Berkeley's $5M Glitch

Here's my high level summary, as a former instructor.

1. Berkeley offered tuition remission as a benefit to grad student instructors essentially as a stipend/subsidy of living.

2. The union representing instructors negotiated tuition remission for undergrad instructors doing the same job as grad instructors, primarily to protect grad students from being short-changed by departments trying to hire cheaper undergrad instructors over the grad instructors who had greater need for the income.

3. CS class sizes increased, and the CS department lacked the funds to hire both enough grad and undergrad instructors to properly staff, so they offered 8-hour positions to undergrads as an alternative.

4. Undergrads were more than happy to take these positions, spend a few hours a week teaching, earn some income, and get close to professors. As 20-hour-a-week instructor, I still felt like it was an incredibly cushy and privileged job.

I wouldn't argue that the union is to blame here. It seems that only the CS department (as opposed to other departments) has hit this budgetary issue of being unable to afford enough instructors to staff its classes--the solution to me is that the university should look at the massive growth in the department and allot commensurate funding for instructors. Instead, the department took a (fairly reasonable) alternative solution which apparently has run afoul of some labor agreement.

Also, as someone who knows some instructors who stand to benefit from this decision: almost no one is happy about it. No one gains except these instructors--the department, future students, and future would-be instructors are all getting screwed (unless the department gets much more funding as a result of this).

When I worked for Berkeley our bosses made it very clear: they can’t stop us from billing more than 39.5 hours in a week, but if we did, they’d have to let us go and stop offering the service we provide, because they just didn’t have the budget.

It’s not like we were providing essential services. We were doing things to make the other students’ lives better, and we were all fine with the restriction.

We were also learning a lot ourselves in the process, and valued the work experience far more than the few extra dollars.

Ironically Berkeley undergraduate TAs are among the best-paid. $30/hr + tuition remission for undergrads is incredibly generous.

I was paid $10/hr @ ~5 hr / week as an undergraduate TA at an Ivy League university.

Thought I'd lend my 2 cents here. I'm a current Berkeley EECS undergrad.

These 8hr a week TA positions are very difficult to get and coveted by many students for (1) relationship to a professor which helps in such a large department and (2) the considerable amount of weekly pay.

Did the EECS department potentially ruin their short term future by not paying full tuition? Maybe.

They also do lean heavily on academic interns (unpaid students who work 1 or 2 hours a week), and I see this group increasing greatly in numbers after this decision is ruled.

Please ask me questions! I'm a past TA myself have a lot of friends who TA.

Terrible decision. The Berkeley EECS department is already cash strapped while serving an ever growing CS student body. This probably will lead to massive decreases in class sizes, as it is not worth it to appoint 8h TAs (incredibly common in CS classes across the board). As a result, the CS GPA cap to declare will probably go up to 3.5 or even 3.7, and CS education will be denied to many students.

Speaking from personal experience, as an 8 hour TA for 3 semesters, I think the current wage ($30 an hour) is more than fair. Usually 8 hour TAs just hold a 1 hour weekly discussion and OH session, along with some grading -- tuition remission sounds a bit excessive.

Calling this a "glitch" is disingenuous. It (is/was) an open secret for my entire undergrad. There were plenty of professors who would encourage students on 8-hour appointments to work 20~30 hours/wk with no overtime pay. Professors control access to valuable research positions and grad school applications so if you wanted to have a career in academia there wasn't anything you could do about it.

Worth noting that the union is yelling at everyone on Twitter and grossly misrepresenting what actually happened in the "ECCS" (???) department: https://twitter.com/BerkeleyUAW2865/status/12171616914078474...

This is a great example of a union doing its job. Why should the TAs be the ones to get less when there is a budget problem. Why not hit the president's salary for the shortfall or any of the other many line items on the budget.

We constantly see people complaining about wealth inequality. Applauding unions for improving workers wages is one of the ways that it gets improved, one small step at a time.

Am I missing something? Berkley isn't arguing they accidentally underpaid people, but that they intentionally sought out more 8 hour positions. That sound in no way like a "glitch"

This problem is endemic in all academic research, even in the private schools and even for non-students. I worked for Stanford as a LSRP (read, research assistant in the biosciences) and there were some interesting hoops that were conditions on my employment.

1) My position was changed from salaried full time to hourly full time in order to avoid paying the needed minimum for salaried employees. 2) Told explicitly that I had to log all my hours but that I could NOT claim overtime, they simply didn't have the money for it. 3) Expected to work more than 40 hours a week because that's what you do in research

I was laid off at the end of a grant cycle because we ran out of funding and the professor thought I wasn't hard working or dedicated enough even though I was pulling 50+ hour weeks and working 6-7 days usually.

Now I work as an hourly consultant for a biotech startup and bill by the hour.

>In negotiating the 10-hour threshold for tuition remission during contract negotiations, the union says it understood that eight-hour appointments would be used only sparingly. And they were used that way for about a decade. Since 2015, however, non-remission-eligible appointments have surged from about 2 percent of assistantships to 12 percent.

It appears that it all comes down to whose understanding about the final contract was right. I understand these are legal documents. Was "sparingly" defined there, and did increasing the number of 8-hour appointments exceed that threshold?

Either way it's bad that the trend always seems to be towards decreasing instructional staff pay and benefits. It's a nice windfall for these TAs whether they were expecting it or not.

i was an undergraduate 8-hour TA at UC Berkeley for six semesters between 2015 and 2018. i was also part of the union. i'm surprised few of the comments are mentioning the main issue: union contract stipulates that 10-hour or more TAs receive tuition fee remission, but even 9.9-hour TAs receive zero remission. (there was at least one 9.9 hour TA, though not in the EECS department.) in 2015 when the 8-hour TA position was implemented there were initially not very many of them, and there were more 20-hour TAs, mostly graduate students. but between then and now Berkeley's CS program grew exponentially. so more and more 8-hour TAs were needed. what started as a clever hack was beginning harm other departments' workers by setting a precedent (ex, the 9.9 hour TA in chemistry). so the union fought and won.

Berkeley's undergraduate CS education is a unique self-sustaining juggernaut. there are not only TAs officially hired and paid by the department, but also numerous volunteers tutoring, lab assisting and otherwise helping each other out. it would be a tragedy if the bureaucracy destroys this beautiful self-sustaining machine through this decision. but i trust Berkeley will find a way as always to teach the most with the least resources.

"It’s akin to employees accusing an employer of keeping them just below the threshold of full-time work in order to avoid having to give them full-time benefits."

... which is akin to accusing a motorist of remaining just below the speed limit in order to avoid paying fines for speeding.

One thing I find very odd about this: it’s in both parties’ interest to gave as much tuition remission as possible and as little pay as possible: tuition remission is not taxable. The deal should have been that tuition remission depends on hours and the hourly pay goes way up after there’s no tuition left. Maybe this violates the Fair Labor Standards Act?

When I was a TA, the effective hourly pay was in excess of $70. It was an amazing job!

Funny how these “glitches” always tend to underpay everyone.

Imagine the unthinkable: hiring more full-time faculty!

Too bad no university has a budget for that.

I don’t really understand why Berkeley has to retroactively give $7500 to students who were never expecting it in the first place. When the minimum wage is raised, should employers have to compensate employees for previous hours worked below the new minimum wage?

my take: https://twitter.com/barakgila/status/1217206089403359233?s=1...

tl;dr: the merits of the labor dispute notwithstanding, TAs were well-compensated relative to other schools and the core problem was a mandated pay structure with a cutoff at 10hr week for tuition fee reimbursement.