9 ms·

In Historic Move, Harvard Teaching and Research Assistants Vote to Unionize

116 points by Mononokay 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago
It's good to see prestigious universities leading for a change, instead of being one of the most socially conservative institutions in so many ways.
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  Graduate students unionizing is the norm in public universities. As the article points out, it's only recently (2016) that the NLRB ruled that graduate students at private universities are to be considered employees, which opened the door for students to vote whether they wanted to unionize, prior to this they had no legal standing to even consider unionization. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
- kd0amg 9y ago
  Not sure I would say Harvard itself is "leading" this. The university was found to have been interfering with the unionization process.
forapurpose 9y ago
Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They seem like more obvious candidates: Terrible pay, no job security, and a smart, highly educated group of people. They have nothing to lose but their crappy jobs. I'm sure they can see it as well as I can; can someone here shed light on it? I would guess that they didn't historically unionize because they were a much smaller group - a higher proportion of faculty had tenure and thus job security. Also, I wonder if they were better paid before universities in the U.S. became focused on money as their primary mission (income; expenses; patents; spin-offs; research grants; tuition; and of course the whole purpose of education became future salary, not trivial things like knowledge, understanding, thought, and the welfare of civilization).
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  Why doesn't any group of people that work together unionize? Generally, someone has to put in the time and effort to make that happen, and at many employers there is no one willing to make the sacrifice of time, energy and potentially their job to unionize their workplace. Retaliation via firing is a very real threat, look at how Walmart handles a store when they vote to unionize: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wal-mart-stores-workers/wal-mart-to-reopen-five-u-s-stores-at-center-of-union-complaint-idUSKCN0R228820150902 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wal-mart-stores-workers/w...
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They do; traditional higher education unions like AFT have organized wall-to-wall (single faculty unions encompassing adjuncts and tenure-track faculty) in public institutions, while unions centered outside the higher education space (notably, SEIU) have organized adjunct-only unions in a number of private insitutions (the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that private institution full-time faculty are managerial and thus do not have collective bargaining rights in US law, which is why wall-to-wall only happens in public institutions.)
- ddavis 9y ago
  The non-tenure (adjunct) faculty at Duke unionized. There was an effort to unionize graduate students using the same union (SEIU). It failed to win the vote.
rrivers 9y ago
Professor Roberto Unger (Harvard) often talks about the current restlessness of the masses in his political philosophy of the paradigm of Progressive Politics courses. Something that through listening to his lecturers over the last few years I strongly agree with. Mainly that people at this moment in time are yearning for a reimagining of what the human experience is, and the solution is a progressive political campaign reimagining our entire institutions. We see the same restlessness in the national Primary Education teacher strikes. Is it possible that the academics are the beginning of a more substantial wave of worker rights and protections as we enter the new Knowledge Economy? Edited to add website: http://www.robertounger.com/en/ http://www.robertounger.com/en/
- aldoushuxley001 9y ago
  What is the Knowledge Economy anyway? I hear people talk of it every now and then but don't understand what it actually is.
  - cocacola1 9y ago
    According to Wikipedia: > The knowledge economy is the use of knowledge (savoir, savoir-faire, savoir-être) to generate tangible and intangible values[1]. Technology, and in particular, knowledge technology, helps to incorporate part of human knowledge into machines[2]. This knowledge can be used by decision support systems in various fields to generate economic value. Knowledge economy is also possible without technology.[3]
    - staticautomatic 9y ago
      Is it just me or is that pure jibberish?
      - andrewflnr 9y ago
        Nah, I'd say it's at most 30% gibberish. Definitely pretty abstract, though.
      - 9y ago
Bucephalus355 9y ago
After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights. Their reasoning was that this was a form of governmental control over working and the freedom of workers, just like slavery was. Every time they defeated a minimum wage law, or broke a union, they congratulated themselves for standing up for “freedom”. Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War. We are seeing something similar now, with Democrats so focused on the rights of smaller and smaller groups, it’s starting to look like “extreme individual rights” all over again. Will they drift towards conservatism while Republicans do the opposite, cross-pollinating some positions between them on the way?
- okintheory 9y ago
  Isn't this very simplistic? In my (limited) understanding, the North was a Republican stronghold, controlled by manufacturing interests, and without a strong economic interest in maintaining slavery. This meant the abolitionist movement was not opposed by the economic elite. On the other hand, Northern industrialists always had an economic interest in fighting against unions. To say that their anti-union sentiment was an extension of the anti-slavery sentiment seems too generous.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War. Well, no, it's the rationalization. The reason is that even at the time of the civil war, the Republican Party was, as well as an antislavery party, also the party of the powerful northern economic interests, which were industrial capitalists. After slavery was abolished, they only really had one reason left.
- Kalium 9y ago
  > After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights. Among other weird historical quirks, unions were at times used to keep out people who spoke the wrong language or had the wrong color skin. Unions were not always the reliable bastions of progressive politics they are seen as today.
madengr 9y ago
So where the hell does the $46k/year tuition go?
- MrMorden 9y ago
  At Harvard? Real-estate acquisition.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  There are big shots to be paid and investment managers whose children need to eat. They only have a $40B endowment.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Endowment interest is 36% of Harvard's operating budget, while students are 21%: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/harvard_ar_11_12016_final.pdf https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/harvard_ar_11_12...
- supreme_sublime 9y ago
  Administrators and campus niceties. There is a lot of competition between universities to get the best students, raise their academic profile and hopefully a successful/donating alum. In this competition they start trying to differentiate themselves in the market by offering more student services, better buildings, a bigger sports program, etc. Unfortunately with how student loans work, there is no downward pressure on price. These loans are essentially unlimited for the borrower and bear no risk for the universities. So students loan lots of money because they have been told that university is their best bet. Which isn't exactly wrong, I'd say misleading, but that's a different conversation. Students are encouraged (or at least were in the past) to not worry about how much they are borrowing since they'll easily get a job and make enough money after college. Unfortunately this hasn't worked out for some people and makes things difficult for a while for many more.
CryptoPunk 9y ago
I can't imagine this not impacting the impartiality of staff when teaching subjects related to labor unions, like Economics.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Is there any thing you can think of which would not impact your need for impartial staff? Because I think your comment is a "damned any way" viewpoint. If they voted to not unionize, then it could still affect the teaching of subjects related to labor unions. Eg, "Why are a bunch of anti-union people teaching business courses? Aren't they just going to train the next generation of managers to hate unions?" If they never considered unionization, then that too might be seen as a bias, either directly by the TAs/RAs, or a selection bias by Harvard in how they pick their TAs/RAs.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members. They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population. For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
    - hekfu 9y ago
      > Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members. > They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population. > For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict. Imagine this: the labourers instead form a company, each holding a number of shares, taking what you call market wages for whatever they are doing. They create a new position inside this company, let's call it union ltd., to negotiate a contract between the university and union ltd. Union for the services the members provide. Any surplus the union negotiates is distributed via dividends on the shares. Is this now differen to what you describe? Or different to any outsourcing company? Unions are nothing more, nothing less than a negotiation,i.e. business tactic, just like we use outsourcing as a business tactic

116 points by Mononokay 9y ago

It's good to see prestigious universities leading for a change, instead of being one of the most socially conservative institutions in so many ways.

alexbeloi 9y ago
Graduate students unionizing is the norm in public universities. As the article points out, it's only recently (2016) that the NLRB ruled that graduate students at private universities are to be considered employees, which opened the door for students to vote whether they wanted to unionize, prior to this they had no legal standing to even consider unionization. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
kd0amg 9y ago
Not sure I would say Harvard itself is "leading" this. The university was found to have been interfering with the unionization process.

forapurpose 9y ago

Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They seem like more obvious candidates: Terrible pay, no job security, and a smart, highly educated group of people. They have nothing to lose but their crappy jobs. I'm sure they can see it as well as I can; can someone here shed light on it? I would guess that they didn't historically unionize because they were a much smaller group - a higher proportion of faculty had tenure and thus job security. Also, I wonder if they were better paid before universities in the U.S. became focused on money as their primary mission (income; expenses; patents; spin-offs; research grants; tuition; and of course the whole purpose of education became future salary, not trivial things like knowledge, understanding, thought, and the welfare of civilization).

StudentStuff 9y ago
Why doesn't any group of people that work together unionize? Generally, someone has to put in the time and effort to make that happen, and at many employers there is no one willing to make the sacrifice of time, energy and potentially their job to unionize their workplace. Retaliation via firing is a very real threat, look at how Walmart handles a store when they vote to unionize: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wal-mart-stores-workers/wal-mart-to-reopen-five-u-s-stores-at-center-of-union-complaint-idUSKCN0R228820150902 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wal-mart-stores-workers/w...
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They do; traditional higher education unions like AFT have organized wall-to-wall (single faculty unions encompassing adjuncts and tenure-track faculty) in public institutions, while unions centered outside the higher education space (notably, SEIU) have organized adjunct-only unions in a number of private insitutions (the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that private institution full-time faculty are managerial and thus do not have collective bargaining rights in US law, which is why wall-to-wall only happens in public institutions.)
ddavis 9y ago
The non-tenure (adjunct) faculty at Duke unionized. There was an effort to unionize graduate students using the same union (SEIU). It failed to win the vote.

rrivers 9y ago

Professor Roberto Unger (Harvard) often talks about the current restlessness of the masses in his political philosophy of the paradigm of Progressive Politics courses. Something that through listening to his lecturers over the last few years I strongly agree with. Mainly that people at this moment in time are yearning for a reimagining of what the human experience is, and the solution is a progressive political campaign reimagining our entire institutions. We see the same restlessness in the national Primary Education teacher strikes. Is it possible that the academics are the beginning of a more substantial wave of worker rights and protections as we enter the new Knowledge Economy? Edited to add website: http://www.robertounger.com/en/ http://www.robertounger.com/en/

aldoushuxley001 9y ago
What is the Knowledge Economy anyway? I hear people talk of it every now and then but don't understand what it actually is.
- cocacola1 9y ago
  According to Wikipedia: > The knowledge economy is the use of knowledge (savoir, savoir-faire, savoir-être) to generate tangible and intangible values[1]. Technology, and in particular, knowledge technology, helps to incorporate part of human knowledge into machines[2]. This knowledge can be used by decision support systems in various fields to generate economic value. Knowledge economy is also possible without technology.[3]
  - staticautomatic 9y ago
    Is it just me or is that pure jibberish?
    - andrewflnr 9y ago
      Nah, I'd say it's at most 30% gibberish. Definitely pretty abstract, though.
    - 9y ago

Bucephalus355 9y ago

After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights. Their reasoning was that this was a form of governmental control over working and the freedom of workers, just like slavery was. Every time they defeated a minimum wage law, or broke a union, they congratulated themselves for standing up for “freedom”. Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War. We are seeing something similar now, with Democrats so focused on the rights of smaller and smaller groups, it’s starting to look like “extreme individual rights” all over again. Will they drift towards conservatism while Republicans do the opposite, cross-pollinating some positions between them on the way?

okintheory 9y ago
Isn't this very simplistic? In my (limited) understanding, the North was a Republican stronghold, controlled by manufacturing interests, and without a strong economic interest in maintaining slavery. This meant the abolitionist movement was not opposed by the economic elite. On the other hand, Northern industrialists always had an economic interest in fighting against unions. To say that their anti-union sentiment was an extension of the anti-slavery sentiment seems too generous.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War. Well, no, it's the rationalization. The reason is that even at the time of the civil war, the Republican Party was, as well as an antislavery party, also the party of the powerful northern economic interests, which were industrial capitalists. After slavery was abolished, they only really had one reason left.
Kalium 9y ago
> After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights. Among other weird historical quirks, unions were at times used to keep out people who spoke the wrong language or had the wrong color skin. Unions were not always the reliable bastions of progressive politics they are seen as today.

madengr 9y ago

So where the hell does the $46k/year tuition go?

MrMorden 9y ago
At Harvard? Real-estate acquisition.
Spooky23 9y ago
There are big shots to be paid and investment managers whose children need to eat. They only have a $40B endowment.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Endowment interest is 36% of Harvard's operating budget, while students are 21%: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/harvard_ar_11_12016_final.pdf https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/harvard_ar_11_12...
supreme_sublime 9y ago
Administrators and campus niceties. There is a lot of competition between universities to get the best students, raise their academic profile and hopefully a successful/donating alum. In this competition they start trying to differentiate themselves in the market by offering more student services, better buildings, a bigger sports program, etc. Unfortunately with how student loans work, there is no downward pressure on price. These loans are essentially unlimited for the borrower and bear no risk for the universities. So students loan lots of money because they have been told that university is their best bet. Which isn't exactly wrong, I'd say misleading, but that's a different conversation. Students are encouraged (or at least were in the past) to not worry about how much they are borrowing since they'll easily get a job and make enough money after college. Unfortunately this hasn't worked out for some people and makes things difficult for a while for many more.

CryptoPunk 9y ago

I can't imagine this not impacting the impartiality of staff when teaching subjects related to labor unions, like Economics.

eesmith 9y ago
Is there any thing you can think of which would not impact your need for impartial staff? Because I think your comment is a "damned any way" viewpoint. If they voted to not unionize, then it could still affect the teaching of subjects related to labor unions. Eg, "Why are a bunch of anti-union people teaching business courses? Aren't they just going to train the next generation of managers to hate unions?" If they never considered unionization, then that too might be seen as a bias, either directly by the TAs/RAs, or a selection bias by Harvard in how they pick their TAs/RAs.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members. They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population. For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
  - hekfu 9y ago
    > Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members. > They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population. > For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict. Imagine this: the labourers instead form a company, each holding a number of shares, taking what you call market wages for whatever they are doing. They create a new position inside this company, let's call it union ltd., to negotiate a contract between the university and union ltd. Union for the services the members provide. Any surplus the union negotiates is distributed via dividends on the shares. Is this now differen to what you describe? Or different to any outsourcing company? Unions are nothing more, nothing less than a negotiation,i.e. business tactic, just like we use outsourcing as a business tactic