Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote
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Having been a one-time 1st or 2nd year STEM student, I think this is the proper decision.
Here's some free advice: leave until January 2025 and spend your newly free time learning a language or growing a garden.
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".
As the economy recovered, STEM hiring picked up substantially and people with a masters degree were quite hirable.
https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/science-technology-engine...
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
https://etf.wi.gov/publications/et2166/download?inline=
> 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.
(note the date when domestic partnerships established would benefit from the benefits that spouses traditionally got - https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/40 )
It is a zero sum problem, unfortunately.
That was the opposite of my experience, actually.
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.
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.
I've spent plenty of time tilting at windmills. But there are limits to how much effort I'll put in for collective good.
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.
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'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.
[1]https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/most-expensiv...
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 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.
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. :)
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.
[1] https://livinghistory.as.ucsb.edu/tag/uaw-local-2865/ [2] https://payusmoreucsc.com/history-of-students-attempts-to-en...
(I’m a proud technology union member myself, and we are currently in bargaining.)
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.
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.
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:
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/graduate-student-prot...
The “small group” of striking students they mention led to UC calling in aid from the military and federal police:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kppna/california-police-use...
They also set up lots of barricades and released a fleet of police drones.
It would have made more news (and likely continued longer), if it hadn’t started just before the Covid lockdowns.
Anyway, this all happened after the students protested in front of UAW meetings, and were ignored by their union reps.
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.
Everybody grew up with richer and "better" schools and areas, I would have hated being sent out to those.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
Is this adjusting for cost of living?
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)
Maybe this will have the effect of sending more federal grant money to lower cost of living research institutes. That could be an interesting outcome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Show me someone who thinks a living wage and a boss who can’t overwork you anymore are cosmetic and I’ll show you a university administrator.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> > 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.
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.
Toxic: That won't be fixed until they start firing tenured profs for abusing grad students. Nothing else will do.
Broken: There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.
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.
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.
It’s a system that we might want to try here in the USA, but it doesn’t coddle 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.
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.
Its a pretty complex & shifting situation historically. In fact, its illegal to have a grad student union in some states for public universities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
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
https://csstipendrankings.org/
Many universities are not paying a living wage for the area they are located in.
It's a popular number to use, but is often quite an overestimate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So perhaps it is a good thing unions are allowed to over-promise, it balances the power structure, if only a tiny bit.
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.
They are not perfect - far from it - but to think of everyone who fought to establish them and keeps them running to this day… it’s inspiring.
Good for Stanford.
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.
I'm not sure that's the right choice.
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.
> 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.
Is this normal in the USA? In New Zealand postdocs are employees (usually on short or medium term contracts that align with funding grants).
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...
But not all students are employees. https://web.archive.org/web/20180307211117/https://www.nlrb....
Just open it in a private window. Twitter is no longer blocking logged-out views (at least for now).
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.
not blocked: https://twitter.com/StanfordGWU/status/1677048098080845824
blocked: https://twitter.com/StanfordGWU/
Wacky.
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?
It's interesting to me that the Shenzhen logo seems to be modeled on the Stanford logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University https://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.
Undergrads pay for their education mostly
The person you vote for can win, sure, and you can win if your preference is the majority, but the group can't win or lose.
i.e. this title doesn't make any sense - what did they actually vote for?
This may seem like a tongue-in-cheek response, but I believe addressing this question in good faith will lead you to the answers you seek.
I agree with the sibling comment that the title is poorly worded.