UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
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Later when I was a researcher I found out that the Provost takes 55% of grant money "for overhead like printer paper". If there is money involved, there are plenty of plenty of people willing to "take their cut" before it ever gets to the researcher or student.
If you can't afford to pay grad students enough to keep body and soul together, don't open the grad student slots.
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On more serious note, grad student working for next to nothing serves similar function as unpaid internships in companies and politics. Some positions are designed to help young people coming from wealthy families without explicitly shutting anyone out.
If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier.
I'm having trouble parsing that
There are other perks of being a grad student than just the pay though...
: sure, the internships aren’t typically a year long, but if you do the math for what’s paid for their duration it’s an incredible amount if it did last a year.
In some places if you have an unpaid tech internship, everything you do has to be an artificial training exercise for the sole benefit of the students.
a) not everyone who figured out higher education is a racket wants to do 180 degree career turn
b) many people would like to make their future in something else than easy code monkeying money
If everyone goes to write NoSQL serverless CRUD for adtech, who will be left to do research or something actually materially productive in the economy?
Also I am sure the janitor at the University is paid decently and loves to work there. Reason is there are not as many people lined up for that job and basic economics takes over.
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 power in such a relationship.
(From a comment in the other thread about this subject on how this particular market was skewed: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove... )
And janitor is in all likelihood a decent job with union protection (good for them).
But then the disappointing part is that the system in place is designed to exploit newcomers and place them in an abuse relationship where they are forced to go through the ringer as indentured servants hoping that their ultimate goal is just around the corner.
You may quote simplistic cliches regarding economy and career choices, but the truth of the matter is that the grad school system is designed to be a monopoly where grad students have absolutely no power or influence over their career other than quitting, which ultimately results in total and definite exclusion from the industry, and thus are forced to endure years of indentured servitude. As a grad student you don't have the freedom to switch schools, negotiate your salary, or even be recognized as an employee.
This example demonstrates the absolute lack of power or influence that grad students have: if you disagree with your supervisor then say goodbye to your whole career.
Your comment is unrealistic and even absurd to the majority of those going through the PhD threadmill.
It's like saying you can dunk a basketball if you'd want to. Sure, show me LeBron James and how easy it is for him, but for those of us who aren't benefitting from abnormal competitive advantages then it's not that realistic.
How many people are lucky enough to be able to not only work a full-time job that pays the bills and is close enough to grad school and also be able to be in a field where literally part-time amateurs can do all the required academic work to write papers, a whole dissertation and defend a decent thesis? And in the end do well enough to aspire to have a career in your field of research?
You have a better chance of dunking on LeBron James.
"Let them eat cake."
From Princeton's policies, particularly the last sentence:
"Graduate study at Princeton, at both the doctoral and, in most cases, the master’s level, requires full-time commitment to study and research on the part of students. The Graduate School’s financial support structure, which extends throughout the length of the student’s program and ordinarily includes summers, is one indication of that requirement. Accordingly, the Graduate School considers employment beyond full fellowship, teaching or research support or its equivalent to be incompatible with full-time graduate study."[0]
It's even worse for international students. Under F1 visa, you can't work more than 20 hours on campus. However, all TA positions are deemed 20 hours of work. So you can't even work at the campus gym if you want.
This is not true at Princeton. Unless they are without funding, PhD students there commonly only work 10 hours per week (nominally) as TAs. The regular stipend is also generous compared to many other programs.
"This means that international students on a full AI or full AR appointment are not eligible for additional on-campus work, even if the Graduate School employment policy would otherwise allow it."
How can they say this, and then also ask their graduate students to teach? They're contradicting themselves.
Research is already a full time job.
Lots of folks trying to sell you a path to success.
It's like if you want to be a General, you are going to have to be a Private first. There is a progression in the sciences.
There’s a way that academics come off which I don’t think they intend to - which is somehow their path is special and their trials are unique.
They’re not.
That's not entirely true, though as I understand it is becoming more true; there are definitely places that will promote to positions for which the normal route is a post-graduate degree based on a lesser degree plus experience (including publications under the rubric of experience).
Now, university faculty positions, degree standards tend to be ironclad, though.
That's not how the military works at all. A Private is an enlisted rank, and their career path typically tops out at a level like Warrant Officer.
If you want to be a General, you're going to have to start as a Lieutenant (the lowest commissioned officer).
What proportion of officers in the US Armed Forces graduates from the military academies? A third? I very much doubt graduating from one is required to become a general. Being a great political operator is but it’s not like only military academy graduates can do that.
But the claim that "a PhD is a necessary step to _specific_ well-paying and fulfilling careers" isn't incompatible with the GP comment's claim that intrinsic motivation makes people shoulder these crappy conditions, just like (eg) actors. It's pretty well-known that PhDs are, on average, _terrible_ career moves from a self-interest and financial perspective. This is common knowledge among literally everybody I've ever met who has any exposure to academia. Hell, Piled Higher and Deeper has been around for more than _20 years_; my university's paper syndicated it.
Just like struggling actors, PhDs put up with low pay and bad conditions to take a shot at something they want to do, with the additional wrinkle that they're (nominally) increasing their human capital in a way that a failing actor isn't. Nothing about your comment rebuts the GP comment's claim that there's nothing unique about academia in this respect.
Yes, it is sold as such. But the appeal is fading fast.
Academia nowadays is something between a Beauty Pageant and the Hunger Games where people struggle with underpayment for years for maybe one day getting the famed tenured position.
Maybe if these people want to do anthropology research, they can, but at their own expense.
When I was looking into doing grad school, I had no illusions that if I went in without a grant that I'd be doing anything other than scraping by. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything else.
It's fucking absurd how top heavy the state run universities (especially UC) are. I would hope that grad students at other UC campuses would strike in solidarity, but knowing that UC's got them by the short and curlies I doubt that'll happen.
Janitor and other unskilled labor jobs at public universities tend to pay crap but are highly sought after because they usually come with the union negotiated benefits package that makes them a better value (than local work in private industry for more money and less benefits) for many people.
Back when I was doing those kinds of jobs I wouldn't even think about wasting my time working for a public university but I was young and needed the money more than I needed healthcare and 40hr weeks.
I sat on a couple school boards for a while, all that was ever discussed was fund raising and how we should be contributing more. Very little focus on education. Sadly it's turned me off spending time with Schools and just targeting students / researchers directly.
Sounds like a win-win, yeah? So, sorta happy ending...
We need an overhaul on bloat in state schools at a minimum, then we're good.
The other issue is patent / design ownership arguments, but that's for another day.
[1] https://www.alligator.org/news/uf-engineering-team-wins-mill...
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So for example a 2 year project that has 120K allocated in direct cost salary, with a 75% overhead regime in a university with a 25% central overhead take would have an overall budget of 210K of which 120K would end up payed as salary to the researchers, 52.5K taken by central administration, and 37.5K taken by the research group.
While technically you could argue paying researchers more would also net the university more money, asthe overheads are calculated as a % on direct costs, in reality this does not hold as funding for research is very finite and funding agencies would not approve paying higher project grants.
Both universities and large businesses have been successfully lobbying for years for higher overhead % regimes in grant instruments, and since the budget for funding research has not changed in line with these evolutions, defaco shifting the windfalls of research grants from the researcher's wages to the administrations.
The strikers want 1.4k more per month. With the current 9 month payment system, that’s about 13k more per PhD student per year. So 1k*13k = 13mil overall to put this problem to bed.
That seems...surprisingly little? Aggravating a big chunk of your on-the-ground workers and attracting all this bad press doesn’t seem worth it. Meanwhile, there appear to be a whole lot of UCSC administrators making comfortable six figures [4].
I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd.
[1] https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html
[2] https://planning.ucsc.edu/budget/reports-overviews/pdfs-imag...
A lot of grad students are international students (like I was) and they simply can't work anywhere else due to their visa restrictions.
The $500K Club: Here are the hundreds of U.C. employees who made more than $500,000 last year
Q: What happens to the typical CIO and his/her package when returns aren't "good" ?
The person running your investments can make or break you. You're going to hire the best you can, and that's going to cost. And someone with a track record of making it rain is going to know this and know what they're worth.
If you want a golden parachute yourself, you're going to need to build a track record of success first showing you're worth it.
I think you kind of summed it up there... There are better things for a university to be doing than paying rainmakers
Dozens of university endowments are over a billion dollars, with significant returns when under good management. Ignoring the returns possible on that means the students and state has to pay more to continue the university. Endowments often consist of hundreds or more fund, usually set up by donors, to advance some part of the university, which very often is scholarships and other direct student benefits.
It's incredibly short-sighted to downplay them without understanding the benefits.
How would one propose to distinguish* someone who will deliver growth for - say - 25 consecutive years from someone who delivers growth for 5 years yet blows up your endowment in year 6 ?
* beforehand ;)
If you think that "25 years of not blowing up" is a sure-fire way to predict the risk of blowing up in year 26, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Besides, Warren Buffet has a stellar track record much longer than 25 years. People paying him to manage their money has made him very, very rich and those people very happy with him.
Note that I'm not making any _moral or normative claims_ about not striking vs striking vs wildcat striking, nor about the interplay of rights and obligations between individual workers, unions, and employers. I'm speaking purely strategically here, in the same frame as your comment.
You're only looking at first-order dynamics here, while second-order ones are often in play. In this case, the 54 students weren't just striking, they were wildcat-striking: striking in defiance of not just the university they work for, but the union that represents them, who had already agreed to a contract with the university.
When the union has already agreed to, ratified, and entered into a contract, capitulating to a wildcat strike a couple of years later is a significant departure from even relatively pro-labor norms. Again, from a purely strategic perspective, the costs of this specific incident are potentially a lot less significant than the future costs of the university signaling that they're okay with contracts becoming meaningless if the other party changes their mind in the middle of the term.
And, tell me how not having any union is better for all than an imperfect union.
Obvious answer: No dues. Not commenting on whether that's a good tradeoff, mind, but it's an answer.
It doesn't always work, in some industries I can see the relationship is much more confrontational and damaging, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Considering that many, many countries exist where this is the case (most of the time), this seems to be very well founded.
> Hermes: So you're telling me I could fire my whole staff and hire Grunka Lunkas at half the cost?
> Glurmo: That's right. They think they have a good union but they don't. [whispering] They're basically slaves.
Again without implying anything normative, what makes you claim that the students' representation by the union isn't "fair"? Simply because they want more than stipulated by the contract the union was able to negotiate? Is my (non-union) salary "unfair" because I'd much rather get paid 3x as much (or 30x, for that matter)?
Just like in a democracy, not everybody's interests can be fully satisfied in a union. So what? That doesn't necessarily mean we'd all be better off with autocracy or without any government whatsoever, not even the people getting the short end of the stick.
The fundamental problem in Santa Cruz, like many other universities in the state, is the cost of housing. UC Santa Cruz didn't build enough housing. Part of the problem is that most of UCSC's land is wildlife refuge, and part of the problem (like everywhere else in California) is the political and regulatory difficulty of building new housing. The cost of housing has been increasing far faster than UCSC's budget.
ref: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...
I know the same thing is happening at UCSD, where the student body exploded in size and despite additional housing being built, it is insufficient and very expensive.
That is very definition of 'Unions'. As an individual you have limited resources to take on a big adversary (employer) hence few people come together and pool in money. If this process is voluntary it is entirely up-to them to come up with the terms of engagement. Once you agree to those terms going back on those terms must be seen as dishonesty. If the union membership is forces them obviously union leaders have zero incentives to actually offer better terms to members.
The only way this can be resolved is by having some kind of "enlightened" union leadership. The superhumans who will instantly know what is the right thing to do and will have 100% freedom to do so. Sadly, such humans are very very rare.
Can anyone give me their actual experience being in a union that's not in the tech industry?
Like, medical mistakes are already crazy common -- and that's with the strict barriers of entry.
This is all about what principle you are applying and whether it scales or not. It is a bit like restraining order. In some specific instances it might be safe to let the person in your house. However that kind of hurts the overall restraining order terms and sometime in future you can get into trouble.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/
Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR.
Was that the annual base salary?
What was the value of the rest of the package?
The data set is fairly informative for it's size and publicity.
My question was more or less rhetorical, since institutions don't always rush to put a figure on all the elements of a package.
Anecdotal data point: the person at the top of the tree at my old university gets a private 200 year-old house inside campus (so long as they're in post). What's that worth?
And this is why unions exist in the first place and make binding contracts - no one wants to make a deal with another party when the other will arbitrarily decide the deal isn't good anymore and act like fools contrary to the terms of the contract.
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.
Here's news on the strike from 2018: https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/05/strike-updates.html
Here's news on the strike from 2017: https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/01/strike-message.html
There's reason to believe that no matter what deal was reached, they would just strike again next year, to try to get more money. How much is enough?
Here's the strike from 2013, with grad students and service workers going on strike together: https://afscme3299.org/media/news/ucsc-service-workers-grad-...
The comments on this UCSC reddit thread discuss how the unions have been coordinating their strikes over the last 3 years: https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSC/comments/ese6sz/to_everyone_wh...
Working with the right professor to shape your research agenda and future as a result, is the second cut.
"UAW local 2865, a labor union representing UC student workers and teaching assistants, recently estimated in over two decades about $1 billion dollars have been wasted in upper-level UC administrative costs. UC Berkeley Professor Charles Schwartz, who has conducted extensive research on this subject, estimated that the total cost of UC administrative bloat had been $600 million per year. He has also estimated that UCLA in particular squanders about $54 million per year, the most out of all the UC’s."
0. https://scaleatucla.weebly.com/ucla-senior-management-growth...
UC had to break the union before they got everyone involved.
Your calculus disregards the additional carry-on costs for parity when the 9 other UC campuses follow suit.
1 person who you give a good deal to might, just might, keep their mouths shut. A whole segment? No way.
Given that there's hundreds of schools with thousands of grad programs to choose from, with none of them having more than a tiny percentage of the total market, this is not monopoly pricing.
It's simply supply and demand. People are willing to show up and work for the vast majority of these programs.
I am confused and a bit curious, because that is not why I went to uni(not in US) and not how I had to deal with my studies. Also - can a foreign student apply for this free cheese and is UC diploma any good(also - outside UC, to have a real job)? And how UC is getting money? Any tax money involved(if that is the case, then why?) or only donations - from former students, who... work at UC?
I'm an UCSC alumnus, and I served as a student rep on UCSC's Academic Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB). I've sided with the graduate students in this case. If you follow the subreddit r/UCSC, you will see the student body is largely divided on the issue. Now, subreddit posts are a small sample of the student body, it does affect the perception as well as the notoriety of UCSC being a liberal school full of hippies that always fight for worker's rights. It is harder to rebuild that kind of reputation in the school's brand. And it also negatively affects alumni fundraising.
It puts the UCSC administration between a rock and a hard place. I've worked with the administration in the past. They are intelligent and caring faculty members trying to walk a tight rope every year with UCOP/Regents increasingly demanding in delivering in business objectives (increase enrollment/revenue) on one side and their academic mission on the other. I do not envy them.
UCOP miscalculated this entire affair. UCSC grads going on strike has also encouraged UC Berkeley's and Davis's grads to strike in solidarity. The administration has never been able to handle student protests with the best optics, and unfortunately, student protests historically do not succeed in getting their demands met. It is.. a teachable moment, well steeped in irony.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's asking you to work on grading infrastructure?
I was an ugrad at another UC where 2/3 of my classes were cancelled because lecturers got jobs at startups in the dotcom times, and they made a habit of not scheduling upper-div major classes frequently enough to stay full-time for the year. haha.
They need to find a way to exert leverage on the people who can satisfy their demands -- meaning the University -- and not on people who are basically innocent customers.
The administration is not withholding grades, the graduates are. I understand that they're doing it as a result of the administration, but why are we (undergraduates) sitting in the middle taking heat from both sides?
I'm happy you would be out there striking as thats your right, but to call me entitled is a tad bit much no? The response on the UCSC subreddit is similar - youre either entitled or a bootlicker if you don't join the cause. I am unsure how that is supposed to make me support the cause?
It clearly has the resources to provide you with your grades, it's not like the specific grad students are the only ones being able to grade random undergrad work. It appears it's failing to provide the service you pay it for.
In most other universities, professors submit grades and are free to grade their own exams. TAs are there to just get through the stack of exams a little faster than the professor working on that same stack themselves. The TAs don't hold any sacred power in this scenario, they aren't needed at all actually, they just add an extra sets of hands to check or cross out answers on a piece of paper. That's it. There is no bylaw stating your grades must be submitted by a graduate student and no other, but if there were, it is the university that is enforcing the bylaw.
This narrative that grades can only be submitted by the TAs does not seem right, it seems like a narrative designed to put a wedge in the student body by spreading around a fundamental misunderstanding on how grading and graduation occurs at a university.
Perhaps Arjona should consider that she could have more money for living expenses if she was more economical with her housing choices. After all, she was the one who chose to sign a lease for $1700/month on a $2200/month salary, when cheaper options exist.
Besides that, people with different backgrounds and life experiences bring different things to the table which is great for a research environment.
If everyone came from the same background and experiences it wouldn’t be great for research.
I expect a graduate student parent to be making significant material sacrifices to support a child (no big parties, no trip to Thailand in the summer) but they shouldn't be in poverty.
If you want to talk about programs specifically for supporting parents working towards their education, I'm all ears. But that is orthogonal to the current discussion.
Most grad 'students' work and should be paid as employees. They're not 'studying'. I really believe a grad student should be an employee and treated as such. They're doing the research which is directly tied to the university's ranking. The ranking and name of a university is tied to the applications they receive. They're the ones doing the grading and proctoring. They're not simply taking classes and graduating. They're writing papers and grants, meeting their deadlines for papers by not sleeping and then going to teach a session or grading all day. All while getting paid to work 'part time'.
Regarding being a parent, the alternative is singling them out, make the ones with children pass through hoops in order to receive extra financial support.
On a university, the funding will probably be limited. So now it's not only grad students that are parents but the grad students that are parents that did it early/qualified.
There's already a big discrepancy, even inside a single university, between how much each student earns based on their department/advisor/research.
Where are you seeing that she has roommates? It's not mentioned in the article I read, and I don't see any evidence that the units are shared at https://housing.ucsc.edu/family/. In fact, it says the rent for a 2br is $1700 a month, the same as what she says she's paying.
In any case, the mistake seems to be earlier in the decision-making process, when she decided to become a anthropology graduate student while having a child to care for and without the financial resources to complete the program.
What I'd really say is that a single, low-income parent-or-other-person-who-won't-have-roommates should probably not move to Santa Cruz (or Beverly Hills, Monaco, Chelsea, Dumbo, the Chicago Loop, etc.). I get that this is a controversial viewpoint for some folks, but it just seems like fundamental personal finance to me.
If for, an admittedly highly contrived, example if this individual had the option of making $50K/yr in a low cost of living area OR the graduate program that would result in subsistence wages in a high COL area, why would we not insist that it is at least in part their own doing? Why would we not consider this to be both a bad decision to opt for subsistence wages as well potentially morally reprehensible for the lifestyle she willingly imposes upon her child?
In an alternate question, what if a similar individual with a child making $50K/yr had the option to purchase a reliable car for $700/mo but instead purchased a luxury vehicle for $2K/mo, forcing her into a situation where she was living on subsistence wages with her child? Would we not criticize the choice?
It seems that today it is becoming a popular opinion that any choice for any additional education (unless its from outside traditional academia and then it's bad) should be viewed as ultimately holy and that criticizing those choices is beyond the pale. I suggest that this may come from the Gen Xers and Millenials of the world who were essentially dictated to that they _had to go to college_ to live a good life. The net result of this has been people attending college and then ending up so-called "underemployed" by the masses. However, perhaps many of these people never should have attended college. Perhaps we sold them a raw deal that we have glorified and encoded in bull shit credentialism that requires college degrees for jobs that I could have easily done as a graduated high school student. For many, especially our youth, this alternative view seems verboten and we are now insisting on making college EVEN MORE prevalent by making it free for all. However, the deal will still be a bad deal. We will then be sending even more individuals into a system that will give them no advantage, take 4yrs of their lives and spit them out just as useful to society as they were going in at great cost.
And if that child's needs are better met by taking a decent job in a lower COL area than by working for poverty wages at UCSC, then you should take that job. Your child is more important than your selfish dreams!
Finding a place off Craig's list is nearly impossible.
Last time I tried to use that (5years ago), the only call-backs I got from about 20 calls were landlords that recognized my name and I had known from other contexts (I've lived here a while). I ended up getting a place through other personal connections. Most local rentals operate on a network of personal connections here, with locals offering friends or other locals a deal to get by in an expensive town. Students never get this treatment, and often don't even get shown rooms.
For a grad student arriving without an extensive network, a room for $1700 isn't too bad.
The university has abandoned these students, and so has the town.
Are you a grad student? And you never took an economics course? This is pretty basic material.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/ar...
Stop calling things like this socialism, futures depend on good education.
_Mad_ is not the word I'd use in this situation. Ive been here long enough to just roll with the punches through every strike. I am just trying to talk about it, but it seems its easy to assume how others are acting.
The aggressive rhetoric this topic brings out like "open up your brain a bit" really is helping no one, including the strike and its cause.
Strikes are supposed to squeeze the employer, e.g. because their factory isn't producing and the employer is losing face & sales to competitors.
All the strikes at UCSC seem to wind up squeezing the student body, which 1) doesn't call the shots and 2) is paying fixed costs.
Last one I remember was a transit strike where the strikers closed all entrances & exits to the campus. That did not win them many supporters.
UCSC can easily marshal the resources to get your grades, get you graduated, etc. The fact that UCSC chooses not to in order to divide you from the strikers is intentional.
People don't go on strike because it's fun or popular. And strikes are not meant to be convenient.
Unless UCSC is hiring water boarding specialists, no they can’t. The TA refused to give them up.
2) Waterboarding and torture have been demonstrated over and over to be ineffective. That mere idea that they might ever be a useful tool is pernicious and needs to be denounced even when said in jest.
(Also, don't forget about the employees in billing, grant handling, the professors bringing in big grants, etc)
Back in the day of unions, strikes were not about making a statement, they were literally bending the employer to the will of the workers with brute force. The workers- collectively- held the power. Unresolved strikes literally sunk companies. It feels like that's been forgotten somewhat.
I wouldn't call that very detrimental to there cause.
But consider that GP is also paying "absurd tuition." Returning grades is the least UC can do.
Not everyone goes to school to become an activist. No one should begrudge you of your means and desire to skip class in solidarity with the oppressed grad students at probably the top public university system in the world, but not everyone has such privileges.
It's the undergrads getting bent over the barrel, not UC, which is IMO why these strikes don't seem to have much public support.
It'd be one thing for me to walk off my job. It'd be another thing entirely for me to run off with the only copy of business-critical data.
IANAL, but I wonder if there might not end up being criminal charges in some cases.
> Instead of firing TAs who are standing up for a decent standard of living for themselves, UC must sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a cost of living increase.
Sitting at the negotiations table where you hold none of the cards means you are not getting the pay increase you are asking for. Striking is for workers who know they hold some cards and the other party is not listening.
Striking without any card means you are going to get fired; which just happened here.
I'm not cheering their firing. I'm just explaining why their strike did not work out as they wished.
> ask for compensation that reflects the value they bring to the organization
That's not how it works in the real world. You get paid by market rate; which means if there is someone else accepting a pay cut, you'll get fired and replaced.
> Universities are no different to businesses in this respect
Universities are a competitive business, too; and students pay high tuition fees. If the universities are out-competed, they can lose business/students. It's turtles all the way down.
I agree, that's true. It's almost as if this is an unjust system that devolves into a race to the bottom and inevitable exploitation of workers. And that in the real world, anyone who tries to fight against this system ends up screwed by their employers.
I'm glad we could agree on the exploitation inherent to the labor market.
When you hire a plumber to do some work on your plumbing, do you do any price comparisons? If so, do you feel that’s “exploitation”?
Yet this system has increased the real pay of labor many, many fold over the past 100 years, to where even poverty level in the US is above a good portion of the world income, even though those other people also labor quite hard.
It's an odd race to the bottom that has raised wages so significantly for all quintiles.
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 thing with work visas like H1-B. Also, laws favoring employers' rights and workers' rights can also affect wages. And of course "credentialing" and artificially limiting supply in the case of doctors affects wages.
> Universities are a competitive business, too;
Not really. Pretty much all the top universities stay at the top because of legacy. Also UC Santa Cruz is a public university. Very little chance it is going to be out-competed and put out of business.
Where do you think UC as a public institution would be if it lost political support of the faction allied with organized labor? It already doesn't have support from the opposing faction.
Relatively little of the funding for the UC's comes from the state. Tuition is a much larger percentage. So they do have a concern of being out-competed.
https://www.dailycal.org/2018/08/08/2018-uc-accountability-r...
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. You grow a bunch of potatoes. We are both willing to trade. That's a market. All people participate in the market if they consume goods and/or offer labor.
Maybe the protests and the media coverage are an important part of spreading information and correcting the demand problem for academic positions. We need to tell the world that academia is not what it is presented as.
Your position is akin to opposing online restuarant reviews because why put reviews online if the market will put bad restaurants out of business..
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.
Workers are treated as replaceable when they are in fact easily replaced. Grad students aren't even really workers, though. They're students where teaching responsibilities are part of their professional training, and as with most similar positions (apprenticeships and internships), they aren't especially lucrative and there's a line around the block to replace anyone who quits.
"As part of its commitment to transparency and public accountability, each year the University of California publicly reports employee pay data. The report covers UC's career faculty and staff employees, as well as part-time, temporary and student employees." [1]
I think the commonly accepted definition of worker is someone who is an employee and not a manager. Grad students are pretty clearly employees, according to the UC system.
As a grad student, I taught 2 undergraduate courses a semester as the professor, the same load as a full faculty member—very much ‘workers in the traditional sense.’ Moreover, grad students are also writing a dissertation and doing research for their advisors and taking a full course load, and apparently in CA, also working a side job to pay their bills.
[1] There are two exceptions to the rule that interns don't get paid much: professional services and engineering. Both fields use internships almost exclusively as a recruiting tool and don't claim to provide any educational value.
These workers belonged to a union
The union did not endorse the strike
The strike occured during a period of operation under an agreed-upon contract
Re-opening the contract for negotiation would have lead to renegotiating for 90,000 other employees during a school year
The workers were withholding student grades, harming others who have taken out a significant bet against their own futures that they would get good grades and eventually jobs to repay that financial aid
There are a number of ways this could have played out, and was basically the second-to-worst case scenario. I am sympathetic to those working under an oppressive union and university, but there really wasn't going to be a different outcome given the path they took.
"We are shocked by UC's callousness, and by the violence that so many protesters experienced as they peacefully made the case for a cost of living increase," said Kavitha Iyengar, president of UAW Local 2865, in a statement. "Instead of firing TAs who are standing up for a decent standard of living for themselves, UC must sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a cost of living increase."
Last week, the university filed an unfair labor practice charge against the union, claiming the union has failed to stop the wildcat strike by the graduate students as it is required to do by the collective bargaining agreement.
The union responded by filing its own unfair labor practice charge, alleging the university has refused to meet with the union to negotiate a cost of living adjustment.
Direct from the article. Care to back up your statement?
"The strike, which is not authorized by the union that represents the graduate student employees, is in violation of the current bargaining agreement, the university said."
It's not clear that the union authorized it, despite what they're quoted as saying further down the article.
I don't know enough about unions to know whether they could authorize a strike after not explicitly authorizing initially.
It reads like the union didn't authorize the strike, but was fine seeing what would happen/causing a reaction.
In practice, union bureaucrats really dislike wildcat strikes. They dissipate the negotiating power of the union; they basically show the entire hand of the union's most powerful weapon, at a time the union views as suboptimal. And it's usually the threat of a strike, not the strike itself, that companies are more scared of: a company highy desires to avoid a disruption, but if it's already in progress, they don't have an incentive to negotiate unless the union has a really strong hand.
It's because of that power asymmetry that there are utterly basic protections such as it being illegal to fire strikers, hire scabs, etc.
Your "free market" approach makes for a very dystopic world indeed.
It won't be. UCSC is a globally renowned research institute. One of the top public schools in the nation. Not to mention being situated in one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are literally thousands of equally talented people waiting to take these spots. As much as I sympathize with any workers' struggle, these people have no idea how privileged they truly were.
The grad students want more pay because housing is so damn expensive in Santa Cruz. Why is it expensive? Because the city refuses to build enough.
If their pay doesn't go up, I assume more an more applicants will just pass on Santa Cruz and go for a school where housing is more reasonable and their pay covers most of their expenses.
It's not a tenable position for the school to be in long term, and they are hoping they can scare other students back into line if they start axing students. If anything, this has fired up the students, not made them accept the status quo of loosing money for every year they live and work at UCSC.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/university-o...
They do perform a service, sometimes teaching classes, sometimes grading papers, sometimes assisting with office hours. They get paid $2400/mo, putting them above median salary for full-time TAs.
Nobody is forcing them to go to graduate school in California and accept this job. This isn't something that they were coerced into.
The fact of the matter is that research is still a demand driven field. This is why you'll see stipends and grants to assist students in higher demand fields, like computer science.
When I was in school a few years ago, everyone knew that if they were not receiving a grant, they were going to be paying for their education. This isn't a surprise, and if they are willing to make the decision to fund their further education, that is something they should be able to do.
What is the significance of this point when literally no one is forced or coerced except for slaves? By this token absolutely no one should be striking for higher wages - they should all go work somewhere else. Oh wait...
>They do perform a service, sometimes teaching classes, sometimes grading papers, sometimes assisting with office hours. They get paid $2400/mo, putting them above median salary for full-time TAs.
Medían where? The entire United States? California? Santa Cruz? And exactly why is that relevant anyway? It's quite possible that the median wage isn't enough! And this would be part of the process for raising it.
>The fact of the matter is that research is still a demand driven field. This is why you'll see stipends and grants to assist students in higher demand fields, like computer science.
When you look at the average salary of a tenured UC professor (the kind that takes on grad students) and the average salary of appointed administrators (deans, provosts, etc) it's very hard to believe that the issue is lack of money and not allocation.
I also have no idea what cs/stem has to do with this. Most stem PhDs don't get more money either (most do not have fellowships nor their own grants).
The current stipend is just not enough to pay for rent in Santa Cruz. In recent years the city has become a bedroom community for bay area commuters and appropriate housing supply hasn't been built to match the influx of people. There are grad students at ucsc where it is cheaper for them to fly across the world back to their home country for the summer than to live in Santa Cruz for those three months.
There are also graduate students who entered their program under a different union contract, with a different rental market landscape, and now find themselves with the prospect of being unable to pay for a wildly higher rent than they expected from data from 2016, something that they couldn't forsee when the signed their fellowship contract 4 years ago, so yes, some of these students are being baited and screwed.
On top of this, UCSC graduate students attempted to fix this at the negotiation table, but the agreement between all UC campuses and the greater graduate union did not take into account the rising cost of living in Santa Cruz when it was made; 83% of UCSC graduate students opposed this agreement at the time and their concerns were not heard by their union or the University of California.
For many students, the choices are to starve, attempt to derail their life by dropping out of grad school and reset it in another field somewhere far away from California with their lack of disposable income to even fund a move like this, or to strike and attempt to improve the situation. I can't blame them at all.
They get the same salary more or less. The only difference is that they don't have to TA, but only research.
Doesn't change how low that salary is.
Generally, grad student pay is not calibrated at the department / subject level, and that’s especially true of a large multi university state system like CA has...
You can choose what to believe. I choose to believe that the world is a better place when people are paid a living wage for their jobs.
The back story here is that United Auto Workers (the UC grad students’ union) negotiated an unacceptable contract, and despite many months of pushback from the students, and despite UCSC voting against it, the union ratified it anyway (including a no-strike clause).
Also, the faculty of UCSC voted against the firings.
Why are they represented by such a completely unrelated union?
The US is a closed shop country, so it is illegal for students to simply cancel their membership in UAW and join a graduate student workers union.
I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).
Even then, I don’t know if campuses would be allowed to negotiate separately or not.
Wow, and there are people arguing that free market will solve it!
Sure there is; the rules for decertifying unions and replacing them are not mysterious.
> They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system.
Because the grad students formed unions and voted to affiliate with UAW, even before their rights to do so were recognized.
> I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).
That's the main option (they'd need support of 30% of the represented employees to force a vote)
In principle, they could also challenge the designation of a single statewide bargaining unit and argue that the separate campuses (or at least, their campus) grad student workers are somehow not part of a community of common interest with the rest of the existing BU, which would allow separate decertification for just their campus.
But why? They’ve got nothing to do with the car industry.
UAW provided organizing and other support beginning shortly after the first few (unrecognized) campus unions were set up by the grad students.
Yup, the students joined the union and the union negotiated a contract they didn't like.
Now the students are breaking that contract.
It already has. Graduate students at UC Santa Barbara started striking a few days ago, and there are rumors of solidarity strikes at other UC campuses as well as a direct result of these firings.
Sounds like not much has changed. Of course, she lives for free in the UC presidential mansion, and had the school spend $620,000 to renovate it before she moved in, so she’s all set.
That's probably a fringe benefit, so at least she's taxed on its value.
The particular strike was implemented by withholding fall grades, which seems to unnecessarily burden students who are to be buried under crushing debt, no? Also, they are apparently unionized and this strike was against the extant agreements.
The consequences of not getting a grade can affect a student’s entire career and ability to sustain themselves financially.
Is firing sufficient for punishment?
I really have a terrible place in my heart for people who criticize protests because it caused a disruption.
That's the point of a protest.
I'm very happy for you that you've never felt the need to take these drastic steps, but they're protesting real issues and real problems they're having. The grades are ultimately the universities problem
It doesn't hurt the administration, it hurts the students.
Now the students are backing the administration!
However, by hurting students and adhering to draconian policies that serve to hurt more students, the school is paradoxically increasing support because the administration knows students are going to be enraged without looking into the nuance of why these things are happening to them, and who decides why these things should happen the way that they do.
Has the school asked for the exams to be returned, so they could be graded? I don’t know. I assume the graduate students wouldn’t turn them over anyways.
The university is free to make whatever rule they'd like to get around this, but instead go for maximum hurt to try to cut the legs off of this strike, and what is blowing me away is that this strategy by the university is working very effectively.
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 students didn't like the job the union did, so they went on strike, violating the contract.
They didn't have a choice. The union then negotiated against their interests.
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.
Dirsupting uninvolved people to get attention is self-serving and short-sighted. You do that to me and I will be against your cause for sure.
Also, I am saddened by your comment about withholding grades being an unnecessary "burden". That's the point of a strike. What do you think a strike is? They are withholding, not erasing grades, and the goal of the strikers is to force the university to pay attention. The true "unnecessary burden" is UC Santa Cruz not paying grad students enough to pay their rents. If the university had done so, then the grad students would not have had to try to get the administration's attention.
The likely reason only 54 went on strike is because most grad students were afraid for their jobs, which the university has shown to be well-founded.
This country amazes me. They seem to be crazy for low skilled labor but want to kick out high skilled ones.
The freakin union negotiated on behalf of the grad students and agreed to the contract!
Where was the union when that was happening?
They are playing dumb. They had every opportunity to bring up that issue when the contract was open.
I'm pretty sure what happened was the union decided that the deal was good enough for everyone they represented and threw the grad students under the bus.
The reductio ad absurdum here is an ER doctor striking and walking out while their patient's chest is wide open, claiming it was the hospital's problem and that they had been warning the hospital for weeks.
Why doesn't anybody discuss housing situation & regulations?! Why these students protest against university and not City's government?! Why is it strike and not revolt agains housing regulations!? Why is here no discussion about «free market» of housing?!
I'm not live in USA, but looks like there is A LOT of demand for new housing and offer is limited by totally out-of-market reasons! And everybody discuss salaries and their fairness, not new housing and fairness of regulations! For me, outsider, it is «obvious» that housing regulations, not university, are to blame and protest against!
Also, I'm shocked, than room mates are offered as viable solution! I was raised in USSR, where one of the main sins of government (in top-10 for sure) was failure to provide personal housing for everybody.
I was raised in shared apartments (multiple bedrooms, single kitchen, toilet and bathroom). Of course, room mates is theoretically better, because theoretically you could choose room mates, and in USSR it was impossible to choice so-tenants, as these rooms and apartments were distributed by officials without consulting with people. But anyway, it is mind-boggling for me, that it is suggested as good solution for adults peoples, who effectively work for one of the best education institution in richest country in the world, to live in shared apartments. Of course, it must be allowed, if friends want to live together, but it must be decision based on convenience, not as only solution to have ANY housing!
Now... maybe the union cut a bad deal, maybe their representatives aren't faithfully honoring their commitment, maybe there is literal corruption involved. But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary negotiation.
Breaking the deal like this makes negotiating the next contract harder, not easier.
Having a union doesn't fundamentally change the un-affordability of accepting below-market wages for skilled labor in a high cost of living area. They might be getting a better deal than they would have otherwise, but clearly there's a disconnect between the UC system, the union, and the students on the premise of today's arrangement and its long term viability.
The agreement is not one the grad students at UCSC and UCSC, but with the grad students at all UC campuses with the University of California, et al. 83% of UCSC grad students opposed the original UC wide negotiation because the salary minimums did not take into account the rising cost of living in Santa Cruz due to market pressure in the bay area. They are striking without the support of their union because the union never supported their situation in the first place.
The union did so, and they are held to that contract.
If they didn't want that arrangement, they shouldn't have joined a union or that union in particular.
https://uaw2865.org/uc-student-worker-union-files-unfair-lab...
Tearing that deal up like this is effectively throwing all the other members of the union under the bus, because now UC has reason not to trust the union can keep its bargains.
If you want to support organized labor you can't be selfish. It just doesn't work.
But many are if every year brings about a new set of graduate students. Perhaps you started your PhD at UCSC 4 years ago, with the understanding that compensation would be different, a wildly different real estate market than today, and under a different agreement by the school.
So yes, future students were not represented at the salary negotiation, and a the same time, students who came to the school before the negotiation came under a different pretext with a different understanding of the local rental economy and graduate compensation that is no longer true today.
Nixon, Reagan, Jarvis and a lot of very conservative Democrats controlled this state for generations. Democrats have largely left their old base behind to neoliberal economics, deregulation (Carter) and financial market weaponization (Clinton).
The radicals from the left aren’t from CA anymore, and my guess is a future that is a bit more Nixony but wearing Allbirds and sipping a Grapefruit IPA.
Poe's law disclaimer: sarcasm, a miraculous new technology that makes words have absolutely identical meanings in a completely humorless manner.
i "survived" in HCOL city then but even then it was not as expensive as it is today.
Edit: I read "assigning grades" to mean assigning the final grades for the course, not grading homework and exams. I'm pretty sure this is the responsibilities the TAs had, because UCLA sent out a memo to all the faculty explaining that senate faculty are responsible for grades here.
Edit: this was the case in my department, a STEM subject required for graduation in multiple unrelated majors
It works extremely well for administrators and professors with tenure, who are the exact constituencies most in favor of stasis and least in favor of change or experimentation.
Also, it was my job as a TA to explain the material during my TA sections (which were basically lectures, only with more questions and more examples, and I used a blackboard while the prof just read PP slides).
Even though the above was the norm, there were a few great professors who cared, and taught very well.
Having 1 person do all that work would be intimidating.
What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? You find a job that pays the same but requires fewer hours of work?
Not sure how you can reasonably downplay that...
Grad students will constantly need to be negotiating for higher wages because the rent will continue to increase. All the students are advocating for is transfer of wealth from the university to landlords. :/
But is it really that awful to ask for a decent living wage? When did we become so feudal?
I think it's best to not take those jobs and to find a cost-efficient way to get through grad school. If people did this, the system would change. There are many ways to access less expensive education, you don't need to be on the coast of California. It's obviously 'too expensive' and that's a real and fundamental issue in life.
Not the UC/CSU systems, which is what this topic is about; they were primarily little to no cost universities 1.5 generation ago--depending on your residence. It wasn't until the administration bloat and race to capture as much foreign students/funding became the name of the game that it has become this cesspool.
Hell, in my freshman and sophomore year as an in-state student costs were sub 10k a year, it wasn't until the bubble got so big in 2007 (just before the financial crisis) that it became the sordid bacchanal, cash grab you see now. It mirrored the Banking Industry so well in my opinion, and just like banking it never corrected and just doubled down and it too has created a Trillion+ bubble and perpetual servitude and permanent underclass(es) ripe for exploitation.
And just so its clear, the CSU/UC system is only the most affordable in the US if you are not from CA; if you are, especially if you are multi-generational, because of the high tax levels in CA its probably on-par with some Ivy leagues and upper level tech schools.
I won't dispute your analysis on University as whole, as I have much more to say on the matter, but I agree with your conclusion. For most University (on ROI at least), especially if not in a lucartive field of STEM, it's just not worth it if you're technically inclined and have an disciplined autodidactic streak. But many seem to be looking for an 'experience' more than they are an actual useful education in a chosen discipline, which is why these predatory practices not only proceed to this day, but excel as they do, hence why so many are willing to accept such awful loans to do so--I can't help but think of the way many hapless souls got suckered into sub-prime mortgages.
Perhaps the only people where college was out of reach back then were those whose transcripts and paperwork were held up by bigoted people, either on the side of the high school or the college itself.
https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/03/23/81849/hey-uc-grads-coul...
As old limits cease to be sufficiently exlusive, new ones are introduced.
People weren't completing high school back then because it was a difficult or a privileged thing to do, they didn't complete high school because they didn't need to complete high school in order to land a job paying a living wage and start a family. For decades, a year of college was something you could pay for with a summertime of part time work, it was not reserved for the rich and elite, but those who simply wanted to go to college.
Now we've structured our economy such that if you want a living wage or a career you can grow, you do need to go to college, and not just any college but a good one, and sometimes more school afterwards. The economic incentives are not the same. For instance, the GI bill was invented to reintegrate returning veterans right back into their life plans when they returned from WWII with little difficulty. Today, the GI bill is used by many as a way to pay for college in the first place, not as a restitution payment for being conscripted to military service like it was after WWII. College is so necessary these days that people are willing to risk a deployment to a warzone to get this scrap of paper, but this wasn't always the case.
Choosing to continue formal education rather than generate income is a choice that is a lot easier for those who are better off. It's surprising to me that, even as vaguely leftist sentiments run through it, your argument hinges on a myth of egalitarian education while denying any possible effect of wealth inequality.
I'm pretty sure many University employees vote democrat and oppose grad student salary increments.
This strain of leftism is essentially just jealousy and entitlement. I learned life isn't fair as a child it really isn't that hard of concept to grasp. That gave me the motivation to think about what I wanted out of life and to work towards that goal. I didn't get a loan from parents (they barely made ends meet growing up). I didn't go to college or a code camp. I worked delivering papers, then as a janitor ($5.65/hr), then a courier at a hospital before I got my first coding job. Instead of going out with friend in high school I stayed home and taught myself how to code. Now I have everything I want in life. I am happy. It just took actual grit and work.
There is, quite literally, endless opportunity in this country if you have the grit to find your own slice. But, because it is not dropped in some people's laps they cry foul.
Our modern society, which was created through capitalism and the defeat of socialism and communism, has lifted billions out of poverty, has made previously deadly diseases a thing of the past, and the list goes on. Instead of learning from our past successes these people throw a childish fit and refuse to work while demanding more pay. It is asinine. If money is important to you find a line of work that pays what you want. Grad school is not that.
Edit: I forgot to mention that these kids withheld students' grades from last semester as leverage. Those students have nothing to do with their compensation but are suffering due to their entitlement. The union for these kids didn't even authorize the strike.
Not available to so many of the international grad students.
You cancelled slavery but you do need your subset of oppressed workers.
Just finished my PhD and I advise everyone to stay away from this hellhole. I should have dropped out 3 years ago though. Terrible life choice.
and to suggest that grad students don't have "actual grit and work" is stupid, they work just as hard and long - if not more - then any other person with a "normal job". and they know well that they won't be getting paid great, so their only real motivation to be doing their work - is because they love their work all else be damned, so trying to paint them as money grabbing leeches or something when they want a livable wage is just stupid
It’s easier for UCSC to find backfills than for these students to find new schools.
Even if the school is sympathetic to the cause, it’s easier for the school to call the bluff on 54 grad students this year than 540 next year.
Some students take a debt for having the opportunity of achieving a grade. If they study, learn, and pass, they should be allowed to participate in the yet narrow window of time of hiring that follows after the formative period. Flashing your grade can be necessary before just start talking with your potential employer. Any random delay could make they lose a year and create a damage in their finances, curricula and lifes.
They just put themselves in a impossible situation. Damaging the lifes of your students, maybe forever, is not how anybody should do a strike and directly disqualifies you as a teacher.
Is not much different when you are a scientist. Strike is a luxury that some sectors really can't afford.