurance policy, either through retention of your validly established domestic partnership, or through the submission of a Beneficiary Designation (ET-2320 or ET-2321) form.
So the humanities folks' priority is sculpting a union program to their specific needs. That also doesn't sound very "fight for the allowance of your peers". That's democracy though. Doesn't mean the right choice is made but that the voters pull the strings.
I think it is objectively the right choice to enable people to build families if they're going to be in a program until their late 20s! This sounds ridiculous to me on its face-- why the hell wouldn't you support your maximally educated populace (getting doctorates) to have families? The 1st and 2nd year STEM kids (literally kids-- you can enter into a masters fresh out of college, so like 21-23 yrs old) who see the opportunity to try and organize to help their humanities peers start families and instead don't participate, exit to industry (an option humanities graduates probably don't have), and say nothing as a governer with a presidential campaign crushes their organizing hopes... a lack of solidarity with one's peers is exactly how it sounds to me.
Calling 22 year olds "kids" and then also saying they have a lack of solidarity with their older "peers" seems a bit insensitive to me. People having families is great, but if their benefits come from the expense of your own salary, that's asking for more than solidarity; that's asking for altruism.
I'm darkly amused that you spend the first half of your comment talking down about how one group of students is "kids" compared to another and then in the second half complain about how those same people have "a lack of solidarity with [their] peers". Gee, I wonder why!
STEM grad students often have much bigger stipends than humanities grad students given that STEM is more well funded. It sounds like the union simply equalized things, although I’m not sure how that would work with DARPA or similar funding agencies, since RA salaries are taken out of grants (maybe just raise overhead to redistribute more funding to humanities, but grants have caps on overhead as well), so maybe just apply it to TA wages (then anyone in STEM would need to RA and avoid being a TA)? Anyways, it doesn’t take a leap to see how stipend equalization at a university would make it less appealing to those who would get less and more appealing to those who would get more.
What school did you go to? In my grad school, there was very little money for humanities students, and they had to compete for TA positions. STEM money wasn't much of a problem, and most grad students could be RAs, and the opposite problem occurred (they were short on TAs).
They always pitch the union as a way for you to get better pay and benefits. But the talk can suddenly shift to how you are a greedy opportunist if you actually take steps to increase your value.
One of main uw campus, Madison, doesn't allow cs masters students. You are brought in as a PhD then allowed to leave when you've achieved your masters. This also causes attrition rates in those programs to skew low. Walked gutted a lot of funding for the programs and made it so the university couldn't find new sources of revenue. These factors definitely impacted the ability for students to finish phds
Yes. Doesn't "a bunch of them went off and got private sector jobs instead, limiting the size of the undergrad population" sound extremely implausible to you? As if graduate students can control enrollment.
The comment sounds like a political hit piece, with no evidence provided. And Scott Walker was a major union buster who spurred massive protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2011 and a recall election (which Walker unfortunately won).
The University of Wisconsin Teaching Assistants Association is one of the oldest student unions in the nation. It's hardly a "disaster".
> Employment in STEM occupations grew by 10.5 percent, or 817,260 jobs, between May 2009 and May 2015, compared with 5.2 percent net growth in non-STEM occupations. Computer occupations and engineers were among the types of STEM occupations with the highest job gains. Employment in computer occupations was nearly 3.2 million in May 2009 and nearly 3.9 million in May 2015. Employment of engineers was nearly 1.5 million in May 2009, compared with over 1.6 million in May 2015. Some STEM occupations lost jobs. In 2009, there were nearly 478,000 jobs in STEM-related sales occupations, compared with approximately 406,000 in 2015.
Anyway, I'm not disputing that grad students leave school for job opportunities. I am disputing whether they left because of some student union disagreement, and whether such a union disagreement could somehow limit undergraduate enrollment.
Moreover, the budget for the University of Wisconsin is set by the Governor and legislature, so if there's no enough money to pay TAs more, it's their fault.
If you were a STEM major graduating in 2009 or 2010, you went to grad school for a year or two and got a masters to wait out the recession.
In 2011, grad school was made much worse as the union for grad students was severely curtailed and benefits for state employees (grad students being state employees) reduced.
As the economy was picking up and you've got a masters and hiring in STEM fields is outpacing all other hiring - it is time to put off procrastinating in grad school and get a job.
> In Wisconsin politics and with the context of unions, 2011 was a very memorable year.
I'm confused about the nature of your reply. You're more or less repeating what I already said in an earlier comment: "Scott Walker was a major union buster who spurred massive protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2011 and a recall election"
To be clear, I'm a Wisconsinite and a former member of the TAA.
I suspect we're in agreement then. My comment was intended supporting material to your claim that the reason people left wasn't the wins by the TAA that became part of the 2010 benefits for domestic partners for state employees but rather that they were done procrastinating entering the job market.
> Yes. Doesn't "a bunch of them went off and got private sector jobs instead, limiting the size of the undergrad population" sound extremely implausible to you? As if graduate students can control enrollment.
You can't run a department without TAs. Who's going to grade homework and exams? Professors? Don't make me laugh.
If you don't have enough grad students to TA your department, you have to borrow some another department. But what if all the STEM departments don't have enough TAs? Do you hire adjuncts (at roughly 3x the rate)?
It's presidential election season in the US. People are going to fight hard to bury what the other side says and raise up what their own side is saying.
Here's some free advice: leave until January 2025 and spend your newly free time learning a language or growing a garden.
Democracy isn't perfect, but checking out is the quickest route to ensuring your interests are only minimally represented. True at all levels of democratic organization.
What happens when there is no where left to move, or the cost of moving is too high?
Solidarity, not freedom, is the opposite of tyranny.
Neutrality and running away implicitly supports the injustice you are running away from. Flight-ing instead of fighting leaves those left behind to the wolves.
Political change only happens once people are willing to put themselves at risk.
Your lack of solidarity for others means they will have a lack of solidarity for you.
The mindset guarantees your exhaustion, loss, and ultimately your oppression.
You don't have to fight the battle, but you should at least support those who self sacrifice and hold it in high regard and equally you should feel shame for running away.
Your privilege let you run away, but others aren't so lucky.
How do you know how much I've run away from compared to you?
Maybe it's been less.
But I sure don't stick around in every shitty situation hoping that I can turn it better with enough sweat of the brow and sufficient persuasion to others to play nice. Hopefully you don't, either.
The thread we're talking about is a classic tyranny of the majority situation: something that democracies handle poorly. If you're outnumbered by a large factor by people with drastically different interests than you, and it's going to be decided by voting, you're in for a bad time if you stick around.
I volunteer taught at a high school for a few months in Milwaukee when Scott Walker was in power.
A lot of poor kids were bused to this school in a nicer neighborhood and couldn't do sports or extracurriculars because Walker cut funding for extra school buses to come later.
The main point is a lot of kids had single parent moms and were basically unsupervised after school. Having extracurricular’s or sports would hopefully give them more structure and discipline and something productive to do along with building healthy social skills rather than just veg out at home at best or go out in the streets at worst.
Likely a matter of the parents in richer neighborhoods being able to donate more time and money to the local school than in poorer neighborhoods. The buildings are better, there are more resources available to teachers, more extra-curricular activities, skilled teachers fight to be posted there. Certainly things can be improved at schools in poorer neighborhoods, but I doubt it could be equalized to the point where kids won't benefit from being bussed to the richer neighborhood schools.
It's not really solving the problem though, is it? The bad neighborhoods and bad schools are still there. And the idea that if you can't equalize it to rich neighborhods (when they can and will never be equal anyway even with this bussig) then there's no point, is exactly the kind of thing I find absurd about it.
I don't deny that it might help some kids some amount. Although now I'm curious -- what kind of improvement does the evidence actually show? Anything close to "equalized"?
> "Good school" is like 99% pupil safety and the general disciplin related and 1% other. Money won't buy you that.
I think money could help that. Even if it never left the schools. Assuming that it went to things like removing lead, made the schools look less run down, supported after school programs, and added security (not police).
Since the suggestion was "making their local neighborhoods and schools better" there might be a lot that could be done in local neighborhoods to improve student safety too. Fixing environmental issues there, cleaning the place up and planting trees, improving access to good stores, improving public transportation, and providing daycare. That could lower crime rates, improve the health of the kids and parents, and give parents more time to spend with their kids or get involved with the school.
Before a child sets foot in kindergarten many inputs have already been happened. Did their mother abuse alcohol or drugs during the pregnancy? Does their household have domestic violence? Did their parents read to them on a regular basis? Did their parents teach them how to interact with other kids? Were their parents able to pass along the English language?
A school is not just faculty and a building. While public schools will enroll any resident children their parents must be able to afford the area. This has a high correlation with the average quality of students at the time of enrollment. The selection effect is the most powerful force in educational institutions. Parental involvement can vary from helicopter parents down to parent teacher conferences that are a ghost town because the crowd of parents is stuck at their second job or they decided they have better things to do.
Transforming an under-performing school district or neighborhood takes many years and is far beyond the capability of a single person. Calling the police on drug dealers carries personal risk.
> Before a child sets foot in kindergarten many inputs have already been happened.
That can also include environmental harms and lack of access to good food or medical care. Investing in neighborhoods that have been neglected and exploited can fix a lot of things and improve them for everyone in the area. Not being an easy fix doesn't mean it wouldn't be worthwhile. Clean up the neighborhoods, lift the the desperation and despair, and the drug dealers won't stick around anymore than they do anywhere else.
Good for them! Academia is a toxic and broken environment, and this seems like a great first step in fixing it. Interested to see how the dynamic plays out at Stanford, and if other American universities follow suit.
Alas, I'm not sure a union can begin to fix anything except a few cosmetic things. The biggest problem is the massive oversupply of people who want academic careers versus the number of real jobs. The individual unions at the schools can't tackle this oversupply at all because it's caused by the schools acting independently. The natural game is to protect the insiders by restricting admission like many of the other unions like the AMA that actively campaign against too many doctors.
Indeed, the unions risk the bad optics of campaigning to reduce new admits in order to maintain opportunities for those already in the pipeline. In other words, slamming the door shut on people who want to learn all to restrict supply of work for the privileged.
I suppose the unions might be able to help in the rare case of a real jerk of a professor who mistreats her students, but I think most professors are smart enough to play passive aggressive games instead. The schools nurture the ability to act passive aggressively.
The rest of the time, the students in the union are going to waste their time arguing about something instead of working on their dissertation, the one thing that will spring them from the jail.
There is a vast oversupply of people who want academic careers vs. the number of currently-existing tenure track jobs. In most fields (CS is somewhat different since industry is so attractive, so often even teaching faculty receive tenure), almost all of the teaching is done by contract workers and adjuncts. So the need for labor is there, just not the funding to give everyone secure jobs.
If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts. Graduate workers have a lot of power since they can gum up the graduation pipeline and piss off wealthy parents and donors.
Of course it is a band-aid solution since the system is fundamentally pyramid-shaped.
CS is rather unique in that regard (along with maybe economics and business, though to a lesser degree).
For everything else, the vast majority of incoming graduate students intend to get a job in academia and then "settle" for a high-paying job in the private sector that doesn't really use their skills.
> If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad.
This is unrealistic. You'd need to increase tenured faculty by at least an order of magnitude to soak up all the grad students currently being produced... But that doesn't even solve the problem because all those professors are going to want to do research, and they're going to want to have graduate research assistants. So now you have the same problem as before, but an order of magnitude bigger.
The only real solution is to reduce the number of PhDs produced over a professor's career from ~20 to ~2. Which of course means reducing the number of grad students.
> This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts
Universities will never go for this. You have to understand your counter-party's BANTA. This is like Brexit: If your position is that you want terms that are strictly worse for your counter-party than if you just don't exist... well then you're not going to get a deal.
Agreed. I'm pretty cynical about academia but I don't see graduate student unions fixing the problems.
I voted against a graduate student union at my institution ca. 7 years ago after a couple very frustrating conversations with organizers (both students and professionals from the SEIU) where they were doing the equivalent of promising everyone a free pony (scholarships for international students, lower tuition, etc.--things that aren't included in the mandatory bargaining subjects for a union). It was deeply manipulative and dishonest.
Graduate student unions aren't aiming to tackle this, and I don't know of any that are. At Stanford, the unionization campaign centered around Stanford's stipends (which have not kept up with inflation and put students in the "extremely low income" category per the county) and Stanford's status as both employer and landlord for many students.
It's pretty much the same at all Universities in HCOL areas.. UCLA is the same. UCLA actually had to build graduate student housing to offset the market and it is still overpriced. Talk about levitown.
TAs aren't overworked, even without union representation. You'll never be asked to do more than an average of 20hrs/week, ever. You can always just refuse to sign the end-of-semester certification.
RAs are overworked, but unions can't do anything to help that. As a grad student, you need to publish papers, which means you need the cooperation of your advisor. If you bring a grievance or work to rule, there are a million innovative ways your advisor can sabotage you as retaliation.
They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out. Or run out of budget before ordering that $THING you need for your experiment. When you still haven't defended after ~8-10 years, the university's policies will automatically kick you out. Problem solved!
As for a living wage: I wasn't represented by a union in grad school, but all the commenters here who were have pointed out that their unions didn't fight for higher wages.
> If you bring a grievance or work to rule, there are a million innovative ways your advisor can sabotage you as retaliation.
That sounds like exactly the kind of thing a union could address.
> I wasn't represented by a union in grad school, but all the commenters here who were have pointed out that their unions didn't fight for higher wages.
It's possible that they were fighting for other things considered by most members to be more important. Ultimately though, if a group has a union and they feel that the union isn't representing their interests there are remedies for that. Members can vote to change leadership, or in extreme circumstances dissolve the union and form a new one designed to prevent the problems you had with the old one.
> > They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out.
> That sounds like exactly the kind of thing a union could address.
Short of having a group of union members becoming your defacto supervisor and doing the guidance your supervisor should be doing, I don't see how they could help in this situation.
Union puts rules in their contract saying 0 retaliation when grievances are filed or disputes arise, explicitly calling out commonly seen retaliations while still leaving room to account for other sneakiness or else X and if students who have complaints feel retaliated against they can now appeal to the union who (if convinced) proceed to X where X can mean anything from disciplinary action against the supervisor, lawsuits, or strike.
Supervisors who want to avoid X will then be forced to reconsider retaliating against students or at the very least find ways to do it where students don't feel like they're being retaliated against which I suppose is the best you can expect since assholes exist and some percentage of them will end up as supervisors.
Yes, I understand the idea of such clauses. My specific argument was that for academia it's very easy for them to retaliate in ways that are very non-obvious as being retaliations, especially to outside observers:
> > They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out.
in my experience, the overwork of the RAs wasn't being pushed by a ruthless taskmaster advisor. it was that students understood the hypercompetitive academic job market and knew that they had to build out their CV if they wanted to be lucky enough to get a postdoc once they defended.
Grad student unions can stop TAs from being overworked for their classes. But most of the overwork actually stems from trying to start a research career.
there’s nothing a union can do to fix research-based overwork because youre a) doing it to yourself, not because a boss is making you and b) you are competing with researchers from other institutions that aren’t in your union to build your CV.
"There's nothing a union can do to fix structural inefficiencies" seems like an obvious and irrelevant take. Unions are for securing benefits within the existing system, not for changing the system per se.
A PhD is a path to citizenship which isn't a bad thing in theory but the side effect is it reduces graduate student real wages and lengthens the time to graduate as demand is so high. I'm surprised economists haven't studied it (or maybe they have) and figured a way out of this fundamental trap.
Also University administrations are basically corrupt in the way they nickel and dime grad students across the board. The whole student/employee/apprentice thing really needs a systematic reevaluation since it can be exploitative.
Maybe they need to pay incentives to professors to graduate PhD students. In general the market for PhDs is expanding and high paying jobs are available at least in STEM fields which is a good thing as new technologies find wide applications.
The advice I always give people (who ask) is that unless they're SO passionate about a subject that they can't imagine being happy away from it... look at industry, not academia. Maybe this sort of vote will be the beginning of the end of that sort of advice being applicable.
Grad student unionization is already well on its way in the US. It started strong in the 90s. It was hamstrung because grad students weren't recognized as workers in 2004 by the NLRB; that was overturned in 2016. Since then, graduate student unions have been having some massive contract wins.
It is a growing movement in academia: Harvard(2018), Yale(2022), NYU(1998), BU, Brandeis, Tufts, UMass Amherst(1991), Columbia(2017), UPenn(2016), Brown(2014), Stanford(yesterday, not even joking), UNC(?), etc. Duke is unionizing like right now
Grad student unions are such a large body of new union members that the UAW has done some weird things to dilute their power in the UAW. like splitting NYU and Columbia into different locals. They're some of the largest inductions of new members in NLRB history.
Its a pretty fascinating history and on going movement
Or permanent positions that are reasonably paid and not professors. Like teachers, researchers, ...
I don't get the impression that everyone becomes a manager in software, not everyone becomes a line manager in a factory. Not every wants to become CEO eventually. Why should academia be any different?
In Germany for one we used to have positions at universities that focused exclusively on teaching. That was, like, their specialty. And frankly a lot of researchers shouldn't be teaching, they only do it because there's nobody else left to do it.
In the US, less than half of all college teaching is done by professors. The remainder are "adjunct" teachers, whose job focus is on teaching. An adjunct job tends to have low pay, is short term, and you sign away some of your rights under the labor laws. You have to re-apply for your job every semester.
Perhaps the real difference is how Germany treats workers.
The US has community colleges, that focus on teaching. In my state, the community college teachers are unionized, and teaching is treated more like a career.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, more than 25 years ago. My spouse has worked there as a non-faculty researcher since that time.
German higher education is based in large classes with only an exam at the end of a class and no TAs, except at maybe the top institutions. They don’t need so many teachers, so they can treat them better.
It’s a system that we might want to try here in the USA, but it doesn’t coddle students.
There is also a USA non-adjunct job called "lecturer" that is meant to focus on teaching rather than research. But while better pay and job security than adjunct, it's still usually pretty bad. (Also not tenured).
This doesn't solve the problem. If schools have a ratio N students per teacher, then at most 1/N students can expect to become a teacher. This works fine for things like B-school of CS where there is heavy industry demand for the credentials and less than 1/N students are trying to be teachers. But for other departments, especially humanities, there is essentially no private sector demand for that credential at the graduate level. This means that almost all grad students are aiming to teach, and since one teacher can teach many students, the majority of them are destined to fail.
This is a thing at US universities. There are pure teaching professors, pure research professors (who might teach one class a year), and others who do both.
>There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.
There's value to graduate/post graduate education other than a chance of tenure. I'd assume many do MSc/PhD without an expectation to become a prof, or work in academia at all (like I and most of my peers did).
What seems to be the problem is the lack of a clear indication that only few percent student have a chance of ever becoming a professor, or students' wishful thinking on the matter.
> There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.
What we really need is for professors to produce fewer PhDs over their career. When each professor produces 20 PhDs, you need an exponentially increasing number of professorships. That number needs to be closer to 2.
Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach?
It's amazing to me that it never occurs to people on the right that when the smartest people around all pretty much agree on reality they aren't actually wrong.
The right treats science just like antivaxers treat medicine. Doctors are evil. Until you get cancer and then the doctor does anything to your body to maybe make it better.
Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years? Who do you think does the work to make sure that our fighters, bombs, drones are better than those of Russia or China? All the right wants is benefits that only the left can give them while hating us. Just like with doctors.
It's really intellectually dishonest. And I'm personally really tired of it.
>>Or maybe, the fact that the overwhelming number of smart people working on making new ideas, new medications, making society better, are left wing is a really good indication that this is a much better approach?
Business owners are doing all of those things, and more than half of them are right wing. [1] The average Republican has a higher income than the average Democrat, and this is despite staunchly pro-Democrat voting blocs like public sector unions enjoying much higher income than the general population due to rent seeking. [2]
If intelligence led to left-wing views, then the business world would be totally left-wing, and higher income would be correlated with having left-wing views.
I believe the fact that academia is so overwhelmingly left-wing is explained by its alliance with government (coercive state power) and the typical effects of dogmatic groupthink that manifests whenever a group has a strong economic interest in a particular ideology becoming dominant.
>Let's hate all the academics and denounce them all the time, but wow, isn't it nice when another disease is cured, when my phone works better, when grandma lives for a few more years?
Academics contribute enormously to society, which is precisely why I so strongly denounce the corruption of academia by the financial conflict of interest and ideological groupthink created by ideologically rationalized union rent-seeking.
Business owners do not create new medications. Academics do. Business owners manage them.
I don't understand. Is this some variant of a conspiracy theory? All academics are working together to groupthink their way to the left?
Or maybe. Seriously. The smart people in the room. Who dedicate their lives to improving the world. All pretty much, no matter what subject they study, come to the conclusion that the left is the correct choice while the right is destructive (see the fact that we've set best records this week).
Stop looking for conspiracies. Most faculty members are not unionized. And this varies a lot by country. Yet, in the US where we aren't unionized (in most states), in Canada where some are unionized, in the UK where are all unionized, in Italy where I think they aren't, etc. Everyone agrees with this basic fact.
Business owners obviously don't contribute to humanity the same way scientists do, but they do contribute nonetheless. And that's demonstrated by how much higher quality of life is in countries that allow private business ownership.
And in terms of innovations that contribute to improving the human condition: massive amounts of such innovation are required in and produced by business, in mundane activities that don't follow any formal process.
Recognizing the value others provide would help you develop greater humility and a more realistic outlook on the world.
And nothing I forwarded was a conspiracy theory. Groupthink is not the same thing as a conspiracy.
The numbers for the MIT living wage calculator are completely wrong for most PhD students. For one, they include thing like social security taxes, which students do not pay. They overestimate medical costs, because most PhD students are young and will not have health complications that drive costs. The rent estimate is based on single-occupancy units, which doesn't make sense because most live with roommates (https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide...). Students often qualify for benefits that are not included in the estimate.
It's a popular number to use, but is often quite an overestimate.
This is some nonsense. It's not an overestimate at all.
Grad students do have health issues. I know plenty who do. Actually. I have never had a PhD student who did not have some major health issue in their 5-6 years.
Many grad students have families. They can't live with 6 other people in a unit. They have childcare.
Rent is extremely expensive around MIT. Even a room in a larger unit will easily run you 1.5k or more per month plus utilities.
With 47k in Cambridge even if I shared an apartment and cut expenses I could just scrape by if I didn't have a child. I have no idea how I would make it with one.
Do you disupte any of the things I mentioned? Yes, obviously PhD students with kids and health issues exist, but on average, PhD students are younger, healthier, pay less taxes, qualify for more benefits, and don't have children. The MIT estimate is based on all the above not being true, but that's simply not reflective of the PhD student population.
If you include tuition at the rate undergrads pay it as part of the compensation then they are paid much more than the median wage. Average annual tuition alone for many research universities is higher than the median annual wage.
For the vast majority of the degree, PhDs are not taking any classes (often, they are not even allowed to). They are just workers who either teach or research. The tuition is usually an accounting trick used by colleges/universities for tax and visa sponsorship purposes. Although faculty typically has to cover a PhD's tuition, factoring it in as pay is a little disingenuous.
If tuition was not waived, PhDs would not even apply. The way the PhD is set up in the US is a little byzantine. Other countries (Canada, continental Europe) do have normal employment contracts and benefits.
And this is computer science. If you want to feel bad for someone, grad students in e.g. biology or anthropology are still at or below $20k annually in many places.
It's okay to be ignorant about how weird things work, but sharing opinions about things you don't know about should be avoided. A PhD "student" isn't really a student. They're an employed researcher at a research institution, working under more senior researchers who are able to attract grant money.
To use an analogy to the trades, the PhD students are the apprentices, the senior researchers / professors are the journeymen. Do not misunderstand, the PhD students are doing labor for the benefit of the university, and getting paid to do so. The problem arises from uninformed people who ask exactly your question, operating on the misguided assumption that graduate school is just more, harder undergraduate school.
Yeah, I was a grad student in physics for 6 years, so feel free not to offer opinions on things you don't know about.
Grad students are getting an education and a big bump to their future earning potential, often at significant taxpayer expense. What entitlement do they have to have a free ride, much less make living wage on top of that?
Many career paths include a steady increase in future earning potential. As for entitlement, they are entitled to a share of the value they bring to their employer. Or at least, if Stanford doesn’t think so, it can fire them.
I disagree. You are entitled to what you can negotiate as your market value and what you accept in exchange for your labor and talents. If grad students are lined up the door willing to work for less because a PhD from Stanford gives them a ticket for the rest of their life, why should Stanford or any employer have to give them a share of value? That's not how most employment works. Or at least not O(n) proportional to the value they create.
Organizing and demanding pay collectively seems to help in negotiations, so good for them for taking this approach. It's not like Stanford can move its grad programs to Mexico like a US car maker and its factories.
Didn’t say that. I think that grad students are reasonably paid a small salary to be able to live modestly on, so that more students can be taken into programs. Requiring a living wage to the tune of $50k/yr at UC Berkeley as the standard is not reasonable as a matter of spending university $ wisely, or as a matter of what the role of grad school is.
You obviously have absolutely no clue how research PhDs work.
Most PhD students are pretty much done with classes after the first year or two. They get their PhDs through research (often writing their own grants) or the vital function of teaching. They are workers. It is disingenuous to view them as students. If PhD students were not able to make a living, very, very few people would ever be able to enter science.
> You obviously have absolutely no clue how research PhDs work.
Somehow my 6 years of PhD in physics begs to differ.
As I said in another comment, grad students are going to grad school and getting a big bump to their future earning potential, subsidized often by the state. I don't think it's an entitlement that they get to do that for free, much less claim a right to earn living wage level on top of that.
Maybe you were doing a CS PhD or something, but PhDs in most fields are not a good good way to maximize earning potential, especially when taking into account lost potential wages and the time value of money.
> PhDs in most fields are not a good good way to maximize earning potential, especially when taking into account lost potential wages and the time value of money.
Nobody made anyone get a PhD in a field that doesn't pay, and so that doesn't mean they're entitled to high pay.
It's not hard to google "starting pay for major x" before making a choice. Nobody should be surprised at what the pay is, especially for someone capable of getting a PhD.
As someone who also spent six years in grad school, I’m entitled to say grad students are generally remarkably unproductive. Much of their ‘research’ work after the 2-3 years of classes is best considered continuing education. Most of them suck as TAs too. They don’t need to make a living either - They just need to get by for 5 years by living with roommates and eating ramen. It’s what I did.
(And it’s not true grad students ‘often’ write their own successful grants. The vast majority of STEM grad students are supported on stipends from their advisor’s research grants or do a TA-ship when desperate.)
But still, I doubt you would have found many grad students who were independently wealthy before unionization. Or at least, in the field where they were lobbying the hardest for unionization, is probably where the most independently wealthy students were.
in addition, many professors and departments discourage PhD students from taking separate jobs, and sometimes its even part of the funding agreement that you don’t take a separate job
Contents of tweet for people with rate-limiting and other Twitter-related issues:
Text: We won. [heart emoji] [fist emoji]
Image: Logo of the union with text overlay. The logo is a circle containing the words "Stanford Graduate Workers Union" around the top and lightning bolts around the bottom. The center of the circle contains line art of a pair of hands holding a tree with smooth hills in the background. Large text at the top says "We won!" in a cursive font and slightly smaller text at the bottom says "94% YES" in block letters.
A follow-up tweet states that there will be a victory day party tomorrow (July 7th) at 6:00pm at Manzanita Field. The party will feature drinks, music, and snacks.
This wouldn't be happening if universities did a better job making grad students less miserable. It was tolerable back in the day when - in theory - you'd simply "pay your dues" and then slide into a tenure-track position. But that era is over and isn't coming back.
The workload of grad students has also increased substantially. Not only are they conducting much of the research, but quite often they're asked to significantly contribute to grant proposals as well.
Partly mistreatment perhaps, but moreover gross incompetence by the administration. For years they’ve been unwilling or unable to fix the most basic issue: Mail delivery, sensible health insurance options, pay that tracks the cost of liming in university-owned housing.
They demonstrated that they weren’t able to make things work, so there was no choice but to escalate to a union. I won’t be surprised if heads roll in upper admin once the Board of Trustees realizes that there’s no going back from this vote. I’m sure the union will be a bureaucratic headache for everyone, it’s unfortunate it was necessary.
Something tells me Stanford grad students are smart enough to see through cheap ploys like the one you suggest. If that's not the case, maybe Stanford doesn't deserve the clout it enjoys.
On the other hand there are plenty of laws which prohibit union busting and falsely fearmongering about unionization, yet corporations get away with it anyway, even when found guilty.
So perhaps it is a good thing unions are allowed to over-promise, it balances the power structure, if only a tiny bit.
When given the opportunity, few people will vote against something that gives them more money. But whether their self-interest is in the broader interest is rarely solved for by such a mechanism.
What will happen is that given a finite pot of money, fewer grad students will be taken on by the university's PhD programs, so that the ones who voted for this can get paid more.
In the program where I did my Master’s, there was a professor who had a salary of 300K and didn’t seem to do anything exceptional compared to his peers. PhD students told me he had been the president of some unit at the university and when he stepped down, he didn’t let go of the money. This silly financial idiocy easily costs 3-4 grad student more to the university every year.
It’s the right choice. We need academia to be a competitive choice, to attract top talent, to not just be those with enough resources or enough passion to put up with awful pay and working conditions.
If high quality grad students are lining up to apply to Stanford at non unionized salary rates, and you can also give more people the educational opportunity with slots than if you had to distribute higher salaries to fewer people, why would I choose the 2nd option?
I started a PhD at NYU just as the graduate student unionization happened. IIRC, at NYU only graduate students who were actively teaching in a given semester or had a specific type of research grant were considered members of the union. First year PhDs at NYU were generally not covered, because in that case your salary was simply the generic PhD fellowship and you didn't count as a worker.
The union essentially negotiated on behalf of all students, and for example won an increase in the PhD stipend that applied to everyone. But there were some benefits (family cash assistance perhaps?) that you could only get if you were in the worker category.
Generally, no, universities classify graduate students as students, not employees. Stanford additionally classifies postdocs as students and charges their funding source a nominal tuition fee.
> A Stanford postdoctoral scholar is a non-matriculated trainee, in graduate student status, in residence at Stanford University pursuing advanced studies beyond the doctoral level in preparation for an independent career.
This makes doing taxes as a postdoc extremely irritating as the stipend is not earned income, which of course benefits Stanford's tax situation considerably.
It depends on the source of the funds and the nature of the postdoc’s duties. If the postdoc is on a “fellowship”, either paid by the university or by something like an NIH trainee fellowship, then they are not employees. If the employee is hired to do work for a project, on the other hand, which is typical when funded on an NSF or DARPA grant, then they are employees. This is MIT’s info page, which I believe is reasonably representative: https://postdocs.mit.edu/postdoctoral-position/defining-post...
Science had an article on that in 2002 that went into more detail on how this system came about (basically, vague laws that have ended up interpreted through a series of IRS rulings). I think but am not 100% sure that even though this article is about 20 years old, the current situation is still similar. https://www.science.org/content/article/postdocs-and-law-par...
Yes at public and private universities graduate students receiving stipends, most assistants are employees covered by the national labor relations act. They get a W2 and pay taxes on the income, except for qualified educational expenses. The law protects their right to collectively bargain.
These days, the answer is more likely to be "Yes". At least for graduate students that do some form of teaching, in addition to taking classes and doing research. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... for more information.
Do we know if it rates limits those of us without the bird?
Also interesting, it's making a call to "UserByTestId" which fails every time I refresh the page while trying to find the rate limit. My dev tools network tab is Christmas colours.
The quality of the union and happiness of it's members directly reflects the quality of Stanford's liberal arts personnel and especially the quality of their political science and history departments.
If the product of our highest quality institutions can't fight for a better quality of life, what hope do the rest of us have?
I am picturing a mob of dirty peasants demanding more rights from their feudal lord and they are somehow Stanford grad students. I don't hate unions but I feel like something has changed where whatever made Stanford prestigious has gone away and now the people associated with it are coasting off its old reputation. I don't know what is the new one that will be as prestigious in the future. Maybe an institution at Shenzhen or something.
It's interesting to me that the Shenzhen logo seems to be modeled on the Stanford logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Universityhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_University and also that the Stanford logo has some English and German writing on it. Stanford University was was founded before WWI and German was the dominant language of science. Similarly the Shenzhen University logo has some Chinese and English writing on it, and at the time of its founding English was the dominant language of science.
Has something structurally changed at Stanford where making a graduate student union is now a good idea and it wasn't a good idea before, or was it always a good idea and only now they are doing it?
Can someone explain this to me, I'm in the UK. What's going on? I thought you paid for college in the USA, but these students are getting money from the university?
PhD students are almost always funded including an annual stipend. The university charges tuition but almost none of them ever see that bill (their advisor or external fellowship does).
Because the question makes no sense. Unions are not just "bunch of people" but also the set of organizational principles, processes, and social-political capital that it represents. The union won the election.
I agree with the sibling comment that the title is poorly worded.
