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.
> 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.
I'm pretty sure people were saying the same things during the early labor movements. "They'll just replace you, they have all the control, you'll just screw up your life." The thing is, they were probably right. For a while it really sucked. But the result in the long run was that the generations that followed ended up starting with a much less lopsided power imbalance.
You acknowledge that there are problems and have ideas for where you'd like things to go. What you don't have is a proposal for bringing about the cultural shift you desire. How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing the workers?
Organizing workers does not necessarily require joining a huge national labor union that was obviously not meant for the type of problems grad students face. It's fucking weird to me that so many schools have joined United Auto Workers. I don't see any real changes to the problems with academic training at any of those schools. And I don't see why UE will be better here. The power imbalance in grad school is very different from the typical labor situations:
1) Grad student roles are extremely heterogeneous compared to laborers. The union at Harvard for example is trying to represent both TAs and RAs, in departments ranging from literature to biology to math, all as part of one collective bargaining agreement. There are huge differences in the problems those students face, and that's before getting into how different student experiences can be even amongst e.g. biology RAs.
2) Grad students receive atypical compensation, not just the degree itself but also things that are clearly not quantified by the union orgs - the (often falsely promised) academic freedom to pursue independent research interests and the time and resources to do some learning for the sake of it. Further, for RAs it can be impossible to untangle work that counts towards the degree requirement and work that is being done in exchange for stipend/other benefits.
3) Graduate school is only a short portion of someone's overall career in the grand scheme of things, while existing unions mainly focus on jobs that can be/often are lifelong. Grad school is by definition a stepping stone. Nobody asks "what do you want to do when you're done being a cop".
4) Most grad students at least enter their programs with the goal of themselves reaching professorship. Auto workers are not trying to build towards owning an automobile factory.
5) There is not a sub-20% acceptance rate for becoming an electrical worker. At many of the schools that are forming unions lately, there are tons of departments with highly competitive admissions processes for the PhD. Some at MIT are easily in the single digits acceptance rate, and this is amongst a specialized pool to begin with.
Thank you for actually engaging in a meaningful discussion.
> How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing the workers?
I alluded to it, but this change requires massive changes at the government level. The first thing I would like to see changed is that universities cannot count waived tuition as a cost of a grad student. Trump actually proposed to tax these waivers taxed at the individual level. Short term, this would have crushed students. But, imagine working for a car dealership and part of your pay was a new car, of course it should be taxed. This tax would have really brought this distortion that this causes in the market. Second, the student-employee limbo needs to be solved. Personally, I think being allowed to pay your PhD tuition should be allowed. That is, if I can make $100k outside, I should be allowed to pay $50k in tuition and work at my own pace. I don't want to advocate for government intervention, but it seems to me that if there is a tuition, that is an implicit admission that that is the price a student would need to pay for the services of being a student. After the university admits me, they should have no control which route I decide to go: TA + research or work + research. This would require rethinking the F1/J1 visa.
Now, why do I think organizing workers won't solve this issue. Because, it does not break the student-employee limbo. As I have pointed out in other comments, PhD students enjoy many benefits of being a student. Chief among them, international students can come here to "study". However, the problem is that your status at the university is dependent on your progress as a student with many programs having hard caps on the number of years to complete certain tasks. This is fundamentally opposed to organized labor because they cannot bargain for changing degree requirements.
I did a math PhD at USCB, where grad students are represented by the UAW. I didn’t find any of this to be true, in particular the university would not be able to provide the same level of service without graduate student TAs.
Any of what? You felt with the union that you could change your advisor on a dime? How many of your fellow students did so?
> the university would not be able to provide the same level of service without graduate student TAs
Just factually not true. The difference between a senior and a first year PhD student is quite literally one year. Plus, graduate student TAs are not the university's only source of TAs. At $100k/year, there would be many former PhDs willing to work at the university full time. That's what I meant by full time equivalent. My stipend as a PhD student was $35k plus subsidized housing. That's already pretty aggressively close to the upper bound.
At my institution the 9-month pay was less than $25k per year (from 2010-2016) with subsidized housing (still pretty expensive) and family on MediCal when my wife worked part time.
How are you going to replace 50 TAs with full time employees? Class sizes were already 700 students in basic calculus and up to 300 in engineering calculus.
The median household income in California is $77.5k [1]. I'll emphasize household. Your 9-month pay was for 20 hours, that means $25k is actually $66.6k annualized which does not include your subsidized housing nor for inflation. The economics just simply is not there. Sure, students might be able to squeak 10-20% in wage increase at the cost of all other university voluntary support such as student group support and things like free gym memberships.
Furthermore, I can very easily see one "professional" TA replacing 5 grad students. Just use HN search to find how many people's advisors told them that teaching does not win Nobel prizes. To be frank, most (not all) grad students do the job poorly. First, the professional TA automatically is 2 grad students because they can devote twice as much time, but then there is economies of scale where they can teach the same stuff multiple times in the larger classes. Again, the number of people would would be signing up to be a professional calculus TA for $100k would be very high.
Sure, you switch out four calculus TAs for calculus with professional TAs. Who is going to TA deep reinforcement learning, or under-actuated robotics, or any of the major-specific courses that takes a lot of relevant knowledge to actually teach properly? Any of the people out there who has the insights to TA these classes thoroughly enough are gonna point and laugh at you if you offer them anything below $200K.
Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual "labor" that the graduate students provide for their research labs. The number of professors in Computer Science at MIT who actually writes code at least once a week may shock you, but the truth is, for MIT to be on the top of the food chain someone needs to keep the wheels turning.
> Also, seems like you are completely ignoring the actual "labor"
But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that (unless you are a research assistant). That is "studying" which I keep pointing out is the whole issue. Which feeds back to your point about highly-specific knowledge TAs. The implicit agreement is that the university provides you with the training required to TA these classes in exchange for being a TA. They normally call this waived tuition. That is, they are supplying you with a +50k benefit for free which is how they draw many people to begin with.
Not particularly, I gave that example because I was TAing that class last semester. Incidentally, it seems we have more in common than I thought!
> But I'm not, you are literally not paid for that (unless you are a research assistant).
This may be a difference in experience and expectation, but in my experience I've always seen graduate student salaries paid out to Ph.D. students employed by the university as an RA or a TA. If you are neither of those, then you do have to pay tuition to the university.
> That is, they are supplying you with a +50k benefit...
Which is another problem with not having a union -- the university unilaterally sets these price stickers without anyone challenging them, and then "waives" it and appearing generous. Without a union, MIT is free to inflate the sticker price of a graduate "education" by 20% a year, thus giving students a 20% raise every year while their life situations don't improve at all. The current student body had no mechanism to prevent it or challenge the administration on shady practices, but hopefully this will change with the union.
> The implicit agreement is that the university provides you with the training required to TA these classes in exchange for being a TA.
Finally, most Ph.D. students after their second year won't even take a class but are already TAing, so by your definition the necessary training is already complete; but they are indentured to work for far below market rate for the three years left on their Ph.D., because...?
> Ph.D. students employed by the university as an RA or a TA.
The vast majority of students are paid through TA (which you have admitted that you were last semester). This means all your other "duties" was your "study". I agree with everything you say, but there is literally nothing a union can do about these things because it these things are not your job. I know it feels like a job. Writing code, SSHing into the cluster, analyzing results. All things that I continued to due in my industry job after graduation. But, this is the key part students don't seem to understand, you are not employed by the university to do this. It does not matter if it is part of a course. This is the sole reason international students are able to come on F1/J1. Legally and practically, you are doing this under the guidance of your advisor. Others have commented in this thread as well, RA becomes very difficult to separate what an RA tasks are and what your PhD student tasks are, but this is the crux of the issue. Your union might be able to fight for increase RA pay, but your advisor/department/university can just forego your RA and accept your student work.
> If you are neither of those, then you do have to pay tuition to the university.
Then you are not an employee and cannot unionize. At least, not in a trade union.
> Which is another problem with not having a union -- the university unilaterally sets these price stickers without anyone challenging them, and then "waives" it and appearing generous...
This is the problem with these unions. They make it appear to the students that they can solve these problems, but they legally cannot. A union cannot bargain for these things. Just like a union cannot bargain with Ford on the price of a F150, a grad student union cannot tell the university how to run its programs. At least at my institution, some students thought that, if we unionized, they could negotiate for fewer teaching requirements. The very thing that makes them employees and eligible to be in the union.
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.