Rather than look at it as "I don't care enough to vote" I tend to look at it as "unwilling or unable to vote" although hopefully the number of people "unable" would be small.
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]
Good for them, but the cynic in me is telling me that tuition will continue to significantly outpace inflation, in part bc of this. $100K/year to attend a prestigious college isn’t far off imo.
Many grad students are employed as research assistants in labs. It's federal agencies like NIH and NSF that are supporting those labs with grants.
For grad students who are serving as teaching assistants or as full "instructors of record," they are still being paid less and given substantially fewer benefits than tenured faculty.
There are many factors driving the increase in the "list price" for undergraduate tuition — I doubt that the take-home pay of grad students and their health insurance are significant factors.
We have a student union in Slovenia. It's fully self-funded from a tax on student work.
One of the things the union provides is the ability for students to get "student jobs" that are more geared towards entry-level work and easier to get. Almost everyone has these jobs at least over the summer, often also part-time during the school year.
Another big thing the union provides are food coupons so you can get discounted meals at participating restaurants. Fully funded from said tax on student work.
Every once in a while the union organizes protests against tuitions and such.
The biggest outcome is that people choose to be students, at least on paper, until 26 when you age out of benefits. Because the tuition is free and the benefits are amazing.
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.
> SARA WEXLER
Will the union make any demands in the contract or bargaining process about USC and its relationship to the Los Angeles community at large — concerning rents, inequality, gentrification?
> YONI HIRSHBERG
I think those types of things fall outside of the scope of labor negotiations. So the contract will include things like our wages and working conditions.
I think this is the way forward if we want widespread unionization. Unions have to focus on making the lives of their members better. Wading into culture wars, even if you think you are doing good, will in the long run cause division and weaken the unionization effort.
Yes, also I don't see what a grad student union and an university can do about inequality in the LA community at large. It would be a recipe for failure.
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.
> The strengthening of social ties within the union gives you a pulpit from which to influence
Hmm. If a pastor uses the church pulpit to convince their flock to vote a specific way, that's okay from your definition. If a well-loved ceo at a company spontaneously meets with the employees in the breakroom, over their free coffee and free lunch, and decides to use that pulpit to convince people to act a certain way politically, that's okay from your definition.
There is a saying: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" [1] which is "used to say that one person or situation should be treated the same way that another person or situation is treated".
> If a pastor uses the church pulpit to convince their flock to vote a specific way, that's okay from your definition.
I don't think they're saying that, just that it does occur. It's actually illegal for churches to convince their flock to vote a certain way specifically[0], since they get such sweeping tax benefits.
Can you point to where GP made a value judgment about what is and isn’t “okay” in their post? It kind of seems like you’re arguing against something that nobody said.
That comment was specifically to say how a student's union can effect societal changes unrelated to the purpose of the union, by the leaders of the union using their bully pulpit to coerce people to act. That is exactly what they said. They even gave the example of how to effectively use the bully pulpit: the corrupt Jimmy Hoffa, who incidentally was convicted for jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud.
Giving an example of how a thing can be observed to work in the world is not the same as saying a thing is inherently morally good or bad.
If I were to say “The catholic church has had a lot of influence over architecture decisions”, would your response be “I see that you hate Frank Lloyd Wright”?
Does describing how a plane flies mean that I like fighter jets?
Nobody ever said that the description of a thing implies any morality. Are you actually engaging in honest conversation here?
The GP clearly wrote how a student's union can affect the members actions, outside of the union's purpose, through using the bully pulpit. That is literally what they wrote. By the same logic as what they wrote in their comment, the bully pulpit can be used to push different beliefs. I've answered your question about that twice now. Please don't try to engage me in red herring arguments.
What did you mean by the word “okay” if you didn’t mean to imply that the author had any opinion on that process?
I’ve now asked you in multiple ways what you meant by that phrasing!
edit: I’ll make it even easier, since you don’t seem to want to answer that question. How about this:
What was the topic of these sentences?
> If a pastor uses the church pulpit to convince their flock to vote a specific way, that's okay from your definition. If a well-loved ceo at a company spontaneously meets with the employees in the breakroom, over their free coffee and free lunch, and decides to use that pulpit to convince people to act a certain way politically, that's okay from your definition.
There is a saying: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander"
To clarify what I mean by “what is the topic”, I mean
1. What was your purpose in bringing up your example of a well-loved ceo when nobody else had? What were you trying to illustrate?
2. If you weren’t commenting on somebody’s perceived moral statement, did you share the goose and gander quote as a completely unrelated fun fact for everyone to enjoy?
Was it some sort of fun little moral lesson unrelated to the rest of the content of your post, like the text on a popsicle stick or Snapple cap?
> What did you mean by the word “okay” if you didn’t mean to imply that the author had any opinion on that process?
> I’ve now asked you in multiple ways what you meant by that phrasing!
You might want to use far fewer words, then, if you want to know the meaning of a word. Using paragraphs to ask that question has a very high noise to signal ratio.
okay [1]
also OK also O.K. also ok
Word forms: okays, okaying, okayed
1. ADJECTIVE
If you say that something is okay, you find it satisfactory or acceptable.
OK [2]
exclamation (also okay)
OK exclamation (AGREEING)
used to show that you agree with something or agree to do something:
> 1. What was your purpose in bringing up your example of a well-loved ceo when nobody else had? What were you trying to illustrate?
> 2. If you weren’t commenting on somebody’s perceived moral statement, did you share the goose and gander quote as a completely unrelated fun fact for everyone to enjoy?
Those are for the exact same reason. The first shows a parallel to what the GP posted but in an unexpected context, which is mentined to show the unintended consequences when using the bully pulpit of a union in a context that it shouldn't be used. The actual article mentioned that even the union organizer in the story denounced this. The second showed the long-held societal wisdom on this, that when one pushes their beliefs using a questionable method in one context, that same method will be applied by others to additional areas in unexpected ways. There was a link that contained an explanation for that.
As I wrote, "By the same logic as what they wrote in their comment, the bully pulpit can be used to push different beliefs."
> Was it some sort of fun little moral lesson unrelated to the rest of the content of your post, like the text on a popsicle stick or Snapple cap?
And, it is now clear that you are intentionally not engaging in honest conversation.
Buddy you saw someone mention organizing in a way that you didn’t like, invented a scenario in which the very mention of that is equivalent to advocating against a way of organizing that you do like, and tried to start an argument against a shadow opponent.
Congrats on not answering my question at all, in any fashion. Condolences on not baiting anyone into a pointless argument about CEOs or whatever, it was just too far a stretch to get from your outrage to anything remotely on-topic here.
Just to be clear I was describing what happens, not implying a moral judgement either way.
Religious leaders are in no way barred from discussing politics from the pulpit by the way. They are prohibited from speaking for or against individual candidates by name or risk losing their non-profit status but they can definitely advocate for their positions on certain issues and leave it to their members to conclude which candidates that most aligns with (and given how peer pressure / communication works, it’s not a secret which candidate that turns out to be). Anything else would be a 1A problem. And religious leaders can ALSO express personal views about what their preferred candidate happens to be outside of the pulpit. And Trump made it even less problematic for politically active religious leaders [1].
CEOs also definitely advocate for/against policy within the company. “I think legislation X is bad for us / our industry”. Some CEOs even cross the line and try to retaliate against/incentivize for your vote (it’s hard with anonymity in general but much easier with mail in ballots).
None of this must apply to unions which regularly endorse candidates by name and have so for a very very long time.
So regardless of good or not, all this does happen. I haven’t thought well enough about what kind of electioneering regulations is good or bad, but generally I’d do some research on countries that I view as having a healthier democratic process (Canada, France, Germany, Norway, etc) to figure out how they deal with the various issues.
Anyway, I don’t know what you’ve taken away from my post or why it triggered you so. What could I clarify there to help you interpret the post in the spirit that it was intended to?
At least in my country (Australia), this is way more an issue with student unionism than unionism generally. Both because student unions are even more powerless to affect widespread change, and because they tend to focus on it more than traditional unions.
I say this as someone that is quite pro-union, and someone that was quite involved in my student union when I was studying. We were one of if not the most powerful student unions in the country, with tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue. It was very much a launchpad for those aspiring to be career politicians. “Stupol” is a legitimate entrypoint into “real” politics and a large percentage of our elected representatives cut their politician teeth being involved in their student union. Thus, you end up with a bunch of naive wannabe politicians that quite easily get lost in showboating and “the bigger picture”, often taking away time, attention, or resources that could be put toward more directly helping the members.
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.
There’s an interesting history between unions and immigration on Wikipedia. Here is my unsolicited summary. Initially unions were opposed, since unions work by controlling labor supply. Then they were in favor, since many union members were in favor.
On one hand, given the inherent scarcity of "good schools" any concession will likely be paid for by students at large in the form of tuition increases.
On the other hand, tuition increases were going to happen anyway, so you might as well get something from it.
In any case, it's good to see people standing up for themselves. Your move, USC.
> On one hand, given the inherent scarcity of "good schools" any concession will likely be paid for by students at large in the form of tuition increases.
> On the other hand, tuition increases were going to happen anyway, so you might as well get something from it.
Your second point completely nullifies your first point. If this causes tuition to rise to the same level it was going to reach anyway, students are paying nothing for this.
no, because we are talking about two different parties. the people in the union do not pay tuition, so it is irrelevant to them. most graduate students who are working do it in lieu of paying tuition
the entire dispute, hence the article, is that they are not paid enough and the value of their work is basically dwindling in comparison to the tuition that they would otherwise be paying and comparable work. there are two options - either lower their tuition, which is not helpful since they do not pay, or raise their wages. USC did not comply, and thus they had to unionize and force the issue.
the other pro-union argument is that those who are working who are not graduate students will benefit as the wage that's being paid will also need to reflect the non-union wage since there are non-graduate students, like lab techs, who often do the exact same job as someone in grad school in a lab.
Really they could just offer a couple fewer graduate assistantships and/or think twice before bloating the administrative payroll with another deputy VP of whatever position making $120kpa.
The University of Calgary has a graduate student union, and it worked pretty well. Our minimum salary for teaching assistantship was pretty good. Health benefits were good. We were told quite clearly by the union that if we were asked to work more, to just tell them, and they would take care of it.
So the department never gave us more work than the maximum allowed by the agreement between the union and the university - in fact, usually they put 10-15 hours of leeway every semester, because they didn't want to be in breach of the contract.
Could those who wanted to work longer for additional pay do so, when asked, or was that restricted by the agreement? I don't have experience with these to know how they work.
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.
I don't really understand what leverage they have here. The school controls the issuance of their degree and if they strike they will just be delaying that. A strike would be a headache for the university, but from what I understand about grad school, pissing off the professor you work for is a near death sentence.
Good to see them pushing back but I guess I don't see the system as fixable without a complete overhaul.
The schools can't operate without grad students. The entire system is built on the assumption they teach and run labs. Accreditation requires hours of class per term. Striking for two weeks would cancel an entire term of undergrad. The damage to the school's budget and reputation would be enormous, while delaying their grad degrees a term.
Replace “degree” with “paycheck” and its a statement about how unions and corporations work in general. Yet unions solidarity still holds a lot of sway.
They would be pissing off the admins who have to answer phone calls from angry donor parents about cancelled classes, but the professors that count, their PIs/supervisors probably back them 100%. If they get themselves paid by the Uni, that's less topping up that the lab head might feel obligated to do to make it possible for them to complete dissertation research that benefits the lab.
I don't think I understood how poor graduate student wages were until years after I was employed as one.
I had worked at a natural foods co-op for a few years between undergrad and grad school, and although my marketing role paid more than some floor jobs, I was blown away when I started as a teaching assistant and made essentially the same wage. I could make the same money grading papers as I had in the real world? No way! Then I entered the private sector again where my starting wage was twice what I made in academia. And I thought I was rich. Until a few years later when I was making multiples of my former hourly rate.
Lots of folks in these roles have no idea what their time is worth. I kick myself for being so naïve at the time.
Yea, me too. Slaved away in academia for peanuts for 6 years. Then the first job I was offered outside academia paid 8x what I was making and 3x of of the best academic positions I was being offered at the time. Never looked back.
I was doing manual labour starting at 4 am on the weekends to make ends meet during my PhD fellowship. I'd invent creative reasons for one off consulting type projects to random faculty in the department to try and get a couple hours of casual pay because that would make the difference in bills. Seems ridiculous in hindsight now that I'm making every level pay and I'm not in a particularly lucrative field.
Academic research productivity per dollar is greatly boosted by low wages for the people who actually do the work.
Academic labs are basically indenture shops that universities and the government use to avoid paying the market price for labor. And of course the greatest profits accrue to commercial companies that apply the work that was paid for by the government and performed by underpaid grad students.
Grad school may be interesting and even fun, but it can also have very high opportunity cost, making it something of a sucker's game for many, at least financially.
The only thing worse would be trying to stay in academia and being trapped in a purgatory of postdoc and adjunct positions, never making it to the top of the pyramid scheme.
The terrible employment conditions put me off post-grad. I was considered a rising star in my field and published in undergrad. I had offers of PhD places.
But I just looked at the career path and thought "I don't want to be poor long into my 40s in the vague hope I will eventually be able to get a job with actual pay and have nice things".
People act like there is a nobility to this. But there isn't. It's just a way of reserving certain professions for people with wealthy parents. And it means instead of having the most motivated, the brightest etc, you just get well-off kids who can't be bothered to make the jump to other careers. Not that I am bitter... :)
You see something similar in Medicine here in the UK: terrible pay and crazy hours for the first 10 years, then you get a pay-off. That's great if mum and dad will cover your rent until you're ~34, but otherwise you can kiss goodbye to being a doctor and having a family.
I think this assumes a singular templated track to get a PhD. In my current and last job, most of the PhDs got their degree while working in industry. It doesn’t require being from a wealthy family, but it does sometimes require thinking differently.
That's what grad programs need, a healthy dose of bureaucracy!
One of my first thoughts was about how 'tenure' works. I once had a horrible professor that provided next to zero value for his classes. (He would literally just sit at the head of the class and repeat "Read your books! What you need is in there!" With nothing else added, ever.) Yet he remained on the payroll, thanks to his tenure.
I fear a union will bring similar inefficiencies here.
The reason isn't tenure. The reason is that research universities value research much more highly than teaching. This is evident in faculty hiring practices, even the hiring of junior professors who don't yet have tenure. And this is also why underpaid graduate students and non-tenure-track postdocs are doing a lot of the teaching work at universities.
75 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] thread> Total Ballots Counted:1721
> Votes for Labor Union:1599
> Votes Against:122
93% for, with 60% turnout. Wow!
https://www.nlrb.gov/case/31-RC-308858
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...
For grad students who are serving as teaching assistants or as full "instructors of record," they are still being paid less and given substantially fewer benefits than tenured faculty.
There are many factors driving the increase in the "list price" for undergraduate tuition — I doubt that the take-home pay of grad students and their health insurance are significant factors.
One of the things the union provides is the ability for students to get "student jobs" that are more geared towards entry-level work and easier to get. Almost everyone has these jobs at least over the summer, often also part-time during the school year.
Another big thing the union provides are food coupons so you can get discounted meals at participating restaurants. Fully funded from said tax on student work.
Every once in a while the union organizes protests against tuitions and such.
The biggest outcome is that people choose to be students, at least on paper, until 26 when you age out of benefits. Because the tuition is free and the benefits are amazing.
https://www.studentska-org.si/predstavitev/english/
> YONI HIRSHBERG I think those types of things fall outside of the scope of labor negotiations. So the contract will include things like our wages and working conditions.
I think this is the way forward if we want widespread unionization. Unions have to focus on making the lives of their members better. Wading into culture wars, even if you think you are doing good, will in the long run cause division and weaken the unionization effort.
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.
Hmm. If a pastor uses the church pulpit to convince their flock to vote a specific way, that's okay from your definition. If a well-loved ceo at a company spontaneously meets with the employees in the breakroom, over their free coffee and free lunch, and decides to use that pulpit to convince people to act a certain way politically, that's okay from your definition.
There is a saying: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" [1] which is "used to say that one person or situation should be treated the same way that another person or situation is treated".
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/what%27s%20good%2...
I don't think they're saying that, just that it does occur. It's actually illegal for churches to convince their flock to vote a certain way specifically[0], since they get such sweeping tax benefits.
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/30/johnson-amendment-el...
Can you point to where GP made a value judgment about what is and isn’t “okay” in their post? It kind of seems like you’re arguing against something that nobody said.
If I were to say “The catholic church has had a lot of influence over architecture decisions”, would your response be “I see that you hate Frank Lloyd Wright”?
Does describing how a plane flies mean that I like fighter jets?
The GP clearly wrote how a student's union can affect the members actions, outside of the union's purpose, through using the bully pulpit. That is literally what they wrote. By the same logic as what they wrote in their comment, the bully pulpit can be used to push different beliefs. I've answered your question about that twice now. Please don't try to engage me in red herring arguments.
I’ve now asked you in multiple ways what you meant by that phrasing!
edit: I’ll make it even easier, since you don’t seem to want to answer that question. How about this:
What was the topic of these sentences?
> If a pastor uses the church pulpit to convince their flock to vote a specific way, that's okay from your definition. If a well-loved ceo at a company spontaneously meets with the employees in the breakroom, over their free coffee and free lunch, and decides to use that pulpit to convince people to act a certain way politically, that's okay from your definition. There is a saying: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander"
To clarify what I mean by “what is the topic”, I mean
1. What was your purpose in bringing up your example of a well-loved ceo when nobody else had? What were you trying to illustrate?
2. If you weren’t commenting on somebody’s perceived moral statement, did you share the goose and gander quote as a completely unrelated fun fact for everyone to enjoy?
Was it some sort of fun little moral lesson unrelated to the rest of the content of your post, like the text on a popsicle stick or Snapple cap?
> I’ve now asked you in multiple ways what you meant by that phrasing!
You might want to use far fewer words, then, if you want to know the meaning of a word. Using paragraphs to ask that question has a very high noise to signal ratio.
> 1. What was your purpose in bringing up your example of a well-loved ceo when nobody else had? What were you trying to illustrate?> 2. If you weren’t commenting on somebody’s perceived moral statement, did you share the goose and gander quote as a completely unrelated fun fact for everyone to enjoy?
Those are for the exact same reason. The first shows a parallel to what the GP posted but in an unexpected context, which is mentined to show the unintended consequences when using the bully pulpit of a union in a context that it shouldn't be used. The actual article mentioned that even the union organizer in the story denounced this. The second showed the long-held societal wisdom on this, that when one pushes their beliefs using a questionable method in one context, that same method will be applied by others to additional areas in unexpected ways. There was a link that contained an explanation for that.
As I wrote, "By the same logic as what they wrote in their comment, the bully pulpit can be used to push different beliefs."
> Was it some sort of fun little moral lesson unrelated to the rest of the content of your post, like the text on a popsicle stick or Snapple cap?
And, it is now clear that you are intentionally not engaging in honest conversation.
[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/okay
[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ok?q=...
Congrats on not answering my question at all, in any fashion. Condolences on not baiting anyone into a pointless argument about CEOs or whatever, it was just too far a stretch to get from your outrage to anything remotely on-topic here.
Religious leaders are in no way barred from discussing politics from the pulpit by the way. They are prohibited from speaking for or against individual candidates by name or risk losing their non-profit status but they can definitely advocate for their positions on certain issues and leave it to their members to conclude which candidates that most aligns with (and given how peer pressure / communication works, it’s not a secret which candidate that turns out to be). Anything else would be a 1A problem. And religious leaders can ALSO express personal views about what their preferred candidate happens to be outside of the pulpit. And Trump made it even less problematic for politically active religious leaders [1].
CEOs also definitely advocate for/against policy within the company. “I think legislation X is bad for us / our industry”. Some CEOs even cross the line and try to retaliate against/incentivize for your vote (it’s hard with anonymity in general but much easier with mail in ballots).
None of this must apply to unions which regularly endorse candidates by name and have so for a very very long time.
So regardless of good or not, all this does happen. I haven’t thought well enough about what kind of electioneering regulations is good or bad, but generally I’d do some research on countries that I view as having a healthier democratic process (Canada, France, Germany, Norway, etc) to figure out how they deal with the various issues.
Anyway, I don’t know what you’ve taken away from my post or why it triggered you so. What could I clarify there to help you interpret the post in the spirit that it was intended to?
[1] https://www.nonprofitissues.com/to-the-point/can-pastor-disc...
I say this as someone that is quite pro-union, and someone that was quite involved in my student union when I was studying. We were one of if not the most powerful student unions in the country, with tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue. It was very much a launchpad for those aspiring to be career politicians. “Stupol” is a legitimate entrypoint into “real” politics and a large percentage of our elected representatives cut their politician teeth being involved in their student union. Thus, you end up with a bunch of naive wannabe politicians that quite easily get lost in showboating and “the bigger picture”, often taking away time, attention, or resources that could be put toward more directly helping the members.
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.
I don’t know if it was union members in favor of immigration or union leadership in favor of immigration.
On the other hand, tuition increases were going to happen anyway, so you might as well get something from it.
In any case, it's good to see people standing up for themselves. Your move, USC.
> On the other hand, tuition increases were going to happen anyway, so you might as well get something from it.
Your second point completely nullifies your first point. If this causes tuition to rise to the same level it was going to reach anyway, students are paying nothing for this.
the entire dispute, hence the article, is that they are not paid enough and the value of their work is basically dwindling in comparison to the tuition that they would otherwise be paying and comparable work. there are two options - either lower their tuition, which is not helpful since they do not pay, or raise their wages. USC did not comply, and thus they had to unionize and force the issue.
the other pro-union argument is that those who are working who are not graduate students will benefit as the wage that's being paid will also need to reflect the non-union wage since there are non-graduate students, like lab techs, who often do the exact same job as someone in grad school in a lab.
So what? Either tuition hits the same level that it would have anyway, or it doesn't.
The first possibility makes your first sentence meaningless. The second one makes your second sentence meaningless.
So the department never gave us more work than the maximum allowed by the agreement between the union and the university - in fact, usually they put 10-15 hours of leeway every semester, because they didn't want to be in breach of the contract.
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).
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.
Good to see them pushing back but I guess I don't see the system as fixable without a complete overhaul.
Their leverage is significant.
That's an interesting point, but can you provide a source of that? (Just curious as a fellow graduate student)
I had worked at a natural foods co-op for a few years between undergrad and grad school, and although my marketing role paid more than some floor jobs, I was blown away when I started as a teaching assistant and made essentially the same wage. I could make the same money grading papers as I had in the real world? No way! Then I entered the private sector again where my starting wage was twice what I made in academia. And I thought I was rich. Until a few years later when I was making multiples of my former hourly rate.
Lots of folks in these roles have no idea what their time is worth. I kick myself for being so naïve at the time.
Academic labs are basically indenture shops that universities and the government use to avoid paying the market price for labor. And of course the greatest profits accrue to commercial companies that apply the work that was paid for by the government and performed by underpaid grad students.
Grad school may be interesting and even fun, but it can also have very high opportunity cost, making it something of a sucker's game for many, at least financially.
The only thing worse would be trying to stay in academia and being trapped in a purgatory of postdoc and adjunct positions, never making it to the top of the pyramid scheme.
But I just looked at the career path and thought "I don't want to be poor long into my 40s in the vague hope I will eventually be able to get a job with actual pay and have nice things".
People act like there is a nobility to this. But there isn't. It's just a way of reserving certain professions for people with wealthy parents. And it means instead of having the most motivated, the brightest etc, you just get well-off kids who can't be bothered to make the jump to other careers. Not that I am bitter... :)
You see something similar in Medicine here in the UK: terrible pay and crazy hours for the first 10 years, then you get a pay-off. That's great if mum and dad will cover your rent until you're ~34, but otherwise you can kiss goodbye to being a doctor and having a family.
One of my first thoughts was about how 'tenure' works. I once had a horrible professor that provided next to zero value for his classes. (He would literally just sit at the head of the class and repeat "Read your books! What you need is in there!" With nothing else added, ever.) Yet he remained on the payroll, thanks to his tenure.
I fear a union will bring similar inefficiencies here.