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Comment by seanccox | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that the author describes an alienation from work that sounds exceedingly Marxist and appears to be the result of failed bargaining power. This isn't an article about the pressures of academia, but about how those pressures mount when universities wield disproportionate power over graduate students' unions, which reflects the overall defeat of unions in the US. It will be interesting to see how long and how inhumanely elite, highly qualified professionals will allow themselves to be treated before there is a collective response.

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The lack of bargaining power in academia exists in part because of the protracted period required to demonstrate productivity. A grad student or postdoc might have invested 3 years in getting a project working only to find that the PI has changed their minds about authorship (for example), or maybe the original idea was simply wrong. This person will now find it difficult to get a different position, and so stays on for a few more years in the hopes of demonstrating productivity, still at the whim of the PI. A Y-combinator funded startup might have gained it's first millionth customer in a third the time and be getting ready to cash-out with an IPO.

In the vein of your comment about Marxism, maybe PIs should be asked these famous questions: "What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”

I think you also have a problem with gross oversupply. In our industry, you see it in the games programming world. There's just too darned many programmers who think they want to make games, so it doesn't matter how badly they treat the programmers, there's always a line behind anyone who leaves.

It's worse in the sciences, though; a games programmer can go get a different programming job. A slight tweak to the career goals and you go from a realm of gross oversupply to a realm of significant undersupply. What does a highly-specialized organic chemist do?

Per some other comments, the source of the oversupply doesn't much matter to the people in the field.

Graduate student unionization has had a troubled past (in the US, the article's author doesn't reference her institution). From my research and what I know at institutions I have worked in, organization has been stymied mostly by a ruling of the National Labor Board that disallows any person receiving "training" who is labeled as a "student" from organizing, hinging on the fact that they are not working a wage job but instead a "fellowship." This distinction can be groan-inducing for academics, but alas.

I don't think this necessarily reflects the "overall defeat of unions in the US", but your philosophical argument does give some food for thought.

For more information, Wikipedia has a summary history of graduate student organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_unionization

I don't think it has much to do with unionization at all so much as that there is generally an overabundance of students applying to graduate school. Combined with the fact that the NIH/NSF more or less set the wages anyway, there really isn't anywhere for a union to lean. After all, unless you could organize a strike of a significant portion of the graduate student populace in the US, I doubt Congress or the NIH/NSF will take any notice.

Overabundance is definitely an issue, and one can indeed argue that in the biomedical sciences wages are set or guided independent of institution, and therefore similar work could expected from trainees. However, in the humanities (and whenever there's a teaching load involved), anecdotally it seems more ripe for abuse--the work you do in TAing a class may not at all benefit your future career but is just required of you.

That being said, the overabundance itself can also be a need for unionization after a fashion: can organized labor influence the number of new students to reverse the trend? Not to mention the general lack of increases in quality of life: wage levels of graduate students have been flat for decades (don't have a graph to point to, but it's in http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan...).

This is a bizarre comment given that the problem with science is that the funding model is coming from the government (NIH, NSF) and non-profits (ie, 501c3s).

They are wrong because graduate students have never had any relation to the unions or collective power. You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business with insufficient places for all to succeed and dog-eat-dog competition for funding and fellowships.

Regardless of where the money comes from most scientists are like small businesses trying to expand or startups seeking investment. If anything the pursuit of short-term wins gets in the way of free thinking or risky projects.

"You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business"

How is a government funded a non-profit anything like "business"? Its a political process, fundamentally. Politics is also competitive. I think the economics analogy is quite flawed (in th GP's comment).

Business is political. Non-profits are political. That's the connection.

What do you see as the difference here?

The lack of competitive markets on the supply side of research funding.

You might find these interesting discussions of universities as corporations:

"In California, the main universities -- Berkeley and UCLA -- they're essentially Ivy League private universities -- colossal tuition, tens of thousands of dollars, huge endowment. General assumption is they are pretty soon going to be privatized, and the rest of the system will be, which was a very good system -- best public system in the world -- that's probably going to be reduced to technical training or something like that. The privatization, of course, means privatization for the rich [and a] lower level of mostly technical training for the rest. And that is happening across the country." (http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20110406.htm)

"The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on." (http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars)

(As for economics vs. politics, we may wonder if it's ideological to separate them.)

Bizarre how?

Work is work, regardless of whom the work is done for or their income (taxes vs. sales). A worker can be as easily exploited by a state entity as by a corporate one, which is why teachers, firefighters, and police tend to have unions.

Can you elaborate on the 'bizarreness' of my previous comment?

I can't speak for 001sky, but I believe you misunderstand the origin of the problem here.

The means of production in academia is overwhelmingly socialized right now. This top-down decision making is both what causes funding to stagnate (since it's up to bureaucratic and political whims) and causes labor issues to fester (since the number of alternate employers is so low).

With that in mind, a call to unionization seems rather futile. There is no body to bargain with, just bureaucrats and budgets. What leverage would a union have against that?

Fixing loopholes in labor laws is overdue, but why unionize and create yet another special interest group? Workers in all sorts of industries, including tech, are exempted from labor laws. Why not start a broader movement to fix those loopholes?

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