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Temple Student Strike Turns Ugly as School Ends Some Tuition Aid
- LarryMullins 4y agoA grad student strike. They're striking as employees, not students.
- mrstone 4y agoStill complete and utter dipshit move from the admin.
- LarryMullins 4y agoCertainly. I was just confused why students would pay for class then refuse to attend. Striking grad students makes a lot more sense.
- ro_bit 4y agoFor reference, during the recent UC-wide strike, student strikers were allowed to keep their tuition remission (however, the university is clawing back paychecks for striking workers, as they are legally allowed to do. We had strike pay anyway, so it's fine)
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y agoOK, but by whom and why? This is important, because if it depended on administrators deciding to love their grad students again (vs mandated by judge, vs required by law), that cannot be the basis for certainty into the future.
- willcipriano 4y ago[flagged]
- ro_bit 4y agoThis isn't a halting of paychecks during the strike. Tuition remission is awarded at the beginning of each semester a student is working. This would be like clawing back a signing bonus made to workers before a strike action, which from a cursory google search seems to be legally ambiguous at best.
- willcipriano 4y agoThey arent working this semester, you can't take a signing bonus then not show up for work.
- klyrs 4y ago> you can't take a signing bonus then not show up for work. You can if your union goes on strike between you getting your signing bonus and your start date. Striking is not the same as quitting in the eyes of the law.
- pwinnski 4y agoIf you are part of a strike, then yes, actually, you are legally protected against some forms of retaliation, including possibly this form. We'll see how it plays out in court, but it is by no means as simple as you're laying out. This is not "people decided to not show up for work," it's a collective bargaining action against a very clearly hostile employer.
- ro_bit 4y agoStriking is not the same as quitting. If negotiations were ratified next week, workers would return and could not face retaliation in benefits or pay for striking. The university could withhold pay for missed shifts during the strike and potentially clawback a prorated portion of the remission at best, but clawing back remissions in their entirety and charging late fees for not paying by a deadline is bad faith and won't be looked upon fondly by the NRLB. While the decision will likely end up being made by a court, to me this definitely seems like illegal retaliation and not a case of students biting off more than they could chew.
- TillE 4y agoAs various lawyers have commented on Twitter, this seems like an insanely blatant violation of labor laws. Just a straight up written confession of illegal retaliation. Unless they have some obscure exemption that nobody else knows about, I cannot imagine how the university's legal counsel signed off on this.
- akavi 4y agoAre companies not allowed to stop paying wages to striking employees? Or is it that tuition remission is viewed as distinct from wages legally?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chrisabrams 4y agoStudents are not employees.
- stefan_ 4y agoThese are graduate students, who generally are and that do a large part of the teaching at any university.
- thorncorona 4y agoWhen I was working for my uni I got a W-2.
- thwayunion 4y agoYes, but if you were a grad student your W-2 almost certainly didn't include your tuition rebate as part of your total income. And the university sure as hell didn't pay taxes on it.
- selimthegrim 4y agoYou can claim it depending on your student scholarship (NSF GRF) or postdoctoral status and what it says on your 1098.
- fencepost 4y agoCurious about what the university schedule is for withdrawing for the semester, and whether it's feasible for the students to take a semester off.
- munk-a 4y agoDuring COVID temple was gratuitously cruel in allowing students to cancel and forcing in-person teaching. I'd assume any cancellation window is as minimal as possible.
- fencepost 4y agoI was actually wondering if they'd specifically waited until after a key deadline to announce our implement this, just as a targeted "eff you" to the students.
- shishy 4y agoBone headed move. They must have miscalculated if they think the students will cave to this pressure. Also, how can they take away tuition reimbursement for the whole semester if the strike hasnt been that long? Garbage administration. I hope the students win and that this isnt the new normal.
- juujian 4y agoIf there is any group that is unlikely to back down and fold it's probably students. Of course the university also has an endowment of $873 million and whatever administrator wrote that must have a very cushy job. This seems really poorly thought out.
- bruceb 4y ago>They must have miscalculated if they think the students will cave to this pressure. Have they miscalculated? Not a comment on the right or wrong of this action but the article says this 80% of similar grad students have not gone on strike. Would be good to know how distributed across academic fields this strike is. If it is a few from each, then it seems Temple can just wait them out. If it is focused on just one area maybe not. This article is very light on detail.
- VanTheBrand 4y agoNo, the article doesn’t say that’s, it says that in a statement the university said that. They are (if not outright lying) surely calculating that number in the most favorable way possible probably doing things like include remote grad students, etc.
- bruceb 4y agotrue, but if we want to get technical it says over 80%. Could they provide misleading stats sure. But the article also uses a pic from provided by the union which is very tight and so hard to gauge how many people are physically walking the picket line. Could also be misleading.
- jgil 4y ago
- bjourne 4y agoIf waived tuition fees is part of the graduate students benefits do they have to include it in their tax declarations? Do they pay tax on this "benefit"?
- vuln 4y ago> Free or reduced tuition provided by eligible educational institutions to its employees may be excludable from gross income as a qualified tuition reduction. Whether a tuition reduction is a “qualified” tuition reduction and excludable from income depends on whether it is for education below or at the graduate level and whether the tuition reduction represents payment for services. https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-governments/qualified-tuition-reduction https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-...
- rwalle 4y agoThat was the focus of a fight when Trump was pushing for tax reform in 2017. Students would need to pay taxes on the remitted tuition which can be a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, which is a lot of money -- many don't even have $20k in total annual salary. In the end that part of the law did not change and students did not pay that extra tax.
- analog31 4y agoHigher education is like what they say about airline pricing: No two people on the plane paid the same price for their ticket. When I was in grad school, we referred to tuition as "funny money." The tuition level is arbitrary and simply represents a worst case maximum. What each student pays is determined by some other means. There was also a threat to tax the tuition waiver during the Reagan administration, when I was in grad school. It caused a lot of consternation among students, but the university eventually told us that we'd be taken care of, and we didn't worry about it.
- jurassic 4y agoGood luck to Temple operating without the grad student labor. They are the backbone of all major universities.
- tssva 4y ago80% of their grad student labor is continuing to work.
- tomrod 4y agoMeaning one in five classes will lack an instructor or grader, one in five professors will lack people they can pile work onto, and the placement rates this year might be abysmal, tanking their program in the future. It's a strike. Don't confuse percent striking with impact of the strike. A 20% haircut on essential, low paid laborers is a big haircut.
- jgil 4y agoAccording to a university official, with no explanation of how they came up with that number. Unions typically needs a certain percent of the vote to approve a strike. IMO — this will impact prospective students’ opinions towards the university for a longer time period than the strike.
- tssva 4y agoThe union represents 750 grad students and 150 are striking.
- thwayunion 4y ago150 are publicly striking. If I were a CS grad student at Temple, I definitely wouldn't strike. But after this hooplah I definitely wouldn't be slinging code at $10/hr either. After all, I'm a good programmer who can write papers and prove theorems and I make $2xK a year. What are they gonna do if I fuck off from running recitations and work on my own stuff or try and sell out my advisor's few half decent ideas to the local VCs? Fire me? LOL.
- cabaalis 4y agoMatching tshirts and signs for a decent sized group aren't cheap. I see stuff like this often in protests. Who pays?
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoIn my experience the union pays, both with fees and also through fundraising. See: the Harper collins union strike was able to go 50+ days, including holidays, with the crowdfunding of a supportive literary community.
- fckgw 4y agoThe union does. That's one of the things your union dues go towards.
- Animats 4y agoFew unions today have enough money for that. The UAW, maybe.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jltsiren 4y agoYour intuition fails here. Resources generally scale with the size of the group, while the price per individual goes down. If you order in sufficient quantities, you should be able to get a decent t-shirt with a single-colored print for ~$5.
- richwater 4y ago“If they choose to strike, i.e., stop working, they would lose any benefits that are connected to their jobs, including pay, free health care and tuition remission. Over 80 percent of the TUGSA-covered students have chosen not to strike, and are still working and still enjoying the benefits to which they are entitled, including tuition remission.” Pretty Simple.
- munk-a 4y agoHonestly it is - when an employer starts pulling crap like this it's a pretty clear sign that the labor action is necessary.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sonofhans 4y ago> “Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package,” explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser. Here's the problem -- that's a business solution. This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university. The administration is too busy filing TPS reports to realize that they're curating something actually important -- the future of this country's youth. In other ways it's just cookie-cutter union-busting from coal-mining days, 120 years ago, and I expect in the long term it will work just as well (i.e., not).
- calvinmorrison 4y agoMy Alma-Mater, more interested in hiring administrators than new professors, or even retaining full time professors. Schools a joke, especially this one.
- munk-a 4y agoYup - a relative of mine has been an associate professor there for fourteen years. Giving out tenure is something I'm pretty sure they'll only do if they're backed into a corner.
- hackyhacky 4y agoAssociate professors are typically tenured. Did you mean assistant professor?
- thwayunion 4y agoTypically. Not always. Some institutions/departments will promote to associate without tenure. At those same places, they'll typically let you stick around for quite a while as long as you keep bringing in the money. In every field there are at least a few departments that are notoriously stingy with tenure.
- munk-a 4y agoNo, they are an associate professor - although I may have misspoken about tenure, I am not certain about their status. I was under the assumption that associate professors weren't covered to the same extent.
- tssva 4y agoThe article leaves out the fact that PA law doesn't allow paying or otherwise providing any compensation to striking public employees which these grad students are.
- thwayunion 4y agoTuition remission isn't pay or compensation. Very explicitly so. Universities even lobbied to maintain this status quo during the TCJA process.
- tssva 4y agoIt is according to PA Code 101.6.
- ninjagoo 4y agoThis is really interesting because I couldn't reach the NLRB website: If you query cloudflare's dns server 1.1.1.1#53 for nlrb.gov it returns ABANDONED. This prevented me from finding relevant regulations until I diagnosed the issue and disabled Cloudflare DNS. If you're currently unable to reach nlrb.gov, that might be why.
- legitster 4y agoI'm a bit confused - striking workers don't normally retain pay and benefits. I don't understand what would make graduate students any different? If they were being punished just for organizing or demonstrating it would probably be a different matter. But I think the University probably has good legal standing here to say "we're just not compensating them for work they didn't do".
- loeg 4y agoGrad student "tuition" isn't pay. It's a made up number transferred from the university to itself.
- elashri 4y agoWorse than this, they charge faculty grants this amount. Beside the percentage, they take from the grant itself. On average, we are talking about the university taking anything between 50-70% of any effective money for research. The other 30% pay for student's stipend, research expenses and equipments.
- thwayunion 4y agoAnd even worse than that, there's a good chance that most of the grad students being charged for "tuition" in this case aren't even taking any courses for most of the semesters they're in grad school. I have no doubt some of these students are being charged huge tuition bills without being enrolled in a single course.
- legitster 4y agoNot necessarily. There are plenty of grad students who do pay full price and do not take on any of the responsibilities.
- thwayunion 4y agoThis is true but irrelevant. The students striking are all phd students with TAships or RAships.
- 72948957 4y agoTo be honest, I don't really get the point of the strike. The grad students are not only getting a free education, they're also getting paid a stipend on top of that. Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc. At least in STEM fields, anyone in grad school probably could have gotten a higher-paying job in industry, but chose to attend grad school, knowing the tradeoffs, because it's what they wanted to do with their life.
- nitwit005 4y ago"Free" education, except that they have to work for the university, and, as you note, they lose out on all the income they could have earned during those years. It's effectively quite expensive. Some of the complaints from prior strikes were rather basic issues like not being able to afford nessesary dental care.
- mooooooooooooo 4y agoWe possibly have encountered graduate students with differing lifestyles, but a lot of the grad students I know in the natural sciences have grueling schedules between taking classes, TAing, and conducting research. The way these activities are structured may not correspond to a typical 9-5 but they’re still intense in their own right. To add onto this - attending conferences isn’t always on the universities dime, often it comes out of grants and other associated project costs that are allotted for your research. Maybe the university does foot the bill in other cases, but these are marginal costs when compared to the realizable value brought by graduate students in the form of monetizable knowledge and subsidized teaching costs. The latter point is at the crux of most tension between graduate students and university administrations, and there’s a large imbalance between the tangible value that grad students (and most academic researchers) bring to universities and the way that they’re compensated.
- DiscourseFan 4y agoWho is going to teach anyone in your equation, if everything was about money there wouldn't be professors to educate the STEM majors. There is more to building a society than balancing the checkbooks.
- anigbrowl 4y ago[flagged]
- throwawaysleep 4y agoWhy would they be paid during a strike? As far as I know, it is pretty common to shut off benefits to strikers as they aren’t working.
- hypomanic 4y agoTuition remission is just a made up number. It's not like money you get paid or have to pay tax on our anything like that. Half the time you don't even have any corresponding coursework.
- hypomanic 4y agoLike imagine your job decides not to pay you (fine) but then finds a loophole to charge you twice your salary.
- neilv 4y agoIf these grad students are in research-oriented programs, with an RA or TA job, the tuition might be Hollywood Accounting anyway -- a number the students might not have even seen before, nor even realize exists -- and now it's been weaponized.
- munk-a 4y agoYup - quite the same as healthcare prices in the US. Because all the white collar folks have good insurance those costs are hidden and the insanely astronomical amounts are only ever levied against those without any recourse. The actual graduate program prices are just paper numbers to make accounting go brrrr - and suddenly a bunch of people (and bear in mind grad students are usually super broke to begin with) will need to come up with those BS charges and face escalating late fees if they fail to comply.
- ETH_start 4y agoThere is no good reason at all for society to accept and institutionalize the sense of entitlement that unionizing workers have. You don't get any moral right to extra-contractual benefits just because you agree to an employment contract. Almost all of the problems society has emanate from the ideological narratives of victimhood (e.g. the superficially plausible but fundamentally fallacious notion that parties with different levels wealth cannot engage in fair negotiations in the absence of a regulatory straightjacket being placed on the wealthier party) created to rationalize this sense of entitlement. This institutionalized entitlement creates massive rent-seeking/inefficiency: https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-workers-earn-143000-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-... In the private sector, it guts industries, and thus harms workers at large, for the short term benefit of a select group of workers, e.g. Detroit was the richest city in the US, with the highest per capita, in 1950. 70 years later, after it was taken over by the UAW Union, it's a shadow of its former self.
- nitwit005 4y agoA free market means people can always walk off the job. They can do it in an organized way, as that just requires talking to each other. It's just a matter of bargaining power in the end. The, so called, fair negotiations you speak of.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoAgreed. Compensation should depend on bargaining power. The problem and challenge is when striking workers actually dont have it. What if Temple is 100% OK with irreconcilable differences with the striking workers.
- ETH_start 4y agoThe problem is not people walking away en masse from a job. The problem is laws that suppress the free market to favor unionization, like prohibiting employers from offering yellow dog contracts.
- munk-a 4y ago
- insane_dreamer 4y agoThis is going to end up in court, and I hope justice is served to Temple.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoAs a father of a baby I wonder what higher education is going to be in 20 years time. I see a fairly long, gradual decline in prestige and effectiveness of universities - at least in the English speaking world - going back a couple of decades at this point. More bureaucratic, more corporate, filled with ever more political extremists. In my jurisdiction at least it's largely used as a pathway for migrants to get a permanent visa - language skill requirements are barely enforced and cheating is rife. I'm questioning what the value of a piece of paper from such a place will really be in 2040. I question what it is now.
- midoridensha 4y ago>As a father of a baby I wonder what higher education is going to be in 20 years time. >I see a fairly long, gradual decline in prestige and effectiveness of universities - at least in the English speaking world - going back a couple of decades at this point. I see a long and continuing decline of all of society in most English-speaking countries right now. I think in 50 years, English may still be the universal language of business and international commerce, but the Anglophone countries are going to be very different from now, probably collapsed and/or broken apart, and definitely not leading the world. They're certainly not a place I'd ever want to raise a child, especially America.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y agoI agree. certainly calls into question 529 investments today.
- DiscourseFan 4y agoI know a lot of people who've worked in University administration and they weren't bad people at all, they genuinely cared about students and wanted to improve their livelihoods and the society around them. Unfortunately they were all pushed out...
- thwayunion 4y agoThis seems incredibly short-sided. Graduate students are the “individual contributors” of academia. A Computer Science PhD student typically makes somewhere between $25K and $40K. At well-regarded universities, the bar is relatively high. Most of my office mates in Graduate School either had an FAANG/high-finance offer or actually did 1-2 years at one of those employers before starting their PhD program. Universities get skilled labor at a six figure discount. Professors are also comparatively under-paid. Maintaining a productive university environment is not easy. They are delicate environments that can go sour very quickly under bad leadership. And when they go sour, everything grinds to a halt in a way that's difficult to see from the outside before it's way too late. I serve very regularly on grant review panels both for my employer and for federal agencies. To be a bit blunt, I'll probably have a bit of a bias against especially junior Temple faculty... that might not be fair, but shrugs my priors about the quality of new Temple faculty and their ability to get good work done in Temple's environment have cratered watching this play out. Hopefully someone in Temple's admin reads this.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago[dead]
- torgian 4y agoTemple University is one of the worst universities to go to. They have one in Japan, and the locals _know_ its a terrible university, yet people still got o it for some reason. No idea how they're still around. Good marketing I guess?
- cashsterling 4y agoGraduate student compensation and treatment is a serious problem at many Universities across the country. I had a pretty good experience in grad school... great department... great advisor... a stipend on which I could actually live. But man oh man... I know of a lot of work colleagues who were treated like shit in grad school: - effective pay far below minimum wage - no medical or crappy medical, far below university staff benefit levels - forced 6-7 day a week schedules - verbal abuse and intimidation from professors - Advisor's holding students back from defending their thesis for years to squeeze more work out of them (this should be a crime) I hope everyone thinking about going to Temple is watching this carefully and making other plans. Also... under the circumstances, I find Temple's DEI statement (https://diversity.temple.edu/ https://diversity.temple.edu/) to be complete bullshit.
- wbowman 4y agoPrescient that the character Alan Snyder, from 2016 TV series Colony, is by vocation a college administrator, who wheeled and dealed his way to a position of power in the collaborationist government of a post-alien-invasion Earth.