Graduate students at the University of Southern California have won a union

That's not how voting works.

Unknown and presumably mostly ambivalent?

Which means that even if all 40% of the non-voters had voted against the union, it still would have passed. That's an extremely strong result.

An absolute majority is frankly pretty impressive. By the same calculation the last US presidential election was 37% unknown, 32% Biden, 29% Trump, 2% 3rd party.

81,283,501 for Biden, 74,223,975 for Trump, 158,429,631 total votes, 252,274,000 as best proxy for eligeble voters (18+ us pop) per [1]

[1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federale...

TAs are paid based on how many hours they are expected to work and don't receive additional pay if they work longer. At my uni TAs are paid as if they worked 12 hours a week, but often have to work 14-16 to get through the assigned work

Yes, the contract could be extended for additional work. In fact, I taught a 5 week module in an undergrad course one semester, and I found that our pre-agreed time was far too little for me to adequately prepare for the classes (and do office hours etc). So I reached out to my department, and we moved to a different contract, where I tracked my exact hours and I was paid for those hours.

However, this was pretty exceptional. In most cases, we got either a 102 hour/semeter contract or a 204 hour/semester contract, with only 90-95% of those hours actually worked (in the Physics dept at least).

This probably doesn't answer your question, but when I was in grad school 30 years ago, there was an unwritten assumption that limiting your hours was necessary, so you could spend most of your time focusing on "getting done." Staying in school imposed a savage opportunity cost compared to finishing quicker and getting into a higher paying job. It also imposed a risk, since there were a lot of things that could happen, outside of your control, and knock you out of the program without a degree.

I worked my extra hours as a musician, and actually made decent money compared to my graduate stipend. But it was limited to about 4 hours a week. And it was a source of recreation and "escape" that I needed.

If you organize well, then you have a voting block you can influence. Historically, union leaders have been extremely powerful because of this because they made sure to strengthen union ties (hosting social events, disability benefits/aid could come from the labor union instead of your employer, etc). The strengthening of social ties within the union gives you a pulpit from which to influence (e.g. if you know your union leader and you like your union leader and they're making sure you get treated well and taking care of you, you might set aside any personal beliefs / things you hear on the news and vote the way your friend is asking you to). In fact, the largest union leaders were as powerful as being a leader of a religious organization (think Jimmy Hoffa). Think about how much leverage cop unions and the Fraternal Order of Police seem to wield about public policy regarding policing as an example of the ways in which unions can organize to be a bulwark against more popular policies.

So what a grad student union can do about inequality in the LA community at large is to organize their members to vote as a single block that politicians will want to court. And if they're too small on their own, they partner with other union leaders who share similar belief to recommend their members vote as one big block on specific issues. That's what community organizing means - organizing a block of votes for a shared purpose.

These are not undergrads unionizing. In USA what you are talking about is “student government”

I have a similar background in Finland, but my view of student unions is less cynical.

We had all major services separated from the student union. Restaurants were run by a company with a mix of professionals and student representatives in the board. Student housing was mostly owned by a foundation controlled by the student unions in the area. This helped to insulate them from day-to-day politics.

There were only a few direct member services. When you have tens of thousands of members, there are not many things you can do in a centralized way without a field organization. Most of the time, it was better to support the work of actual student-run organizations than to try to provide the services yourself.

Then there was the political mission. We had two largely separate groups: one focused on coordinating the work of student representatives in university administration, while the other tried to influence local and national politics with varying degrees of success.

The most controversial part was the legal mandate to participate "in the implementation of the educational mission of the university [..] by preparing students for an active, informed and critical citizenship." Some factions used that to justify involving the student union in general politics.

Regardless of what one thinks of that, student unions certainly help to train more competent career politicians. Finnish student unions, as well as the youth/student organizations of political parties, are structured to mimic national and local politics. In a few years, you reach the top, and you get to see how the system works from the perspective of top decisionmakers. That's the kind of experience you don't get in a decade of actual politics.

Similarly, people who were interested in student politics quickly learned to have effective meetings. This was most obvious in the lower levels of university administration which often involved professors outside the administrative track. The average professor (or the average software engineer) has little idea what to do in a meeting, and even less idea how to run one. The result is a lot of incoherent rambling that wastes everyone's time.

> Then they were in favor, since many union members were in favor.

I don’t know if it was union members in favor of immigration or union leadership in favor of immigration.

I haven't read the wikipedia article, but this depends on the union.

I did not say anything about the rate of the increase, only an increase existing in general, so no.

No, both points are perfectly fine. It is just your addition of "same level" that is unreasonable and completely nullifies your post.

at USC most PhD students would not be paying tuition to begin with.

Tuition is waived in 98%+ of cases, when it is not the assistantship is being paid by a research grant and for many of those the stipend is already higher than USCs. There may be some act of it tuition fees from one internal account to another in the case of a waiver though.

> Striking for two weeks would cancel an entire term of undergrad

That's an interesting point, but can you provide a source of that? (Just curious as a fellow graduate student)