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University of Chicago Graduate Students Vote to Unionize
- photoJ 9y agoA significant change in how graduate studies may occur.
- epalmer 9y agoWhat?
- politician 9y ago> An e-mail from Executive Vice Provost David Nirenberg on Sunday cautioned that unionization would introduce a “third party” that could interfere with graduate students’ relationships with the University. That, of course, being the point.
- sjg007 9y agoIt's funny that the liberal ivory tower academics in charge don't want unions...... Oh the... I'd say irony but it is really hypocrisy.
- justinpombrio 9y agoThe students and professors tend to be in favor, but they aren't the university. It's the administration that tends to hate the idea. EDIT: speaking from my limited experience with the unionization effort at Brown. My main point is that faculty are not the university.
- HarryHirsch 9y agoWhen they tried to unionize students and postdocs at a previous workplace the most vociferous opponents were the full-time professors, protected not only by their public-sector union, but by tenure as well. They would do such a thing, wouldn't they, it would limit their power.
- justinpombrio 9y agoHuh, I'm not getting that impression from Brown's professors at all. We're working toward unionization as well.
- Cyph0n 9y agoWhy would professors be in favor of a move that would likely make it harder to get the cheap labor needed to churn out publications?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThe university pays for the graduate student salary, not the faculty. Edit: My knowledge of funding comes from a sample size of 1 (wife's cousin doing genetic engineering out of St Louis) so it's possible I've made a mistake extrapolating too widely.
- Cyph0n 9y agoI'm a grad student myself, so I'm speaking from experience. As far as I know, in virtually all US public universities, faculty members have to pay for research assistants from their own grant money. The university I am at helps the faculty by charging less for the student's tuition (out-of-state to in-state). Maybe you are confusing RA funding with TA funding?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 9y agoIsn't it mainly TAs who want unionization? At least in the physical sciences, RAs are indeed paid with grant money.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- newen 9y agoIt depends on the universities. Yeah for most public universities, the grad students are directly funded by the professor's research. In many other universities, grad students are funded through the department, as in they are guaranteed a salary; the salary would come from the professor (or other fellowships the student got themselves) if they a research assistant, and it would come from the university if they are a teaching assistant. They are guaranteed funding because if the student doesn't get research funding, then the department sticks them in a TA position so that they get a salary.
- williamscales 9y agoThe sad truth is that over the last 60 years the academics have been seeing more and more power over the University ripped away from them by middle management. So they aren't really in charge. If you speak with an academic in the US about this they will agree that it's a bad situation for everyone...except the middle managers.
- omegaworks 9y agoMaybe it's time to question your belief that academia is inherently liberal.
- Fomite 9y agoOr perhaps recognize that "left leaning" is not a monolithically held block of universal ideas.
- sjg007 9y agoIn some sense though most academic departments that study labor movements would probably argue that unions are a good thing. So that is why it seems hypocritical.
- Fomite 9y agoYou've now gone from "Something the provost said" to the stance of most faculty in a single department. One of these things is not like the others.
- MisterBastahrd 9y agoThe kind of profs that are the norm at Chicago aren't living off their educational salaries.
- dbingham 9y agoYeah, the administration is not "liberal ivory tower academics". The administration tend to be conservative business folks forever at odds with the university's faculty.
- mesozoic 9y agoThis will end well...
- rflrob 9y agoI went to grad school at a unionized school (UC Berkeley), and was generally fine with the union. I never directly took advantage of the union protections, but it's nice knowing that you won't just be at the mercy of your advisor should something go wrong (though having an advisor you can trust in the first place is obviously preferable). I know people who took advantage of maternity leave, and I felt that the benefits we were provided were a cut above those at Stanford (who only recently got dental/vision coverage).
- s3r3nity 9y agoCurious: did unionization reduce the # of graduate students UC Berkeley was able to allow in? This has been a common criticism I've heard, and would have potential ramifications on the long-term research pipeline if it were true + spread nationally.
- vkou 9y agoGiven the pyramid scheme nature of graduate programs, this may be a positive outcome.
- rflrob 9y agoNot obviously, though most people I knew were in reasonably well funded departments/programs, and at any rate they were unionized well before I got there, so I wasn't around to observe any changes. For what it's worth, I'm not convinced that the research pipeline isn't already overfull. The tenure track shouldn't be the goal of all incoming graduate students, but I think the increasing length of postdoc positions, the massive oversupply of adjunct professors, and historically low rates of grant funding are hints that there's something wrong.
- nharada 9y agoI also attended a unionized school (UMich) and I also appreciated the union. Our union frequently pushed for wage increases and other benefits, and our healthcare was absolutely stellar (basically full and free coverage for most common things, no co-pay even). Obviously not ALL of that can be attributed to the union, but I really appreciated knowing that an organization had my back.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dmitrygr 9y agoA PhD student at UChicago whom I know well told me that they significantly limited who was allowed to vote to make this happen. Not allowed to vote if: * Not currently onsite (field work or pre-grad research elsewhere for a year) * If you were not onsite in the previous year (anyone who did field work last year) * Anyone who took a year break from teaching was not allowed to vote even if returning to teaching this year * Anyone in 1st or 2nd year not allowed to vote (despite most years left to live under this union)
- rflrob 9y agoAny idea what the criteria were? Was it by department? Degree status? Teaching vs fellowship status?
- dmitrygr 9y agoI updated the parent comment
- mathperson 9y agohttp://knowthefacts.uchicago.edu/ http://knowthefacts.uchicago.edu/ eligible voters are "All graduate students in the School of Divinity, School of Social Service Administration, Division of the Social Sciences, Division of the Humanities, Division of the Biological Sciences, and Division of the Physical Sciences who are or were compensated as full-time and regular part-time teaching assistants, research assistants, course assistants, workshop coordinators, writing interns, preceptors, language assistants, instructors, lecturers, lectors, and teaching interns, in at least one quarter of Autumn 2016, Winter 2017, Spring 2017, Summer 2017, or Autumn 2017, and who have not yet attained their degree or otherwise completed their course of study." Some wikipedia resulted in 600 (law)+ 400 ( medschool)+ 3140 (business)+noise term ~5000 grad students. I bet the rest of the gap is just low turnout
- vkou 9y agoThis seems to contradict the criteria in a child post, citing. [1] Is there any citation for your claims? From the cited list, it seems that anyone who got paid on a regular basis by the university over the past two years could vote. [1] http://knowthefacts.uchicago.edu/ http://knowthefacts.uchicago.edu/
- Y_Y 9y agoThis is a fantastic idea. Graduate students have to compete for so little funding (or even just unfunded slots) that the wage and conditions are at a bare minimum. Just a shot at those sweet professor jobs (whether or not they exist) or just adding to the world's knowledge send to be so desirable that people will work ridiculous hours with no benefits for pitiful pay. But why should the grads compete with each other? What's next should be academia uniting to distribute funding internally, rather than stock with the farcical lotteries that are grant proposals.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoNot every project is deserving of funding. Grants provide at least one filter, and at least in my experience have some correlation to merit. There's just not enough money, spreading it out doesn't help. Attaching funding to academic politics sounds like the death of innovation, but that may be an exaggeration.
- Y_Y 9y agoKnowing what projects "deserve" funding before they're funded is a harder problem than any funding body would like to admit. I'm not proposing all available money is divided up equally, in saying that the application should be done in an efficient way by a union of academics.
- YesonID 9y ago~1600 students participated in the vote, but on wikipedia the school has 10k postgrads. How does this work?
- dmitrygr 9y agoThey limited who could vote to mostly those who support the idea (source: a PhD there). I posted details a comment above
- Halladie7 9y agoThis is very interesting. Having been a graduate student who threw off the reins to do basically the same work in industry at 6-7x the compensation with better benefits I support them.
- huac 9y agoThe graduate students at Penn have been trying to unionize for a while (http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/update-grad-students-union-upenn-philly http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/update-grad-students-un...). For the most part, the divide is between engineering students (who are well-funded) and the rest (who are not).
- snomad 9y agoI wonder if this will spark student athletes in major football and basketball programs to follow suit.
- maxerickson 9y agoThere are already a fair number of graduate student unions so probably not.
- sjg007 9y agoThey definitely should.
- sgillen 9y agoThis would be a long time coming. In my experience athletes at big programs are even more vulnerable and more exploited than graduate students. It's a similar situation, but there are even less professional jobs, less alternatives after graduation, and a n increased risk for injury.
- chris_7 9y agoDo they get to take advantage of labor laws protecting organizing since they're not actually, like, employed? Obviously the minimum wage doesn't apply to them... If they don't have the protection, doing that could jeopardize any chance they have of going to the NFL (not that most of them make it anyways).
- cfqycwz 9y agoStudent athletes' biggest protection from retaliation is probably their incredible power over the institution and high level of visibility, as demonstrated by the actions of the Mizzou players during #concernedstudent1950. Football players, at least in D1, have also been determined to at least have some of the rights to concerted action protected under the NLRA: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/02/nlrb-general-counsel-says-private-college-football-players-are-employees https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/02/nlrb-general-... Of course, while that does protect them from their current employer (the school), I don't think it can protect them against the reluctance of a potential future employer (like the NFL).
- aresant 9y agoIn higher ED this seems like a long time coming. Grad students essentially work as slaves for the Uni's & professors with triple-duty in lab time for professor + teaching + self-research. Their reward comes in notoriety & bi-lines on research that helps them become professors in their own right in higher ed. The cost is minimized rights to IP they've been crucial in inventing, outrageously low wages, and an average of $100k (1) in debt. The brutality is sold as a right of passage, but the reality is the incentives are completely out of whack - uni's have an inverse incentive to admit Phd / grad students to benefit from the wage-slave / revenue generating aspect. And it shows in the data - there are now a "glut" of PhD's that are far outpacing the very limited # of academic positions. The system needs fixing and if unionization exerts some pressure on correcting the macro problem I am all for it. (1) https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/25/how-much-outstanding-loan-debt-is-from-grad-students-more-than-you-think https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/25/how-much-out... (2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2016/10/academic-job-market-tottering-nobodys-telling-graduate-students/ https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2016/10/academic-job-market-...
- tiki12revolt 9y ago> there are now a "glut" of PhD's that are far outpacing the very limited # of academic positions. Professors have very little incentive to practice academic `birth control`.
- Nomentatus 9y agoThey have a strong perverse incentive to glut the PhD market since their control of grads then becomes nearly absolute - the graduate students' futures depend on their profs letters of recommendation. Not just wage slavery but "Weinberg benefits" and "pump and dump" (steal the graduate students ideas and then kill their careers and publish those ideas) results. One helluvan incentive.
- mattmanser 9y agoWith such a power disparity, I wonder how long before the stories of professors sexually abusing their positions start coming out. The situation sounds like a breeding ground for that sort of exploitation.
- djsumdog 9y agoI'm excited about this. I had the advantage of working full-time while in grad school, and my company paid for most of it, but I missed out on being a TA and getting classroom experience. I watched a lot of fellow grad students struggle, constantly worrying about grants and funding. Some just took loans, others rushing so they could get through before their fellowships ended. Meanwhile you watch new buildings, dorms and student centers go up as undergrad tuition goes up. Most professors I know who are my age are all adjunct or part time, but it's their full time gig. Adjuncts positions were meant for professionals in the field who wanted to teach a class or two. The position is really being abused to keep from paying hard working professors a full-time wage and keeping them from a tenure track. So where the hell is all the money going. Yes there are cuts, but we still see new buildings and programs. I realize these are different budgets a lot of times, but it's still getting really ridiculous. If universities want to do something real, they need to stop worrying about unions and start tackling the student debt situation. They draw students deeper into debt than they've ever been in history to fund their institutions. You can no longer work a part time job and pay for many state schools. And what if those kids graduate and decide they really hate engineering or business or whatever they got. Now they feel like slaves, working jobs they hate to pay off that debt. We desperately need student debt forgiveness. It has to happen. The bubble needs to burst, the system needs to collapse and schools need to scrap and rebuild programs that are affordable, that work and that are significantly better and different than their shitty for profit counterparts, which they're becoming more like everyday.
- sjg007 9y agoAdministration is like a giant vacuum.
- interloper13 9y agoSeveral things to note in this issue. 1. Regarding huge number of grads and few people voting - wiki and other aggregate sources of info will only tell you the total number of students listed as "enrolled" at the school. Not all of them taught in the previous five quarters. That actually reduces the number of grads eligible to vote drastically. 2. Regarding the comments linking union to money. It is by no means guaranteed that a union can increase the salaries paid to grad students. And in fact most grad students (at least at the PhD level) survive off the stipend not the TA/RA salary. As far as I understand the union has no bearing in the stipend amount. There is also the thing that UChicago is cash strapped. It doesn't have the liquid assets to increase anyone's salaries. (Look up the aggressive campaign to sell UChicago owned buildings in HP if you are curios). 3. A union, as an organization of people, by definition caters to the average contributor. In a factory where the workers provide similar enough service that 'an average' is still a meaningful concept, a union can do some good. In my opinion, in a union of all grad students across all departments, 'average demand' is meaningless. Each department can't even agree internally on what their students need, so I'm not sure how a union will find common ground among all the departments. On the one hand limiting the number of hours in a work day sounds good, no? But ask a science grad - they will likely complain that they no longer have time to finish their experiment in time. Giving students a choice in which class they want to TA sounds good, no? But ask a student in humanities - they will tell you that seventeen of them apply for the same spot that only one person can have so they would prefer assigned positions not chosen ones. Etc, etc, etc.
- mathperson 9y agoI'm not sure the uchicago sell off is because they are cash strapped. probably because uchicago feels like it no longer has to ensure that hyde park experiences urban decay (aka why they bought the buildings) and to shift those funds it into something with a better rate of return.
- mathperson 9y ago-no longer has to ensure hyde park DOESNT experience urban decay
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rosstex 9y agoPrinceton did this last year as well.
- RickJWag 9y agoSeems unlikely to drive the cost of education lower. The value of a degree will continue to lose ground against the cost. This is not good.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThis is a direct consequence of rising enrollment rates in college. A degree is a largely a positional good - it only helps your employment prospects by making the limited number of open positions more likely to be filled by you rather than someone without a degree. In other words, the marginal extra law degree results in nearer to zero additional employed lawyers, rather than one.
- photoJ 9y agoOf the 2,457 students in the bargaining unit, 1,103 students voted in favor, 479 students voted against, two ballots could not be counted and 873 did not vote.
- gravypod 9y agoWhy do a group of people need permission to start a union? Can a group of people unionize without permission of their employer? Does the employer need to sign a form or something? I thought unions were just groups of people who bargained with collective power. Why don't all researchers at these universities just use their abilities as leverage? Most people in universities are hired because they're one of a few thousand people in the world who are up to speed on a specific topic. That makes them very difficult to replace, one would think.
- cfqycwz 9y agoUnder US law, the only way to gain recognition as the bargaining representative of a unit of employees—and the only way an employer is legally allowed to recognize you as the sole bargaining agent—is by demonstrating that you have the support of a majority of the bargaining unit, usually through a union certification election. I don't think there's anything legally preventing a subset of employees from banding together and withholding work until just that subset gets what they want, if that's what you're asking. It's just not a terribly effective tactic, and obviously doesn't leave the benefits in place for future employees the way that a NLRB-sanctioned collective bargaining agreement does.
- bedhead 9y agoAbolish tenure. Problem solved.
- gcb0 9y agoucla grad student anecdote: we have a union. but a few students are not part of it. they do accept benefits for being quiet about work issues or outright siding with the faculty. just to set a level of the workers issue I am talking about, recently they cut in half the salary of a category, to double the number of people. from 3 to 6. while each teaches a class in full, to 20+ undergrads each. pay is now tuition plus enough to be 2 grand a year above CA poverty line.
- losteverything 9y agoGrad students aren't grad students forever, right? So it must be darn hard to have union membership turn over. Grads today in the union will leave in a few years and not stay decades. Unions i know work when lives in the same job are represented. And contracts last 4-6 yrs. Not sure i see a chance for long term benefit.
- santaclaus 9y agoUniversity of Chicago is private, right? So this falls under Federal purview (unionization issues at state schools are under state jurisdiction). With the NLRB in the current administration, I can't imagine a friendly ruling towards the graduate students when the university administration's inevitable appeal boils up.
- earksiinni 9y agoI wonder how many of the responses here are from folks who went through CS/STEM graduate programs and who have no idea what their current/former colleagues in the humanities go through. One person alluded to how privileged a grad student is to have their tuition paid while being afforded the opportunity to become a "domain expert" in their field. Tell that to the average history Ph.D. in the US who takes 7-9 years to complete her degree, spending the prime of her youth to end up working 4/4 course loads as an adjunct in some godforsaken community college with no health insurance. And yet that individual carries with her the collective knowledge of thousands of years of human intellectual endeavor. As for the news from UChicago, I congratulate my former colleagues, and yet I also know that it's not enough. I started a Ph.D. in the humanities at Illinois and left after 2.5 years. Our union was great, but no union is enough. We were fighting to prevent the administration from docking our meager $17k/year pay for frivolous BS reasons, and while I'm grateful for what the union did for us, in another way it was so shortsighted. Why were the stewards of civilization making $17k/year in the first place? Why couldn't we make far, far more, worthy of the years of specialized knowledge that we had developed at great cost? The union could never answer these questions. Actually, most people thought I was crazy for even asking them. We spent all day denouncing capitalism, and yet we were enthralled to the myth of the Protestant work ethic, that compensation is somehow tied to our self-worth. And that misguided albeit well-meaning hypocrisy why I left academia and joined Silicon Valley.
- chasely 9y agoI responded to another comment along this line of thought. I took a relatively common "STEM" view until I joined a fellowship cohort with some students in humanities. Their teaching loads were completely ridiculous as grad students and they seemed to have a nearly abusive relationships with their departments because of it.
- ptero 9y agoI got my PhD a while ago, but I think unionizing is a terrible idea. First, while the hours are long, tuition is usually paid for / waived and we got a small stipend and OK health insurance for 2-4 hours of teaching a week. I graduated with no debt. Much more important though is that most unions make work predictable. Hours, duties, etc. However, most PhD research is highly unpredictable. If I want to set up the test while the conditions are good, I may want to work NOW; hearing that I'm out of hours and need to do it tomorrow is the last thing I need. If I got my test set up (in shared lab) and going great I may want to go as long as I can stand it -- it may be broken tomorrow. At least last 2 years of grad school my #1 desire was to finish and go use my new PhD in real world for real money. If union imposed policies add 1-2 years to the process I would not want them.
- chasely 9y agoI am at a university (Michigan) where the union is primarily for graduate students that teach. I could not tell from the writeup, but it sounds like this is for _all_ graduate students at UChicago. Being in an engineering department, I never had an issue with having to teach a heavy load of classes. But, some of my friends in humanities departments had a teaching load of - 6+ hours of classroom time + discussions + grading long papers - for classes of 50+ students. Being part of the union allowed them to put pressure on their departments that they needed to hire other TAs so that they could focus on their research and not spend additional years writing their dissertation. I don't think being part of a union is going to stop any motivated student from doing their own research. And part of joining the union is to ensure that their members do receive a good stipend and have their health insurance paid for while maintaining a reasonable teaching load.
- ptero 9y agoIt is definitely possible that my worries are overblown. However I did see a lab where researchers would close doors before moving a desk to a new location because they are not supposed to as moving furniture was a union job (and requesting this via official channels takes days instead of minutes). When I saw it first I thought it was a joke and laughed, but the folks working there were serious and asked me to shut up lest I get them in trouble. Maybe this is an edge case, but this still worries me when I hear about unionizing -- formalization of duties is extremely inefficient in most research environments and is often a flip side of unionization. Again, I admit that my fears might be overblown.
- wheaties 9y agoThe sad thing that they will learn which my wife's school learnt was that, as a union employee, you are no longer a student. That is, all the tax breaks, ability to not pay SS, etc. all those fees come right back. In the end, they raised student wages but the take home pay was cut. Then they paid union dues...
- throwawayjava 9y agoThis is either hyperbole or an example of the university punishing unionization, because I know of at least a half dozen unionized universities where grad students do get those benefits.
- Aardwolf 9y agoThe comments here are giving me more questions than answers... I genuinely don't know what it's about. At my university, the work to do (5 years in my case) existed out of studying for exams, sometimes group projects to build something (not something usable outside of a presentation for points), and in the last year a thesis (not at all as publish-worthy as a phd paper). This spanned "bachelor" and "master" but those names were actually retrofitted to an older system. The article and comments talk about labor by students in university. My university was in Europe. Please enlighten me, do students do actual labor in US universities? I'd love to understand what this is about. Thanks!
- mason55 9y agoIn the US graduate students typically do "grunt work" as part of their program. For example, you might be a research assistant, where you help out with your professor's research. Or a teaching assistant, where you help a professor teach a low-level/intro class (things like grading or preparation of class materials). For this you receive a small stipend. The original idea was that a professor takes you under his or her wing to teach you and help you with your research and in exchange you help out the professor with what they are doing. Nowadays graduate students feel like they're just being treated as cheap labor without the professor/university holding up their end of the bargain.
- Aardwolf 9y agoAs far as I understand the terminology, "bachelor" matches "undergrad student" and "master" matches "grad student". Is that right? So this bachelor and master was just combined in one single 5-year program in my case. Research, being teaching assistant, and writing papers was done by those who went for a PhD at my university, that is, after those 5 years, those who chose to do a PhD after receiving your master diploma. Do you think it says something about the quality of the university, when master students were not teaching/writing papers/doing research, but simply doing exams as usual...? (Ok there was the thesis in the last year, but that was really more like a larger final project) Most top universities in the world are indeed not in Europe, but in my country at least is was considered a good one.
- kiliantics 9y agoAwesome news! I hope this rapidly growing network of graduate unions somehow jumps over to infect the tech world. Strong unions in tech could really make big changes in US politics.