9 ms·

There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there

• option 7y ago
  "lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand" - as a former grad student at one of UC's campuses - this is not as simple as you put it. A lot of grad students are international students (like I was) and they simply can't work anywhere else due to their visa restrictions.
  • russellendicott 7y ago
    Sounds a lot like a mild version of indentured servitude. Cheap labor for the university.
• detaro 7y ago
  It probably also has by now spent quite a bit of money on managing this strike (security/campus police (some sources say $300k/day), lawyers, PR, ...)
• gyrgtyn 7y ago
  https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/26/all-the-university-of-california-500000-earners.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/26/all... The $500K Club: Here are the hundreds of U.C. employees who made more than $500,000 last year
  • lisper 7y ago
    They all seem to be medical doctors.
    • gyrgtyn 7y ago
      I think it doesn't include administrative type people? The chancellor makes about that much
      • lisper 7y ago
        It does include them. I saw the chief investment officer mixed in amongst the MDs.
        • WalterBright 7y ago
          Being cheap with your chief investment officer doesn't sound like a good idea. Besides, a proper CIO's pay is tied to getting good investment returns.
          • logifail 7y ago
            > Besides, a proper CIO's pay is tied to getting good investment returns [...] Q: What happens to the typical CIO and his/her package when returns aren't "good" ?
            • WalterBright 7y ago
              Fired.
• dickeytk 7y ago
  Vice seems to indicate that 22k is the minimum salary, not average: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxe45b/graduate-student-strikes-are-spreading-in-california https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxe45b/graduate-student-s...
  • majos 7y ago
    I think you’re right, edited. As far as I can tell they’re using this number as a baseline for wage increases so the rest of the comment should still hold.
• rmwaite 7y ago
  It’s about sending a message.
• wutbrodo 7y ago
  > I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd. Note that I'm not making any _moral or normative claims_ about not striking vs striking vs wildcat striking, nor about the interplay of rights and obligations between individual workers, unions, and employers. I'm speaking purely strategically here, in the same frame as your comment. You're only looking at first-order dynamics here, while second-order ones are often in play. In this case, the 54 students weren't just striking, they were wildcat-striking: striking in defiance of not just the university they work for, but the union that represents them, who had already agreed to a contract with the university. When the union has already agreed to, ratified, and entered into a contract, capitulating to a wildcat strike a couple of years later is a significant departure from even relatively pro-labor norms. Again, from a purely strategic perspective, the costs of this specific incident are potentially a lot less significant than the future costs of the university signaling that they're okay with contracts becoming meaningless if the other party changes their mind in the middle of the term.
  • kova12 7y ago
    Which just underlies the problem with unions: not only they are compulsory institutions that force you into their ranks whether you want it or not, but even those who join them don't get a fair representation and have to strike on their own.
    • unethical_ban 7y ago
      Define "fair representation" And, tell me how not having any union is better for all than an imperfect union.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        > tell me how not having any union is better for all than an imperfect union. Obvious answer: No dues. Not commenting on whether that's a good tradeoff, mind, but it's an answer.
• Balgair 7y ago
  The Sacremento Bee has a database of all the salaries of every state worker, including UCSC professors and admin here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/ https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/ Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR.
  • logifail 7y ago
    > Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR Was that the annual base salary? What was the value of the rest of the package?
    • Balgair 7y ago
      Go ahead and put her name in yourself! :P The data set is fairly informative for it's size and publicity.
      • logifail 7y ago
        > Go ahead and put her name in yourself My question was more or less rhetorical, since institutions don't always rush to put a figure on all the elements of a package. Anecdotal data point: the person at the top of the tree at my old university gets a private 200 year-old house inside campus (so long as they're in post). What's that worth?
• baryphonic 7y ago
  The problem from the university's perspective is that while $13M is a low-ish amount of money (by university standards), the university has no reason to believe it would "put the problem to bed." If the university backs down, the strikers will be able to dictate any terms they want in the future, and any such strikes (i.e. illegal ones) would certainly have many more participants. The disruption to university operations could be severe. And this is why unions exist in the first place and make binding contracts - no one wants to make a deal with another party when the other will arbitrarily decide the deal isn't good anymore and act like fools contrary to the terms of the contract.
  • asdff 7y ago
    Grad students at UCSC didn't arbitrarily think the deal they struck isn't good enough anymore, they never thought it was good enough in the first place. 83% of UCSC grad students felt the minimums outlined in the agreement, which was a UC wide agreement and not between UCSC and the UCSC grad students by the way, were insufficient for the growing rents in Santa Cruz. This 13m number isn't arbitrary. In fact that $1400 per month bump is designed to put UCSC grad students in line with net compensation received by grad students at UC Riverside.
    • overeater 7y ago
      Weren't they the ones who had to vote in the union in the first place? Seems like they should have figured out what they want from the union before giving it the power to negotiate a contract on their behalf.
      • asdff 7y ago
        83% of these grad students voted against this deal that the UAW negotiated on their behalf.
        • overeater 7y ago
          Right, but they voted to give the union the power to negotiate on their behalf without any checks. It seems too late then to change your mind once they have that power. I guess I don't understand how union politics work, but it might make sense to allow a union, but require majority vote for any major decisions.
• SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  The UC System has been defunding their academic positions and putting billions of money into upper management positions for generations. [0] "UAW local 2865, a labor union representing UC student workers and teaching assistants, recently estimated in over two decades about $1 billion dollars have been wasted in upper-level UC administrative costs. UC Berkeley Professor Charles Schwartz, who has conducted extensive research on this subject, estimated that the total cost of UC administrative bloat had been $600 million per year. He has also estimated that UCLA in particular squanders about $54 million per year, the most out of all the UC’s." 0. https://scaleatucla.weebly.com/ucla-senior-management-growth-in-comparison-to-faculty-and-students-1993-2014.html https://scaleatucla.weebly.com/ucla-senior-management-growth...
• late2part 7y ago
  This is not regional in scope. UCSC is part of UC. If the wall breaks here; wages go up everywhere else. UC had to break the union before they got everyone involved. Your calculus disregards the additional carry-on costs for parity when the 9 other UC campuses follow suit.
  • asdff 7y ago
    Parity to the existing is what UCSC grad students want. This $1400 per month isn't arbitrary, it would bring minimum net compensation in line with what an arbitrary grad student at UC Riverside receives in net compensation.
• LatteLazy 7y ago
  If you give one group of workers a raise, how long before all the others demand the same? And then some want more? And then the first group come back because they realise they can get even more... 1 person who you give a good deal to might, just might, keep their mouths shut. A whole segment? No way.
• sjg007 7y ago
  The whole grad school equation is foobar. Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly where paid positions exist. They also rely on students obtaining external funding.
  • asdff 7y ago
    Then they take half of said external grant funding as overhead.
    • gammadens 7y ago
      Indirect funds on grants need to be eliminated in my opinion. The GOP is a disaster at the moment in my opinion but introducing bills to eliminate them is one of the things they've done right. Indirect funds distort the purpose of grants and give perverse incentives to university administration and other funding sources.
  • ChrisLomont 7y ago
    >Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly Given that there's hundreds of schools with thousands of grad programs to choose from, with none of them having more than a tiny percentage of the total market, this is not monopoly pricing. It's simply supply and demand. People are willing to show up and work for the vast majority of these programs.
    • sjg007 7y ago
      Are you sure about that?
      • ChrisLomont 7y ago
        Yes. This isn’t a monopoly, so it’s not monopoly pricing. That leaves competitive pricing.
        • sjg007 7y ago
• curryslapper 7y ago
  All graduate students are teaching?
• pjc50 7y ago
  Whenever there's a truly toxic dispute like this, the money is less important to the managers than maintaining the status hierarchy.
• svaigsq 7y ago
  There are even more questions if all of those 1000 PhD students receive pay(not the money they receive to support their research, which is not the same thing) from UC. But I assume that is not the case, that ALL PhD students are employed by UC... or is it? And why only 54 of those students feel that they are special? I am confused and a bit curious, because that is not why I went to uni(not in US) and not how I had to deal with my studies. Also - can a foreign student apply for this free cheese and is UC diploma any good(also - outside UC, to have a real job)? And how UC is getting money? Any tax money involved(if that is the case, then why?) or only donations - from former students, who... work at UC?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Rebles 7y ago
  Your second reference also points out UCSC's operating budget for 2016 is $722 million. Revenue and expenditures have likely increased 4 years later, but the $13 mil represents a 1.8% increase in operational cost. The UCSC administration would have to cut other programs' budgets in order to make the difference. I'm an UCSC alumnus, and I served as a student rep on UCSC's Academic Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB). I've sided with the graduate students in this case. If you follow the subreddit r/UCSC, you will see the student body is largely divided on the issue. Now, subreddit posts are a small sample of the student body, it does affect the perception as well as the notoriety of UCSC being a liberal school full of hippies that always fight for worker's rights. It is harder to rebuild that kind of reputation in the school's brand. And it also negatively affects alumni fundraising. It puts the UCSC administration between a rock and a hard place. I've worked with the administration in the past. They are intelligent and caring faculty members trying to walk a tight rope every year with UCOP/Regents increasingly demanding in delivering in business objectives (increase enrollment/revenue) on one side and their academic mission on the other. I do not envy them. UCOP miscalculated this entire affair. UCSC grads going on strike has also encouraged UC Berkeley's and Davis's grads to strike in solidarity. The administration has never been able to handle student protests with the best optics, and unfortunately, student protests historically do not succeed in getting their demands met. It is.. a teachable moment, well steeped in irony.