27 ms·

MIT graduate students vote to unionize

638 points by Metacelsus 5y ago

AlbertoAsw10 5y ago
e
- ergregregfb 5y ago
  - ergregregfb 5y ago
JaimeThompson 5y ago
Good, that an institution with so much money has been treating them this way is simply inexcusable.
- Proven 5y ago
slothtrop 5y ago
Is this unprecedented for grad students?
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  No, grad students have been unionizing across the country, including Berkeley, Columbia, and many other places
- Spooky23 5y ago
  No, I’m surprised MIT wasn’t already. Big arrogant institutions really require a union.
- sseagull 5y ago
  When I was a grad student at a public university, we were affiliated with a larger union (CWA, Communication Workers of America IIRC). So not unheard of I guess. Exactly what benefits we got I don’t remember, but things got interesting once when CWA was talking about striking :) Edit: This about 10-15 years ago
- oceliker 5y ago
  There's another school down the street from MIT where the grad students already have a union.
- asdflawje5qwa35 5y ago
  No, not unprecedented, see my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969055 TL;DR is many grad students at UW Madison had a union until about 10 years ago.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I assume you mean in the USA specifically. No, it is not unprecedented for grad students to have a union and a union contract. It has been slowly gaining steam in the USA over the past 20 years -- as the US NLRB keeps changing it's mind about whether graduate students have the legal right to protections to organize unions (and sometimes different for public vs private universities). I went looking for a list, and found the wikipedia article has some kind of old statistics (anyone wanna try to find newer ones and update it?), but let's you know it's not unprecedented: "As of 2014, there are at least 33 US graduate employee unions, 18 unrecognized unions in the United States, and 23 graduate employee unions in Canada," and "Since 2000, more than twenty campuses have unionized." —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... I haven't found a complete list, but some mentioned in the wikipedia article are Oregon State University, Michigan State University, Temple University, the University of Washington, and Columbia. They are still more common at public than private schools, and I think it may be that none of the Ivy League universities have graduate student unions? MIT is not technically an Ivy, but is usually considered in the same tier of prestige/funding/quality. So in that sense MIT unionization is ground-breaking.
Rovanion 5y ago
Coming from Sweden I'm surprised they aren't already. Do you also not have student unions to represent you until you reach undergrad?
- oceliker 5y ago
  I believe you are thinking about representative bodies (maybe the equivalent of UA for undergrads, or GSC for grads, at MIT) while the union in the news is employment-based and is the sole legally recognized entity to negotiate salaries, employment conditions, etc. on behalf of MIT graduate students.
- mpascale00 5y ago
  What does an undergraduate union consist of?
- dmitriid_y 5y ago
  There are usually "student council" programs that give a handful of elected students a regular audience with administrators, but most of these programs don't have any teeth. Graduate student council programs in particular are often built as a compromise to prevent the students from forming an organization with greater efficacy. Anecdotally, some PIs I know have had to directly contend with rising organization among students and handed out a raise and a bonus to their labs.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  Yeah that's weird, I wish this included undergraduate students as well. But maybe there is a reason behind it that I don't understand.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Including undergraduates, who are primarily paying consumers, would have muddied the waters. Graduate students are clearly workers under any definition.
    - pas 5y ago
Quillbert182 5y ago
For the uninformed, what is the purpose of a student union?
- urthor 5y ago
  Elect leadership. Who then negotiates with the faculty.
  - gruez 5y ago
    What leverage do they have? Worker's unions work because they can threaten to withhold labor. Are those students seriously going to not attend MIT? An institution as prestigious as MIT probably has no trouble finding replacements.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      "MIT fires entire graduate student body in union-busting move" is probably not a great look for them.
      - sjg007 5y ago
        The would use the term "expells" because they want to say they are students and not employees.
        stale2002 5y ago
        At which point there would be a lawsuit, and they would lose the lawsuit. Labor labors are an established thing. If a union is approved by the government, then they would have protections.
    - willis936 5y ago
      When you run a research group: one student leaving is no big deal, every student leaving is a catastrophe. Who's going to fund you when you have no one to do the work? It takes years to get grad students up to speed. All wind is drained from the sails and you need to waste your precious time rebuilding. All because you didn't want to treat your workers like humans.
typeofhuman 5y ago
Unions can be good. They can be operated poorly and inefficiently too. Good luck to them. Consumer unions seem like a neat idea too.
- willis936 5y ago
  Graduate students are paid half time but expected to work full time and have their entire career at the mercy of individual professors. If protections will not be given freely then collective bargaining can force the issue.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    Except this is still true at US schools that have had a union for many years. The pay and benefits go up a little bit but the fundamental issues remain. I've never even heard of a grad union trying to bargain for true changes in funding structure or degree requirements.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  can't wait for company unions, where they band together to achieve their objectives
  - occz 5y ago
    This already exists, in the form of various think tanks and lobbying organisations. Maybe that was the joke you were making though, I can't quite tell.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      No I'm talking about things like Ford, GM, and Chrysler creating a group together to more effectively negotiate with the UAW. Together, they are strong!
some-human 5y ago
In the UK, most students are members of their universitys' branch of the National Union of Students.[1] The unions have a big presence on campus and a bar with heavily discounted drinks and organise a lot of the social clubs and events that happen outside of the study. They also negotiate with the university and faculty, fighting for students, and you can get individual advise and help too. Enrolling to the student union usual happens almost automatically when you turn up and register for your dorm, classes and doctors etc. The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University and College Union.[2] I didn't know this was abnormal in other countries? [1] https://www.nus.org.uk/ https://www.nus.org.uk/ [2] https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1685/About-UCU https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1685/About-UCU
- joeberon 5y ago
- ImaCake 5y ago
  We used to have the same system in Australia but it was abolished by our centre right party (Liberals). The result has been an erosion of student rights and tertiary education quality.
- nabla9 5y ago
  A student's union is not the same as a labor union. The student's union represents students. This is a labor union representing graduate student-workers who are employed by MIT.
  - some-human 5y ago
    Again, The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University and College Union.[2] If they are employed by the university in the UK, they typically belong to this union.
- WWWWH 5y ago
  This is true, and they are valuable. But a students union is best thought of as a very distinct sort of organisation; they are not the same as a labour union. (You obviously know this, but it may help prevent some misleading comparisons down the line…)
temp8964 5y ago
When I was a graduate student, I always thought I had a good deal, where I learn graduate degree for free, AND got a living stipend for me and my wife. The relationship between me and the university was two folded: I am a customer as a student and an employee at the same time. And I think student was my main role. And my advisor was mostly my teacher, instead of my work boss. I don't think you can turn this relationship into purely an employer-employee relationship. You can separate the two relationships by making the university pay the whole salary, and then you pay the tuition from your bank account. You can ask for higher wage, but the university can ask for higher tuition. I think the low tuition has already having this factored in, otherwise how can you get a 2-year / 4-year work training program with such low price?
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  The thing is this is great if you and your advisor get along. If your advisor decides to blackball your academic career instead there’s nothing you can do.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  Most PhD “students” stop taking classes by the 2year mark (out of a five year PhD in CS, longer for other fields), and spend the rest of their time doing full-time research and teaching, without getting paid full time. And while your advisor does not necessarily act like a boss, they have often even more power; they can withhold funding, which can stall or end your PhD, they can assign you dead-end/inconsequential projects, killing your career, etc. It does no service to anyone to not acknowledge the power differential that exists between advisors and advisees. In general the current academic research model has positives and negatives for grad students, and it benefits no one to pretend the negatives don’t exist. This is coming from a person who had a wonderful PhD experience and has received offers for TT positions from top universities in the US (I say this not to brag, but to ward off accusations of sour grapes)
- sjg007 5y ago
  It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide accreditation. The fact that they charge for tuition actually seems legally tenuous (akin to a company town) which is why I think they all have these tuition waivers for RA and TA positions. The more I think about it, it seems like there is a bunch of legal issues. Maybe Congress has resolved those idk...
bognition 5y ago
I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where senior members can single handedly destroy a young investigators career. (It happened to me and I saw it happen to several people). There is little to no recourse against this. Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: "If you want to be the best in your field you have to work harder than everyone else. Forming a union won't change that fact and may even discourage students from working so hard. This might interfere with their career goals." However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low. A lot of the field agrees that something needs to change, but no one can agree exactly what needs to change or how to get there. The people with the power are the tenured professors who "won the lottery" and are out of touch with the problems they are causing. They aren't going to be the mechanism of change even though they hold all the power.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  It sounds like the situation is pretty terrible already and hard for it to get worse; might as well try a union so these folks suffer less from a broken system. Versus the alternative, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all. The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby. The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working. Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities. [1] https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/ https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/
lettergram 5y ago
I can’t imagine this actually producing better results long-term. Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative parties in order to combat the higher authority/ employer. The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding, etc) which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable (while assisting the less capable).
- thot_experiment 5y ago
  Ahh yes, less meritocracy or as I like to put it: not having to work awful hours and being paid like shit because that's just the way things have always been you don't have collective bargaining leverage.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  What nonsense. Have you actually been a PhD student recently? The peers you’re “competing” with usually aren’t even at the same institution; and even then there’s a lot more cross-institution collaboration than there is competition. Also this view of doing research as competition is absolute garbage. Yes, competing to produce good research is good. No, advisors exploiting cheap PhD labour to do that is not good. The latter is what unions are meant to prevent.
- exdsq 5y ago
  My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about PhD students but I imagine it’s no easier for them than early career postdocs, so this seems to make a lot of sense.
  - sheikheddy 5y ago
    Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but this is only my half-formed intuition).
g_p 5y ago
For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students actually have a good bit more power available to them by organising sensibly than you might think. The same is also true for early career postdoctoral research staff. This is because most of the work that actually matters is being done by these individuals, in a very pyramidical structure, but the money stops rolling in without the work that the base of the pyramid is delivering. Tenured professors and others win research grants, and are only as good as their last grant. If they stop running on the treadmill, they won't get any more grants, as their pitch becomes less compelling than others'. They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. Often they even win the grants in the first place. The exception is that when there's some credit to be gained for the work, the professor will reappear to take center stage and give interviews. If the grad students organise, the wheels could begin to fall off quickly - if projects are delayed, grant payments won't come through. If they are not teaching classes, someone else has to teach them. If the research isn't getting done, someone has to speak with funders on calls. Someone has to write reports. There's more to be done than the professor can do, and they will rapidly end up snowed under, unable to function, and unable to deliver papers on their grant. That will make it harder for them to get their next pet project funded. Unfortunately, many people go into academia believing it to be a bastion of meritocracy where their efforts and skill will be rewarded, and they spend some number of years believing this before they start to realise what is actually going on. Some will make it to be a professor, others become disillusioned and go elsewhere. In my view though, the model is quite broken, and too reliant on a professor claiming credit for others' work without challenge, even though the work of their (hidden) team was the meaningful intellectual input, and some of them would probably be better as the professor.
- amitport 5y ago
  If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...
  - neutronicus 5y ago
    Yeah in my experience professors are pretty good about giving credit (the student is the first author on the paper, does the conference presentations, etc). The comment above is right about the general structure (professors pitch, students deliver), though. And perhaps right about claiming credit in some fields, although not mine.
hervature 5y ago
As someone who just finished their PhD, I fear these unionization efforts will have the exact opposite effect that the students are aiming for. In particular, many universities provide subsidized housing in some of the most expensive places in the US. Housing is not a bargainable. The direct consequence is that universities will kick graduate students out of the housing, replace them with undergrad students to pay for the 10% wage increase. So the grad students get the 10% raise with a 50% housing increase. Grad students really are not in a position to bargain for much as they work 20 hours to earn their salaries which is most often teaching. They can easily be replaced with a lecturer whose full time equivalent already matches PhD stipends at this tier of universities. At least the last time I saw the numbers. Furthermore, who wants to lose a year of PhD when they already take so long to complete? Striking would really lower your lifetime earnings by delaying your real earnings another year. Furthermore, many other union benefits are moot in the PhD setting. Grievances with your supervisor are irrelevant because you're supervisor cannot be replaced. Or, again, the pain of replacement is burdened by the student. The democratic process is the democratic process and so I respect their decision but grad students unionizing is really more complex than the workforce. In particular, the union is turning over every 5-8 years. It is quite possible no one wants the union after those who voted it in and don't have a choice not to join. Your PhD is defined by your advisor and my #1 advice to future PhD students is to pick your school based on advisor before location and other things. What this means is that your choice to "join" the union is incredibly overshadowed by external forces. Again, as someone who went through this very recently, the problem is the power imbalance between the institution and the students. They have complete control over your supply of labor. That is, many (all?) US universities usually have the policy "any outside job is considered incompatible with full time PhD work and grounds for removal from the program". To me, forcing universities to pay students their prevailing market rate would solve all these issues. The first step towards this would be a cultural shift that allows part time PhD and moving towards PhD students being employees and not students. This would require a massive change to the F1 visas to allow international students to work which really pinpoints the root cause of all of this. PhD students are really in this strange limbo of being neither a student nor an employee. This limbo allows the university to use whichever definition fits their prerogative just like the NCAA. For instance, PhD students want more pay but the university decreases tuition assistance, nothing has changed.
mac-chaffee 5y ago
The lack of protections for graduate student workers is shocking IMO, especially in student housing. Grad student workers of course don't get paid vacation, sick time, or anything like that. But you can't even just lower your hours since you're paid with a fixed stipend. Contracts may be largely 20 hours per week, but they have all kinds of carve-outs where the university can force you to work up to 30/40 hours, like at the start and end of the year and during on-call (which is also 100% unpaid), taking time away from exams. And universities mismanage the hell out of grad students, such as only giving purchasing power to one person instead of having backups. Or having horrible on-call coverage where you can expect 3+ calls per night, many of which are pointlessly mandated "escalations". All of these problems can be fixed so easily (time off, on-call pay/coverage), but an enormous administration with a toxic culture of "No" prevents progress.
- tomohawk 5y ago
  Universities are subject to very little oversight and regulation. They basically are selling a luxury good to very unsophisticated buyers (you can't get much less sophisticated than the average 18yo). A lot of what they are selling will not be worth the time or money put in. Instead of subsidizing them like crazy, the government should be looking into their dodgy practices.
  - culi 5y ago
    > Universities are subject to very little oversight and regulation. This varies by state too. Many of the UC's in California right now are basically becoming corporations. They argue that them making more money means they can better serve students, but they routinely lobby for less funding from California. That's because that funding comes with certain conditions, like accepting more Californian students. The UC I went to, UCI, is facing a huge housing crisis and has been building a ton of new housing, but the amount of in-state students they're accepting hasn't changed since before 2010. Instead they've drastically increased the number of foreign students they've accepted. Those students usually pay more than twice as much as in-state and, counter to narratives about "increased diversity", often come from a very specific class background. Their whole strategy is basically to wean themselves off of state funding so they can run the UC like a profit-driven corporation
yuppie_scum 5y ago
I can understand the value of unions in a situation where you are the employee. But Jesus, if you don’t like the school just go to a different school.
- texaslonghorn5 5y ago
  Right so the grad students are employees of the university.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  What are you gonna tell the new school?
lnxg33k1 5y ago
I am not sure how to fairly express this concept, so I will write it as it comes, younger generations are kinda fixing all the fuck ups of millennials in terms of working conditions, in a bit maybe they will even get paid overtime, I felt always like my generation was more focused in trying to find someone to blame rather than fighting to fix things, more focused on saying "Ok boomer" or blame "GenX". And I think the main issue with millennials psychology is that they were born in a welthy and rich middle-class society and grew up spoiled, and then when in their late-teens the economy fucked them up they didn't have the strenght to fight, while maybe younger generations are born in crysis, unstability and exploitation, and might have more strenght to fix things
- sheikheddy 5y ago
  Do you also believe this pattern will hold as this generation ages? It could be the case that this property is really about young vs old people. Although I hope future generations will be so well off that they'll view the role of menial labor in modern society as something akin to slavery.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    That's a nice point, I am not sure, but a while ago here on HN someone posted an article showing stats about uprises going down in a proportional way to ageing of the population, so I am not a scholar of sociology but according to that article the answer to your question should be "no" :(, but maybe there will be young people of new generations who will keep the fight on, if current young generation are able to get fair working conditions which allow them to make kids and families
- bick_nyers 5y ago
  I just turned 26, so I straddle the line between millennial and Gen Z. I have friends that are distinctly in both generations. What you say definitely rings true to me, although I think the relationship with emerging technology also plays an interesting part here too. From all that I can tell of the situation, Gen Z is much more integrated and connected with each other due to the existing popularity of the internet and smartphones, where millennials growing up still followed that traditional model where there were strong cliques throughout school, and interests in things like the internet were still fairly obscure. That's not to say that cliques don't exist today, but it's hard for me to describe the right words behind the communication & relationship model that changed so dramatically. As a result, millennials don't feel nearly as much comraderie as Gen Z, which I believe to be playing a large role in the current societal anti-exploitation movements.
bjt2n3904 5y ago
I remember when I was in graduate school doing engineering, a union rep wandered into my lab to try and sell me on the idea. I got into the program because I was the best at what I did. It paid for tuition, medical, and a little extra on top. And this guy wanted to tell me that I didn't have it good enough, and I could have it better if he became a middleman? And that my program director was "greedy" and keeping all the fat for himself? I asked him what program he was in, he wasn't even a student at the University. Asked him what he got his degree in, and he told me some nonsense non-STEM degree. He was a worthless parasite, with no marketable skills but to leech off what other students worked for. I told him in no uncertain terms to get out of the lab, and if he ever came back I'd call campus police on him.
nharada 5y ago
I was in a grad student union at University of Michigan and it was awesome. Compared to my colleagues at other institutions I got better pay (especially taking cost of living into account) and insanely good healthcare. When our stipend contracts were up for re-negotiation I never had to worry someone didn't have my back, which is great cause as a grad student I was far too busy to worry about that myself.
pjmlp 5y ago
Interesting this is such a big subject, already on my university days in the early 1990's, student unions were a common reality in many European universities.
asdflawje5qwa35 5y ago
UW Madison teaching assistants were represented by a union [1,2] between 1970 and 2011, when its status was abruptly terminated by conservative political forces in Wisconsin. When the union was active, it was pretty clear that negotiating was not its strength, but the union was always available to help people navigate day-to-day problems that come up. Maybe it is just coincidence, but multiple independent accounts detailing toxic work environments within UW have been reported in recent years. [1] https://taa-madison.org https://taa-madison.org [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Associatio...
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Did you mean "represented by a union" rather than "repressed by a union"?
  - asdflawje5qwa35 5y ago
    Yes! Edited to fix that.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Unionization usually works when: 1) the workers in question are not easily replaced (for example, specialized skills or long training period before they become productive) 2) the workers in question are not easily able to switch employers, so they need the protection of a union (instead of just switching employers whenever they are unhappy, such that they are normally happy) There are lots of professions which either do not meet condition 1 or do not meet condition 2. However, grad students would seem to be a classic example of a group ripe for unionization.
- slibhb 5y ago
  I think you're right. I'm usually skeptical of unionization but it may make sense in this case. Grad students have little leverage, the universities know this and use it. I also think there are too many grad students but that's a different issue.
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    True on both.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I was a graduate student with a research assistantship position at the University of Washington in the mid 2000s, a few years after they unionized and got a contract with the UAW. By the time I was there, even though it was only a few years after the union struggle, I didn't hear much about the union, at least in my department. But what I knew it meant was: we had good health insurance, we had a guaranteed minimum stipend, we had the right to actually take vacation during university vacations, and a certain number of sick days. I knew from talking to oother students, that before the union contract, grad students with assistantships didn't necessarily have these things (it depended on department), and sometimes literally got no vacation or allowed sick leave at all. I was aware of no ways that the presence of a graduate student union harmed the grad students involved -- to the contrary of some suppositions in this thread. Grad student unions exist in dozens of universities, some for years now, so it's possible to look at actual experiences, not just forecasting supposition. I was also aware of no ways the union harmed research or academics at the university (beyond of course costing them more money to treat the grad students right). I wonder if a few years after I left, most grad students even realized what the union had won for them. The union was not very visible, once the fight for a contract was over.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I was in a union as a PhD student. The union did nonsense things like running a (bad) cafe. My pay was set by my funders so the union didn’t have any say on that or any leverage on anything else at all really. Wasn’t sure what the point was. I just opted out after a while. I don’t think they added anything of value whatsoever.
- changoplatanero 5y ago
  I was also a grad student at the University of Washington and my feeling was that the union was a net-negative. I remember one time in particular when my advisor had an extra funding source for me but the union rules didn't allow her to hire me in that position. It's hard for me to understand why business the union has in inserting itself in between the relationship between me and my advisor. On top of that, the union took a portion of pay pay from each check. I wish they would give me a refund.
dalbasal 5y ago
For a non-american with no union experience. What's the what with these teamsters, UE & such? What does it mean that they choose to unionize with one of them?
ta988 5y ago
This is highly needed in non-elite universities. Grad students are underpaid, and encouraged to apply for scolarship that yes will improve their resume but result in them paying taxes on them so they end up with even less money than they had before. In some places they are threatened to be kicked out of programs if they don't apply to those scolarships. This plus the repeat offender PIs that can abuse their students and get protected because they bring grant money...
throwaway787544 5y ago
I think this is what's needed on a massive scale to end rent-seeking by publishers. The problem as I see it is two-fold: one, the academic institution requires publishing to an esteemed journal. And two, the esteemed journal seeks exorbitant fees because they know the institutions want esteemed journals. If a union forced the institutions to stop requiring publishing to esteemed journals, and instead formed boards of reviewers that gave ratings to pre-prints on a donation-based server, then the big publishers would have to adapt dramatically new pricing to compete.
aborsy 5y ago
In France, students and hipsters started similar protests. Horrible outcomes ever since, producing a lot of social, political and ultimately economical problems for the country for decades to come. Having lived in France, I shiver when I hear word “union.”
- aborsy 5y ago
  I meant in 1968.
whatever1 5y ago
US Universities have enormous overhead costs. And unfortunately the PhD students / post docs are paying with their blood and sweat for these. My advisor had to spit 150k to the university to have me as a student (including a 20k fee for lab usage, despite the fact my PhD was a theoretical one). From that 150k I was taking 22k - 3k of mandatory health insurance. I could barely make it given that I had to pay > 12k per year for rent and utilities (with roommates). Meanwhile the University would splash money to get athletic coaches or give bonuses to the executives or open branches in dictatorships. I think unions should focus on university management, because they have been acting unchecked for way too long.
- ceeplusplus 5y ago
  It's mostly caused by the explosion of lifestyle inflation at universities. Rather than just providing an education and doing research they are now expected to be mental health counselors, promote "diversity" (aka we need more of certain skin colors over other skin colors), and make "democratic" decisions. In practice this means everything is filled with bureaucracy and you need to go through 5 committees and 3 vice chancellors before anything gets done. Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1 schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.
  - whatever1 5y ago
    How diversity has anything to do with institutional mismanagement. And no, US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show.
    - ceeplusplus 5y ago
      Because these deans of "diversity" get paid a lot of money to bikeshed about useless issues while not actually having any impact on the school. It's run exclusively as a PR stunt to satisfy the whiners in the school. It's one example of the many cases of unneeded, useless headcount in universities that's contributing to bloat. I can't name a single time where anyone with the word diversity in their title at my former college did anything concrete. > US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show. That's not really the case especially in public universities. If you want to make a change that might step on a lot of toes you need to get buy in from people. They aren't explicit democracies where everyone votes, but nonetheless you need to secure acceptance from people to get things done. To give you an example of the useless bureaucracy, I once had to submit a reimbursement for some research expenses and was bounced around for several months between different forms and different people. Any 1 part of the reimbursement that didn't match the forms exactly meant the entire thing would be rejected. This was to access grant money that wasn't even the university's, it was the lab's. In corporate settings people don't give a shit and approve it as long as it looks legitimate.
jl2718 5y ago
Is this not a direct violation of the student visa?
- thylacine222 5y ago
  Why would it be? International workers have the same labor rights that American workers do.
  - jl2718 5y ago
    Yes, and working is a violation of the student visa.
    - overspeed 5y ago
      That is incorrect. On-campus employment is allowed in the student visa and graduate student appointments are typically RA positions which qualify as employment under this definition.
      - jl2718 5y ago
        CPT and OPT are interesting cases for collective bargaining. Not my area of expertise. However, I found a different answer that seems like a more concrete protection regardless of labor classification: > The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) cannot ask you questions about your union membership or participation in lawful union activity. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognized the importance of enforcing labor laws and signed an agreement with the Department of Labor (DOL) that states it is essential to ensure proper wages and working conditions for all covered workers regardless of immigration status. It is your right to belong to a union and being a union member cannot affect your visa application. https://www.wearegage.org/international-student-rights https://www.wearegage.org/international-student-rights
Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
I know of one tenured professor in a pretty big East Coast college who spends his time finding graduate students about to launch a start-up, and then demands 20% equity or threatens said students for working on commercial projects on college time. Guy is easily a multi millionaire through this alone right now.
ok123456 5y ago
Solidarity Forever.
- meatsauce 5y ago
  Whenever I read this, I think of some out of touch career academic who has never experienced the real world, yet knows exactly how the world should be, and can't wait to tell you.
  - ok123456 5y ago
    k. I was a union carpenter before I went back to school.
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TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
There's a rot in US academia ... ballooning costs, useless degrees that confer no perceivable boost in the job market, swollen bureaucracies. Unions might help one part of the ecosystem: the grad students, but it could also make overall reform harder. I look at US Academia's complexities and it seems to me an easier approach to reform is to start from scratch via new institutions.
citizenpaul 5y ago
Good! The grad student system is incredibly broken. Grad students are basically slaves at worst or indentured servants at best. The worst part is the universitys all know this and dont care because the university gets massive benifits from having highly educated slaves producing intellectual property that can be sold and licensed. The grad student of course gets no benifit from this. Its like the work for exposure BS except worse because the student often has no alternative. Especially foreign students on tight immigration visa deadlines. Thus doesnt even start to touch the IP subject where universities are public funded and have no right to the IP produced there in the first place...
- andreyk 5y ago
  hmm, as a grad student a lot of this seems hugely hyperbolic to me "slaves at worst or indentured servants" is a rather harsh way to put it, it's not like you can't quit your PhD (many people do this after getting their Masters, so the times spent in the program is not wasted). "gets massive benifits from having highly educated slaves producing intellectual property that can be sold and licensed" is again way overstating things. Very little of research is worth much as far as IP; in my 5 years as grad student I only know of one research project that resulted in a patent. The production of IP is much more of a thing in industry research, as would make sense. "The grad student of course gets no benifit from this." in CS (especially AI, where I work) this is not really true, doing research lets you get really good research positions in industry, even assuming you don't want to stick around in academia. Don't get me wrong, there is a ton wrong about academia/the grad student system. I really wish I was paid anything near my value on the job market. But I think your view is way too negative.
  - citizenpaul 5y ago
    >I only know of one research project that resulted in a patent. You do realize that there is a large number of people that have only patented a handful of things and retired? They robbed that opportunity from you plain and simple. Universities patenting IP in the first place is inarguabley wrong . They are funded with tax dollars and have no right to the IP in the first place. At the very least all IP should be released into public domain, more ideally with right of first refusal to the grad students involved. I am only closely involved with people in the grad life not in it myself. I may be wrong as how bad the grad student thing is, no benefits is dramatic i suppose. However there is massive manipulation of young people inexperienced in negotiation involved, double so when there is no recourse after the fact like quitting/leaving/changing/moving. I hear and see endless things that make my skin crawl from grad friends and they are most definitely beting taken advantage of in power gap that is funded with tax dollars.
asdff 5y ago
Not uncommon for grad students with supposed "good" stipends in high cost of living areas to be only taking home $2300 a month or so, where rents are probably $2200 a month now for a 1br apartment. What do they expect grad students to do? You almost have to share a bedroom, which imo is ridiculous for a job that requires a B.S. where you might quite literally be designing multi million dollar scientific experiments.
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milofeynman 5y ago
I want to see PICU attendings at academic universities unionize. Some of their schedules should be illegal. 14-16 7-day shifts a year, one of those Fri, Sat, Sun shifts they work from 7am through their shift the next day which means Fri and Sat are approximately 7am-4pm the next day with NO guaranteed sleep. They also have other random night shifts throughout the year for a total of 35 or so overnight shifts, but those start at 4pm. Those ~33 hour shifts should be illegal
einpoklum 5y ago
Unionization, especially academic workers' unionization, and double-especially junior, untenured researcher unionization is ultra-important. The recent couple of centuries, especially the last one, have brought an increased application of commercial-corporation-type relations into academia, with graduate researchers and teachers being the object of degradation of both material welfare and intra-academic status. I wrote about this when I was involved in unionizing grads in my own university - not in the US, but still: https://app.box.com/s/osnf6xfqgqgvmnat6ldq https://app.box.com/s/osnf6xfqgqgvmnat6ldq (or in Hebrew: https://app.box.com/shared/l3iypqd2yi https://app.box.com/shared/l3iypqd2yi ) I wish the MIT grads all the best in their struggle. However, when looking at their "Path to unionization" page: https://mitgsu.org/roadmap https://mitgsu.org/roadmap , I am worried they are too timid of an endeavor. They write: > The real goal of the campaign is to secure a union contract A contract is never the goal. Just like signing an employment contract as an individual is not the goal - the employment conditions, and the relations and standing in the workplace - are the goal. A contract is at best a means to reach the goal, and at worst - a fetish. I've seen many a unionization drive fixate on negotiations and a contract, not on building "shop-floor" power, on the individual and collective level. When grads walk around knowing that mistreatment by administration or supervisors will result in harsh collective action by their peers - from public shaming of those involved to work disruption if necessary, contract or no contract - that's when things have changed. But if what you get is a link to a piece of paper saying that in theory you can seek some arbitration somehow, but in practice your daily life remains the same, then you haven't gained much.
tomohawk 5y ago
They don't say how the election was done. Was it secret ballot, or one of the union-favored methods such as card check. The non-secret ballot methods are notorious for allowing pressure tactics to be used. Do grad students still have a right to work without joining, or will they be forced to join?
MrPatan 5y ago
Economics students? That'd be delicious
bigcat123 5y ago
wanderingmind 5y ago
The most important thing we must be teaching undergrads is to avoid grad school like a plague that it is which will suck everything out of you and leave you begging on the streets.
- mprime1 5y ago
  Meanwhile in a different country I got basically paid to go to grad school. The already low yearly fees were discounted for good grades and jobs for students are provided to help with living expenses. Ended grad school positive on my bank account, loved studying what I studied (distributed systems). The US school system has some upsides, but the whole student debt thing is pretty F’d up. Edit: spelling
rmbyrro 5y ago
I'm confused, is this a union of workers in the MIT campus or really MIT students? If it's really the latter, do studying count as work now?
alasdair_ 5y ago
Do student athletes next!
killjoywashere 5y ago
Rich kids like Apple, everybody starts buying Apple. Rich kids unionize ... everybody starts to unionize? Maybe?
smugma 5y ago
It's news that MIT is doing it, but there is precedent for this in the US. The University of California system (includes Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSC, which had a wildcat strike during COVID) unionized nearly 40 years ago, and have had many labor strikes over the years [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/grad-student-union-finally-busts-uc https://www.science.org/content/article/grad-student-union-f...
joeman1000 5y ago
This is sorely needed in Australia. Uni quality is incredibly poor and no one is held accountable.

638 points by Metacelsus 5y ago

AlbertoAsw10 5y ago

ergregregfb 5y ago
- ergregregfb 5y ago

JaimeThompson 5y ago

Good, that an institution with so much money has been treating them this way is simply inexcusable.

Proven 5y ago

slothtrop 5y ago

Is this unprecedented for grad students?

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
No, grad students have been unionizing across the country, including Berkeley, Columbia, and many other places
Spooky23 5y ago
No, I’m surprised MIT wasn’t already. Big arrogant institutions really require a union.
sseagull 5y ago
When I was a grad student at a public university, we were affiliated with a larger union (CWA, Communication Workers of America IIRC). So not unheard of I guess. Exactly what benefits we got I don’t remember, but things got interesting once when CWA was talking about striking :) Edit: This about 10-15 years ago
oceliker 5y ago
There's another school down the street from MIT where the grad students already have a union.
asdflawje5qwa35 5y ago
No, not unprecedented, see my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969055 TL;DR is many grad students at UW Madison had a union until about 10 years ago.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I assume you mean in the USA specifically. No, it is not unprecedented for grad students to have a union and a union contract. It has been slowly gaining steam in the USA over the past 20 years -- as the US NLRB keeps changing it's mind about whether graduate students have the legal right to protections to organize unions (and sometimes different for public vs private universities). I went looking for a list, and found the wikipedia article has some kind of old statistics (anyone wanna try to find newer ones and update it?), but let's you know it's not unprecedented: "As of 2014, there are at least 33 US graduate employee unions, 18 unrecognized unions in the United States, and 23 graduate employee unions in Canada," and "Since 2000, more than twenty campuses have unionized." —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... I haven't found a complete list, but some mentioned in the wikipedia article are Oregon State University, Michigan State University, Temple University, the University of Washington, and Columbia. They are still more common at public than private schools, and I think it may be that none of the Ivy League universities have graduate student unions? MIT is not technically an Ivy, but is usually considered in the same tier of prestige/funding/quality. So in that sense MIT unionization is ground-breaking.

Rovanion 5y ago

Coming from Sweden I'm surprised they aren't already. Do you also not have student unions to represent you until you reach undergrad?

oceliker 5y ago
I believe you are thinking about representative bodies (maybe the equivalent of UA for undergrads, or GSC for grads, at MIT) while the union in the news is employment-based and is the sole legally recognized entity to negotiate salaries, employment conditions, etc. on behalf of MIT graduate students.
mpascale00 5y ago
What does an undergraduate union consist of?
dmitriid_y 5y ago
There are usually "student council" programs that give a handful of elected students a regular audience with administrators, but most of these programs don't have any teeth. Graduate student council programs in particular are often built as a compromise to prevent the students from forming an organization with greater efficacy. Anecdotally, some PIs I know have had to directly contend with rising organization among students and handed out a raise and a bonus to their labs.
Bilal_io 5y ago
Yeah that's weird, I wish this included undergraduate students as well. But maybe there is a reason behind it that I don't understand.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Including undergraduates, who are primarily paying consumers, would have muddied the waters. Graduate students are clearly workers under any definition.
  - pas 5y ago

Quillbert182 5y ago

For the uninformed, what is the purpose of a student union?

urthor 5y ago
Elect leadership. Who then negotiates with the faculty.
- gruez 5y ago
  What leverage do they have? Worker's unions work because they can threaten to withhold labor. Are those students seriously going to not attend MIT? An institution as prestigious as MIT probably has no trouble finding replacements.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    "MIT fires entire graduate student body in union-busting move" is probably not a great look for them.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      The would use the term "expells" because they want to say they are students and not employees.
      - stale2002 5y ago
        At which point there would be a lawsuit, and they would lose the lawsuit. Labor labors are an established thing. If a union is approved by the government, then they would have protections.
  - willis936 5y ago
    When you run a research group: one student leaving is no big deal, every student leaving is a catastrophe. Who's going to fund you when you have no one to do the work? It takes years to get grad students up to speed. All wind is drained from the sails and you need to waste your precious time rebuilding. All because you didn't want to treat your workers like humans.

typeofhuman 5y ago

Unions can be good. They can be operated poorly and inefficiently too. Good luck to them. Consumer unions seem like a neat idea too.

willis936 5y ago
Graduate students are paid half time but expected to work full time and have their entire career at the mercy of individual professors. If protections will not be given freely then collective bargaining can force the issue.
- caddemon 5y ago
  Except this is still true at US schools that have had a union for many years. The pay and benefits go up a little bit but the fundamental issues remain. I've never even heard of a grad union trying to bargain for true changes in funding structure or degree requirements.
missedthecue 5y ago
can't wait for company unions, where they band together to achieve their objectives
- occz 5y ago
  This already exists, in the form of various think tanks and lobbying organisations. Maybe that was the joke you were making though, I can't quite tell.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    No I'm talking about things like Ford, GM, and Chrysler creating a group together to more effectively negotiate with the UAW. Together, they are strong!

some-human 5y ago

In the UK, most students are members of their universitys' branch of the National Union of Students.[1] The unions have a big presence on campus and a bar with heavily discounted drinks and organise a lot of the social clubs and events that happen outside of the study. They also negotiate with the university and faculty, fighting for students, and you can get individual advise and help too. Enrolling to the student union usual happens almost automatically when you turn up and register for your dorm, classes and doctors etc. The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University and College Union.[2] I didn't know this was abnormal in other countries? [1] https://www.nus.org.uk/ https://www.nus.org.uk/ [2] https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1685/About-UCU https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1685/About-UCU

joeberon 5y ago
ImaCake 5y ago
We used to have the same system in Australia but it was abolished by our centre right party (Liberals). The result has been an erosion of student rights and tertiary education quality.
nabla9 5y ago
A student's union is not the same as a labor union. The student's union represents students. This is a labor union representing graduate student-workers who are employed by MIT.
- some-human 5y ago
  Again, The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University and College Union.[2] If they are employed by the university in the UK, they typically belong to this union.
WWWWH 5y ago
This is true, and they are valuable. But a students union is best thought of as a very distinct sort of organisation; they are not the same as a labour union. (You obviously know this, but it may help prevent some misleading comparisons down the line…)

temp8964 5y ago

When I was a graduate student, I always thought I had a good deal, where I learn graduate degree for free, AND got a living stipend for me and my wife. The relationship between me and the university was two folded: I am a customer as a student and an employee at the same time. And I think student was my main role. And my advisor was mostly my teacher, instead of my work boss. I don't think you can turn this relationship into purely an employer-employee relationship. You can separate the two relationships by making the university pay the whole salary, and then you pay the tuition from your bank account. You can ask for higher wage, but the university can ask for higher tuition. I think the low tuition has already having this factored in, otherwise how can you get a 2-year / 4-year work training program with such low price?

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
The thing is this is great if you and your advisor get along. If your advisor decides to blackball your academic career instead there’s nothing you can do.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Most PhD “students” stop taking classes by the 2year mark (out of a five year PhD in CS, longer for other fields), and spend the rest of their time doing full-time research and teaching, without getting paid full time. And while your advisor does not necessarily act like a boss, they have often even more power; they can withhold funding, which can stall or end your PhD, they can assign you dead-end/inconsequential projects, killing your career, etc. It does no service to anyone to not acknowledge the power differential that exists between advisors and advisees. In general the current academic research model has positives and negatives for grad students, and it benefits no one to pretend the negatives don’t exist. This is coming from a person who had a wonderful PhD experience and has received offers for TT positions from top universities in the US (I say this not to brag, but to ward off accusations of sour grapes)
sjg007 5y ago
It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide accreditation. The fact that they charge for tuition actually seems legally tenuous (akin to a company town) which is why I think they all have these tuition waivers for RA and TA positions. The more I think about it, it seems like there is a bunch of legal issues. Maybe Congress has resolved those idk...

bognition 5y ago

I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured. Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where senior members can single handedly destroy a young investigators career. (It happened to me and I saw it happen to several people). There is little to no recourse against this. Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: "If you want to be the best in your field you have to work harder than everyone else. Forming a union won't change that fact and may even discourage students from working so hard. This might interfere with their career goals." However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low. A lot of the field agrees that something needs to change, but no one can agree exactly what needs to change or how to get there. The people with the power are the tenured professors who "won the lottery" and are out of touch with the problems they are causing. They aren't going to be the mechanism of change even though they hold all the power.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
It sounds like the situation is pretty terrible already and hard for it to get worse; might as well try a union so these folks suffer less from a broken system. Versus the alternative, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all. The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby. The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working. Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities. [1] https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/ https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/

lettergram 5y ago

I can’t imagine this actually producing better results long-term. Unions objectives are to limit competition amongst relative parties in order to combat the higher authority/ employer. The purpose of graduate school is to put compete your peers. What this will likely lead to IMO is more “equity” among the less capable (grants, funding, etc) which will reduce the opportunity for meritocracy and more capable (while assisting the less capable).

thot_experiment 5y ago
Ahh yes, less meritocracy or as I like to put it: not having to work awful hours and being paid like shit because that's just the way things have always been you don't have collective bargaining leverage.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
What nonsense. Have you actually been a PhD student recently? The peers you’re “competing” with usually aren’t even at the same institution; and even then there’s a lot more cross-institution collaboration than there is competition. Also this view of doing research as competition is absolute garbage. Yes, competing to produce good research is good. No, advisors exploiting cheap PhD labour to do that is not good. The latter is what unions are meant to prevent.
exdsq 5y ago
My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about PhD students but I imagine it’s no easier for them than early career postdocs, so this seems to make a lot of sense.
- sheikheddy 5y ago
  Stanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but this is only my half-formed intuition).

g_p 5y ago

For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students actually have a good bit more power available to them by organising sensibly than you might think. The same is also true for early career postdoctoral research staff. This is because most of the work that actually matters is being done by these individuals, in a very pyramidical structure, but the money stops rolling in without the work that the base of the pyramid is delivering. Tenured professors and others win research grants, and are only as good as their last grant. If they stop running on the treadmill, they won't get any more grants, as their pitch becomes less compelling than others'. They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. Often they even win the grants in the first place. The exception is that when there's some credit to be gained for the work, the professor will reappear to take center stage and give interviews. If the grad students organise, the wheels could begin to fall off quickly - if projects are delayed, grant payments won't come through. If they are not teaching classes, someone else has to teach them. If the research isn't getting done, someone has to speak with funders on calls. Someone has to write reports. There's more to be done than the professor can do, and they will rapidly end up snowed under, unable to function, and unable to deliver papers on their grant. That will make it harder for them to get their next pet project funded. Unfortunately, many people go into academia believing it to be a bastion of meritocracy where their efforts and skill will be rewarded, and they spend some number of years believing this before they start to realise what is actually going on. Some will make it to be a professor, others become disillusioned and go elsewhere. In my view though, the model is quite broken, and too reliant on a professor claiming credit for others' work without challenge, even though the work of their (hidden) team was the meaningful intellectual input, and some of them would probably be better as the professor.

amitport 5y ago
If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...
- neutronicus 5y ago
  Yeah in my experience professors are pretty good about giving credit (the student is the first author on the paper, does the conference presentations, etc). The comment above is right about the general structure (professors pitch, students deliver), though. And perhaps right about claiming credit in some fields, although not mine.

hervature 5y ago

As someone who just finished their PhD, I fear these unionization efforts will have the exact opposite effect that the students are aiming for. In particular, many universities provide subsidized housing in some of the most expensive places in the US. Housing is not a bargainable. The direct consequence is that universities will kick graduate students out of the housing, replace them with undergrad students to pay for the 10% wage increase. So the grad students get the 10% raise with a 50% housing increase. Grad students really are not in a position to bargain for much as they work 20 hours to earn their salaries which is most often teaching. They can easily be replaced with a lecturer whose full time equivalent already matches PhD stipends at this tier of universities. At least the last time I saw the numbers. Furthermore, who wants to lose a year of PhD when they already take so long to complete? Striking would really lower your lifetime earnings by delaying your real earnings another year. Furthermore, many other union benefits are moot in the PhD setting. Grievances with your supervisor are irrelevant because you're supervisor cannot be replaced. Or, again, the pain of replacement is burdened by the student. The democratic process is the democratic process and so I respect their decision but grad students unionizing is really more complex than the workforce. In particular, the union is turning over every 5-8 years. It is quite possible no one wants the union after those who voted it in and don't have a choice not to join. Your PhD is defined by your advisor and my #1 advice to future PhD students is to pick your school based on advisor before location and other things. What this means is that your choice to "join" the union is incredibly overshadowed by external forces. Again, as someone who went through this very recently, the problem is the power imbalance between the institution and the students. They have complete control over your supply of labor. That is, many (all?) US universities usually have the policy "any outside job is considered incompatible with full time PhD work and grounds for removal from the program". To me, forcing universities to pay students their prevailing market rate would solve all these issues. The first step towards this would be a cultural shift that allows part time PhD and moving towards PhD students being employees and not students. This would require a massive change to the F1 visas to allow international students to work which really pinpoints the root cause of all of this. PhD students are really in this strange limbo of being neither a student nor an employee. This limbo allows the university to use whichever definition fits their prerogative just like the NCAA. For instance, PhD students want more pay but the university decreases tuition assistance, nothing has changed.

mac-chaffee 5y ago

The lack of protections for graduate student workers is shocking IMO, especially in student housing. Grad student workers of course don't get paid vacation, sick time, or anything like that. But you can't even just lower your hours since you're paid with a fixed stipend. Contracts may be largely 20 hours per week, but they have all kinds of carve-outs where the university can force you to work up to 30/40 hours, like at the start and end of the year and during on-call (which is also 100% unpaid), taking time away from exams. And universities mismanage the hell out of grad students, such as only giving purchasing power to one person instead of having backups. Or having horrible on-call coverage where you can expect 3+ calls per night, many of which are pointlessly mandated "escalations". All of these problems can be fixed so easily (time off, on-call pay/coverage), but an enormous administration with a toxic culture of "No" prevents progress.

tomohawk 5y ago
Universities are subject to very little oversight and regulation. They basically are selling a luxury good to very unsophisticated buyers (you can't get much less sophisticated than the average 18yo). A lot of what they are selling will not be worth the time or money put in. Instead of subsidizing them like crazy, the government should be looking into their dodgy practices.
- culi 5y ago
  > Universities are subject to very little oversight and regulation. This varies by state too. Many of the UC's in California right now are basically becoming corporations. They argue that them making more money means they can better serve students, but they routinely lobby for less funding from California. That's because that funding comes with certain conditions, like accepting more Californian students. The UC I went to, UCI, is facing a huge housing crisis and has been building a ton of new housing, but the amount of in-state students they're accepting hasn't changed since before 2010. Instead they've drastically increased the number of foreign students they've accepted. Those students usually pay more than twice as much as in-state and, counter to narratives about "increased diversity", often come from a very specific class background. Their whole strategy is basically to wean themselves off of state funding so they can run the UC like a profit-driven corporation

yuppie_scum 5y ago

I can understand the value of unions in a situation where you are the employee. But Jesus, if you don’t like the school just go to a different school.

texaslonghorn5 5y ago
Right so the grad students are employees of the university.
selimthegrim 5y ago
What are you gonna tell the new school?

lnxg33k1 5y ago

I am not sure how to fairly express this concept, so I will write it as it comes, younger generations are kinda fixing all the fuck ups of millennials in terms of working conditions, in a bit maybe they will even get paid overtime, I felt always like my generation was more focused in trying to find someone to blame rather than fighting to fix things, more focused on saying "Ok boomer" or blame "GenX". And I think the main issue with millennials psychology is that they were born in a welthy and rich middle-class society and grew up spoiled, and then when in their late-teens the economy fucked them up they didn't have the strenght to fight, while maybe younger generations are born in crysis, unstability and exploitation, and might have more strenght to fix things

sheikheddy 5y ago
Do you also believe this pattern will hold as this generation ages? It could be the case that this property is really about young vs old people. Although I hope future generations will be so well off that they'll view the role of menial labor in modern society as something akin to slavery.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  That's a nice point, I am not sure, but a while ago here on HN someone posted an article showing stats about uprises going down in a proportional way to ageing of the population, so I am not a scholar of sociology but according to that article the answer to your question should be "no" :(, but maybe there will be young people of new generations who will keep the fight on, if current young generation are able to get fair working conditions which allow them to make kids and families
bick_nyers 5y ago
I just turned 26, so I straddle the line between millennial and Gen Z. I have friends that are distinctly in both generations. What you say definitely rings true to me, although I think the relationship with emerging technology also plays an interesting part here too. From all that I can tell of the situation, Gen Z is much more integrated and connected with each other due to the existing popularity of the internet and smartphones, where millennials growing up still followed that traditional model where there were strong cliques throughout school, and interests in things like the internet were still fairly obscure. That's not to say that cliques don't exist today, but it's hard for me to describe the right words behind the communication & relationship model that changed so dramatically. As a result, millennials don't feel nearly as much comraderie as Gen Z, which I believe to be playing a large role in the current societal anti-exploitation movements.

bjt2n3904 5y ago

I remember when I was in graduate school doing engineering, a union rep wandered into my lab to try and sell me on the idea. I got into the program because I was the best at what I did. It paid for tuition, medical, and a little extra on top. And this guy wanted to tell me that I didn't have it good enough, and I could have it better if he became a middleman? And that my program director was "greedy" and keeping all the fat for himself? I asked him what program he was in, he wasn't even a student at the University. Asked him what he got his degree in, and he told me some nonsense non-STEM degree. He was a worthless parasite, with no marketable skills but to leech off what other students worked for. I told him in no uncertain terms to get out of the lab, and if he ever came back I'd call campus police on him.

nharada 5y ago

I was in a grad student union at University of Michigan and it was awesome. Compared to my colleagues at other institutions I got better pay (especially taking cost of living into account) and insanely good healthcare. When our stipend contracts were up for re-negotiation I never had to worry someone didn't have my back, which is great cause as a grad student I was far too busy to worry about that myself.

pjmlp 5y ago

Interesting this is such a big subject, already on my university days in the early 1990's, student unions were a common reality in many European universities.

asdflawje5qwa35 5y ago

UW Madison teaching assistants were represented by a union [1,2] between 1970 and 2011, when its status was abruptly terminated by conservative political forces in Wisconsin. When the union was active, it was pretty clear that negotiating was not its strength, but the union was always available to help people navigate day-to-day problems that come up. Maybe it is just coincidence, but multiple independent accounts detailing toxic work environments within UW have been reported in recent years. [1] https://taa-madison.org https://taa-madison.org [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistants_Associatio...

rossdavidh 5y ago
Did you mean "represented by a union" rather than "repressed by a union"?
- asdflawje5qwa35 5y ago
  Yes! Edited to fix that.

rossdavidh 5y ago

Unionization usually works when: 1) the workers in question are not easily replaced (for example, specialized skills or long training period before they become productive) 2) the workers in question are not easily able to switch employers, so they need the protection of a union (instead of just switching employers whenever they are unhappy, such that they are normally happy) There are lots of professions which either do not meet condition 1 or do not meet condition 2. However, grad students would seem to be a classic example of a group ripe for unionization.

slibhb 5y ago
I think you're right. I'm usually skeptical of unionization but it may make sense in this case. Grad students have little leverage, the universities know this and use it. I also think there are too many grad students but that's a different issue.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  True on both.

jrochkind1 5y ago

I was a graduate student with a research assistantship position at the University of Washington in the mid 2000s, a few years after they unionized and got a contract with the UAW. By the time I was there, even though it was only a few years after the union struggle, I didn't hear much about the union, at least in my department. But what I knew it meant was: we had good health insurance, we had a guaranteed minimum stipend, we had the right to actually take vacation during university vacations, and a certain number of sick days. I knew from talking to oother students, that before the union contract, grad students with assistantships didn't necessarily have these things (it depended on department), and sometimes literally got no vacation or allowed sick leave at all. I was aware of no ways that the presence of a graduate student union harmed the grad students involved -- to the contrary of some suppositions in this thread. Grad student unions exist in dozens of universities, some for years now, so it's possible to look at actual experiences, not just forecasting supposition. I was also aware of no ways the union harmed research or academics at the university (beyond of course costing them more money to treat the grad students right). I wonder if a few years after I left, most grad students even realized what the union had won for them. The union was not very visible, once the fight for a contract was over.

chrisseaton 5y ago
I was in a union as a PhD student. The union did nonsense things like running a (bad) cafe. My pay was set by my funders so the union didn’t have any say on that or any leverage on anything else at all really. Wasn’t sure what the point was. I just opted out after a while. I don’t think they added anything of value whatsoever.
changoplatanero 5y ago
I was also a grad student at the University of Washington and my feeling was that the union was a net-negative. I remember one time in particular when my advisor had an extra funding source for me but the union rules didn't allow her to hire me in that position. It's hard for me to understand why business the union has in inserting itself in between the relationship between me and my advisor. On top of that, the union took a portion of pay pay from each check. I wish they would give me a refund.

dalbasal 5y ago

For a non-american with no union experience. What's the what with these teamsters, UE & such? What does it mean that they choose to unionize with one of them?

ta988 5y ago

This is highly needed in non-elite universities. Grad students are underpaid, and encouraged to apply for scolarship that yes will improve their resume but result in them paying taxes on them so they end up with even less money than they had before. In some places they are threatened to be kicked out of programs if they don't apply to those scolarships. This plus the repeat offender PIs that can abuse their students and get protected because they bring grant money...

throwaway787544 5y ago

I think this is what's needed on a massive scale to end rent-seeking by publishers. The problem as I see it is two-fold: one, the academic institution requires publishing to an esteemed journal. And two, the esteemed journal seeks exorbitant fees because they know the institutions want esteemed journals. If a union forced the institutions to stop requiring publishing to esteemed journals, and instead formed boards of reviewers that gave ratings to pre-prints on a donation-based server, then the big publishers would have to adapt dramatically new pricing to compete.

aborsy 5y ago

In France, students and hipsters started similar protests. Horrible outcomes ever since, producing a lot of social, political and ultimately economical problems for the country for decades to come. Having lived in France, I shiver when I hear word “union.”

aborsy 5y ago
I meant in 1968.

whatever1 5y ago

US Universities have enormous overhead costs. And unfortunately the PhD students / post docs are paying with their blood and sweat for these. My advisor had to spit 150k to the university to have me as a student (including a 20k fee for lab usage, despite the fact my PhD was a theoretical one). From that 150k I was taking 22k - 3k of mandatory health insurance. I could barely make it given that I had to pay > 12k per year for rent and utilities (with roommates). Meanwhile the University would splash money to get athletic coaches or give bonuses to the executives or open branches in dictatorships. I think unions should focus on university management, because they have been acting unchecked for way too long.

ceeplusplus 5y ago
It's mostly caused by the explosion of lifestyle inflation at universities. Rather than just providing an education and doing research they are now expected to be mental health counselors, promote "diversity" (aka we need more of certain skin colors over other skin colors), and make "democratic" decisions. In practice this means everything is filled with bureaucracy and you need to go through 5 committees and 3 vice chancellors before anything gets done. Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1 schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.
- whatever1 5y ago
  How diversity has anything to do with institutional mismanagement. And no, US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show.
  - ceeplusplus 5y ago
    Because these deans of "diversity" get paid a lot of money to bikeshed about useless issues while not actually having any impact on the school. It's run exclusively as a PR stunt to satisfy the whiners in the school. It's one example of the many cases of unneeded, useless headcount in universities that's contributing to bloat. I can't name a single time where anyone with the word diversity in their title at my former college did anything concrete. > US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show. That's not really the case especially in public universities. If you want to make a change that might step on a lot of toes you need to get buy in from people. They aren't explicit democracies where everyone votes, but nonetheless you need to secure acceptance from people to get things done. To give you an example of the useless bureaucracy, I once had to submit a reimbursement for some research expenses and was bounced around for several months between different forms and different people. Any 1 part of the reimbursement that didn't match the forms exactly meant the entire thing would be rejected. This was to access grant money that wasn't even the university's, it was the lab's. In corporate settings people don't give a shit and approve it as long as it looks legitimate.

jl2718 5y ago

Is this not a direct violation of the student visa?

thylacine222 5y ago
Why would it be? International workers have the same labor rights that American workers do.
- jl2718 5y ago
  Yes, and working is a violation of the student visa.
  - overspeed 5y ago
    That is incorrect. On-campus employment is allowed in the student visa and graduate student appointments are typically RA positions which qualify as employment under this definition.
    - jl2718 5y ago
      CPT and OPT are interesting cases for collective bargaining. Not my area of expertise. However, I found a different answer that seems like a more concrete protection regardless of labor classification: > The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) cannot ask you questions about your union membership or participation in lawful union activity. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognized the importance of enforcing labor laws and signed an agreement with the Department of Labor (DOL) that states it is essential to ensure proper wages and working conditions for all covered workers regardless of immigration status. It is your right to belong to a union and being a union member cannot affect your visa application. https://www.wearegage.org/international-student-rights https://www.wearegage.org/international-student-rights

Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago

I know of one tenured professor in a pretty big East Coast college who spends his time finding graduate students about to launch a start-up, and then demands 20% equity or threatens said students for working on commercial projects on college time. Guy is easily a multi millionaire through this alone right now.

ok123456 5y ago

Solidarity Forever.

meatsauce 5y ago
Whenever I read this, I think of some out of touch career academic who has never experienced the real world, yet knows exactly how the world should be, and can't wait to tell you.
- ok123456 5y ago
  k. I was a union carpenter before I went back to school.

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TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

There's a rot in US academia ... ballooning costs, useless degrees that confer no perceivable boost in the job market, swollen bureaucracies. Unions might help one part of the ecosystem: the grad students, but it could also make overall reform harder. I look at US Academia's complexities and it seems to me an easier approach to reform is to start from scratch via new institutions.

citizenpaul 5y ago

Good! The grad student system is incredibly broken. Grad students are basically slaves at worst or indentured servants at best. The worst part is the universitys all know this and dont care because the university gets massive benifits from having highly educated slaves producing intellectual property that can be sold and licensed. The grad student of course gets no benifit from this. Its like the work for exposure BS except worse because the student often has no alternative. Especially foreign students on tight immigration visa deadlines. Thus doesnt even start to touch the IP subject where universities are public funded and have no right to the IP produced there in the first place...

andreyk 5y ago
hmm, as a grad student a lot of this seems hugely hyperbolic to me "slaves at worst or indentured servants" is a rather harsh way to put it, it's not like you can't quit your PhD (many people do this after getting their Masters, so the times spent in the program is not wasted). "gets massive benifits from having highly educated slaves producing intellectual property that can be sold and licensed" is again way overstating things. Very little of research is worth much as far as IP; in my 5 years as grad student I only know of one research project that resulted in a patent. The production of IP is much more of a thing in industry research, as would make sense. "The grad student of course gets no benifit from this." in CS (especially AI, where I work) this is not really true, doing research lets you get really good research positions in industry, even assuming you don't want to stick around in academia. Don't get me wrong, there is a ton wrong about academia/the grad student system. I really wish I was paid anything near my value on the job market. But I think your view is way too negative.
- citizenpaul 5y ago
  >I only know of one research project that resulted in a patent. You do realize that there is a large number of people that have only patented a handful of things and retired? They robbed that opportunity from you plain and simple. Universities patenting IP in the first place is inarguabley wrong . They are funded with tax dollars and have no right to the IP in the first place. At the very least all IP should be released into public domain, more ideally with right of first refusal to the grad students involved. I am only closely involved with people in the grad life not in it myself. I may be wrong as how bad the grad student thing is, no benefits is dramatic i suppose. However there is massive manipulation of young people inexperienced in negotiation involved, double so when there is no recourse after the fact like quitting/leaving/changing/moving. I hear and see endless things that make my skin crawl from grad friends and they are most definitely beting taken advantage of in power gap that is funded with tax dollars.

asdff 5y ago

Not uncommon for grad students with supposed "good" stipends in high cost of living areas to be only taking home $2300 a month or so, where rents are probably $2200 a month now for a 1br apartment. What do they expect grad students to do? You almost have to share a bedroom, which imo is ridiculous for a job that requires a B.S. where you might quite literally be designing multi million dollar scientific experiments.

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milofeynman 5y ago

I want to see PICU attendings at academic universities unionize. Some of their schedules should be illegal. 14-16 7-day shifts a year, one of those Fri, Sat, Sun shifts they work from 7am through their shift the next day which means Fri and Sat are approximately 7am-4pm the next day with NO guaranteed sleep. They also have other random night shifts throughout the year for a total of 35 or so overnight shifts, but those start at 4pm. Those ~33 hour shifts should be illegal

einpoklum 5y ago

Unionization, especially academic workers' unionization, and double-especially junior, untenured researcher unionization is ultra-important. The recent couple of centuries, especially the last one, have brought an increased application of commercial-corporation-type relations into academia, with graduate researchers and teachers being the object of degradation of both material welfare and intra-academic status. I wrote about this when I was involved in unionizing grads in my own university - not in the US, but still: https://app.box.com/s/osnf6xfqgqgvmnat6ldq https://app.box.com/s/osnf6xfqgqgvmnat6ldq (or in Hebrew: https://app.box.com/shared/l3iypqd2yi https://app.box.com/shared/l3iypqd2yi ) I wish the MIT grads all the best in their struggle. However, when looking at their "Path to unionization" page: https://mitgsu.org/roadmap https://mitgsu.org/roadmap , I am worried they are too timid of an endeavor. They write: > The real goal of the campaign is to secure a union contract A contract is never the goal. Just like signing an employment contract as an individual is not the goal - the employment conditions, and the relations and standing in the workplace - are the goal. A contract is at best a means to reach the goal, and at worst - a fetish. I've seen many a unionization drive fixate on negotiations and a contract, not on building "shop-floor" power, on the individual and collective level. When grads walk around knowing that mistreatment by administration or supervisors will result in harsh collective action by their peers - from public shaming of those involved to work disruption if necessary, contract or no contract - that's when things have changed. But if what you get is a link to a piece of paper saying that in theory you can seek some arbitration somehow, but in practice your daily life remains the same, then you haven't gained much.

tomohawk 5y ago

They don't say how the election was done. Was it secret ballot, or one of the union-favored methods such as card check. The non-secret ballot methods are notorious for allowing pressure tactics to be used. Do grad students still have a right to work without joining, or will they be forced to join?

MrPatan 5y ago

Economics students? That'd be delicious

bigcat123 5y ago

wanderingmind 5y ago

The most important thing we must be teaching undergrads is to avoid grad school like a plague that it is which will suck everything out of you and leave you begging on the streets.

mprime1 5y ago
Meanwhile in a different country I got basically paid to go to grad school. The already low yearly fees were discounted for good grades and jobs for students are provided to help with living expenses. Ended grad school positive on my bank account, loved studying what I studied (distributed systems). The US school system has some upsides, but the whole student debt thing is pretty F’d up. Edit: spelling

rmbyrro 5y ago

I'm confused, is this a union of workers in the MIT campus or really MIT students? If it's really the latter, do studying count as work now?

alasdair_ 5y ago

Do student athletes next!

killjoywashere 5y ago

Rich kids like Apple, everybody starts buying Apple. Rich kids unionize ... everybody starts to unionize? Maybe?

smugma 5y ago

It's news that MIT is doing it, but there is precedent for this in the US. The University of California system (includes Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSC, which had a wildcat strike during COVID) unionized nearly 40 years ago, and have had many labor strikes over the years [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/grad-student-union-finally-busts-uc https://www.science.org/content/article/grad-student-union-f...

joeman1000 5y ago

This is sorely needed in Australia. Uni quality is incredibly poor and no one is held accountable.