Teaching Assistants Say They've Won Millions From UC Berkeley (vice.com) 72
The university underemployed more than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in computer science and engineering -- in order to avoid paying union benefits, UAW Local 2865 says. From a report: The University of California at Berkeley owes student workers $5 million in back pay, a third-party arbitrator ruled on Monday, teaching assistants at the university say. More than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science department -- are eligible for compensation, the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865, which represents 19,000 student workers in the University of California system, told Motherboard. In some cases, individual students will receive around $7,500 per term, the union says. "This victory means that the university cannot get away with a transparent erosion of labor rights guaranteed under our contract," Nathan Kenshur, head steward of UAW Local 2865 and a third-year undergraduate math major at Berkeley, told Motherboard.
Thanks to their union contract, students working 10 hours a week or more at Berkeley are entitled to a full waiver of their in-state tuition fees, $150 in campus fees each semester, and childcare benefits. (Graduate students also receive free healthcare.) But in recent years, Berkeley has avoided paying for these benefits, according to UAW Local 2865. Instead, the university has hired hundreds of students as teaching assistants with appointments of less than 10 hours a week. On Monday, an arbitrator agreed upon by the UAW and the university ruled that Berkeley had intentionally avoided paying its student employees' benefits by hiring part-time workers. It ordered the university to pay the full tuition amount for students who worked these appointments between fall 2017 and today, a press release from the union says.
Thanks to their union contract, students working 10 hours a week or more at Berkeley are entitled to a full waiver of their in-state tuition fees, $150 in campus fees each semester, and childcare benefits. (Graduate students also receive free healthcare.) But in recent years, Berkeley has avoided paying for these benefits, according to UAW Local 2865. Instead, the university has hired hundreds of students as teaching assistants with appointments of less than 10 hours a week. On Monday, an arbitrator agreed upon by the UAW and the university ruled that Berkeley had intentionally avoided paying its student employees' benefits by hiring part-time workers. It ordered the university to pay the full tuition amount for students who worked these appointments between fall 2017 and today, a press release from the union says.
MBA mentality in action? (Score:2)
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Skirting the labor laws? They followed the labor laws as far as I can tell.
Is paying the exact amount for a product "skirting the theft laws" ?
I'm not sure why their behavior as an employer is even remotely questionable.
They have a set of rules to follow and they followed them.
What does this have to do with rolling back child labor laws?
I'm just really confused here.
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If that's true, then why did the 3rd party arbitrator find against them? They signed the contract, they violated the contract, now they have to pay up per the contract according to the arbitrator they chose.
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I think that they have fallen victim of a legal concept which is called "taking the piss".
This is where, for example, you have a legal obligation which kicks in at 10 hours, so you pay people to work for 9 hours, 50 minutes to avoid the legal obligation. This kind of trickery never goes well as tribunal, or in a court.
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$91.06/hr.
See the below post [slashdot.org] where someone calculates the undergrad TA pay rate at $91.06/hr.
Then tell me that this is a contract that makes sense, rather than being an ignorant ass.
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What does it matter if the contract makes sense? Both parties signed it right? Both parties were properly represented in negotiating and agreeing to the contract right? I mean, UC Berkley does run a top 10 law school (at least according to US News) so I would imagine their access to proper representation is pretty solid. As I understand it, there was a portion of the contract that indicated disputes over the implementation of the contract must be settled by a third party via binding arbitration. That's
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Union contracts are not labor laws.
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They went around the union rules to save money. If they weren't unionized, they may have had an actual job
If they weren't unionized, they would have had zero recourse - that's the only difference.
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They went around the union rules to save money. If they weren't unionized, they may have had an actual job.
That's a totally speculative statement, you don't know that. Either show some data to corroborate that statement or fuck off.
Re:MBA mentality in action? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was a UC grad student, we spent a lot of time just trying to get group health insurance. I stuffed a lot of envelopes for a vote, and we succeeded. Then one year later the insurace provider dropped us like a hot potato because one student had a baby with heart problems and we were all deemed too big a risk and were left without any health insurance again (except an on campus clinic with a nurse practitioner). We also spent some time investigating joining a union, mostly so that we would be considered as actual employees and not mere students, but that didn't go anywhere.
So I am glad to see that today grad students do get health care, and that there is a union. It's not perfect of course, but it's definitely an improvement.
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Question: During the time you had no health insurance, did you suffer any health afflictions? Did your body suddenly collapse the moment the insurance company dropped coverage? Did you receive a blow to the head during this time?
If you answered no to all of the above, then you didn't need health insurance and were saved money by not having to pay for something you didn't use.
Re:MBA mentality in action? (Score:4, Insightful)
If something had happened, I could not have afforded to pay for health care. You're basically saying that it's ok to go for years without seeing a doctor if you can't afford to see one. But you can't go see a doctor without the insurage or health plan. This did not save me money, but it did save my employer monety. I also did not see a dentist over those years, and that did cost a lot of catchup money once I was out and had health insurance.
Health is not a luxury item, it's a necessity.
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The better response is, the same thing could be said of car seat belts, don't have an accident and you wasted your money.
Seat belt for the same reason as health insurance, doesn't matter what you do, some other idiot can wipe you out, and health doesn't matter what you do some bacteria, virus, or another car driver can wipe you out.
Re: MBA mentality in action? (Score:2)
TAs have always been about free or extremely cheap labor. Graduate TAs get paid poverty wages to teach and conduct important research. Itâ(TM)s better than paying for grad school, but itâ(TM)s tough knowing that even if you added the stipend and tuition remission together they wouldnâ(TM)t add up to half a normal professorâ(TM)s salary and youâ(TM)re teaching the same class.
Adjunct professors get it even worse. Academia is structured in exactly the way that most academics complain a
Not just contract, good business reason (Score:2)
Of course they intentionally fucking avoided going over 10 hours, that's what the contract says. And?
It's even worse than that. There is a very good business reason for hiring TAs in chunks of under 10 hours a week because it usually takes less than that to run a lab section or grade assignments for a small class. Certainly where I work we often employ TAs for 6-hours/week to run and grade a 3-hour lab section and that's without any magic union-threshold to avoid.
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Of course they intentionally fucking avoided going over 10 hours, that's what the contract says. And?
"And" means you actually give a shit about the intent of the law, and question why the drug dealer keeps depositing $9,999 every week into their bank account.
The potential for abuse here, is just as obvious as my example. Thresholds are designed to be constraints against abuse, not blatantly leveraged to create abuse.
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WTF, huh? It's not at all like that. It's like passing a law about a blood alcohol level of .08 being illegal to drive under, and then arresting someone for .03 because you know they had a fucking beer.
God save us from assholes who 'know' the 'intent of the law'. It's bullshit and you are full of shit.
As for abuse, what abuse specifically? Paying some TAs for a few hours of easy work a week? Oh no, the humanity!!!
This won't stand, and even if it does it only helps past TAs because fucking of course Berkeley
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"And" means you actually give a shit about the intent of the law, and question why the drug dealer keeps depositing $9,999 every week into their bank account.
WTF, huh? It's not at all like that. It's like passing a law about a blood alcohol level of .08 being illegal to drive under, and then arresting someone for .03 because you know they had a fucking beer.
No, your analogy does not hold up at all. The intent of the blood alcohol level is to set a threshold where a person is unsafe to drive. Intentionally staying under that level and still driving is completely within the intent of the law. If the law wanted all alcholic consumption before driving to be illegal, they would have more universally set the limit to .04, like truck drivers.
The original analogy was nearly perfect, since what the school was doing is essentially the same as structuring, which is an il
Re: Ahahaha. (Score:3)
No, your analogy does not hold up at all. The intent of the blood alcohol level is to set a threshold where a person is unsafe to drive.
His analogy holds up perfectly. The intent of the 10 hour limit is to set a threshold above which Berkeley must provide specific benefits.
Intentionally staying under that level and still driving is completely within the intent of the law. If the law wanted all alcholic consumption before driving to be illegal, they would have more universally set the limit to .04, like truck drivers.
Intentionally hiring people for less than 10 hours is completely within the intent of the contract. If the contract wanted all workers to receive the same benefits it would have set the limit to 1 minute per week.
I wouldn't have been sure if that was illegal, but considering this ruling it is likely it is illegal for similar reasons that structuring is.
It can't possibly be illegal. At worst it could be (but isn't) a breach of contract. For it to be illegal it would have to violate an actual law.
Unfortunatel
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What kind of idiot would write a law that explicitly allows abuse?
The kind of "idiot" that understands the value of compromise, unlike you. For the most part all those zero tolerance polices don't work worth a shit because the world is never that black and white, and makes enforcement all that much more difficult if not impossible. Your rather silly but accurate "one second a week" employee is a perfect example of why thresholds make sense. Again, they don't exist for the explicit purpose of abuse, even if that's all you tend to see.
Here's another good example. Let's
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Intent doesn't mean jack when it comes to contracts.
Structuring laws are really shady. Talk about "potential for abuse".
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The fact that it's the most left leaning college in the country makes it so much better.
Re:Ahahaha. (Score:5, Insightful)
“The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department has had a massive increase in enrollment since 2016,” said Kenshur. "To compensate for this enrollment in a budget-friendly way, the department has been employing hundreds of mostly undergrad students to work less than ten hours a week.”
So instead of hiring more people to support the INCREASED DEMAND, the school tried to take advantage of undergraduate students.
Might want to learn how to read sometime.
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Learn to read what, it's unclear why you think this is such an awesome rejoinder.
Contract says over 10 hours must be paid exorbitant amounts of money. School paid people under 10 hours to avoid this because duh. Now they're being sued.
That's exactly what I pointed out. Putting a few words in bold doesn't make the hot point you seem convinced it does.
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If the contract stipulates that he should be covered in pitch and set on fire, it could fly in international waters. Stateside, it'd be some kind of assault/attempted murder charge (sorry, contracts can't permit blatantly illegal behavior).
Which is interesting since hiring undergrads for under 9 hours/week isn't blatantly illegal. But it WAS covered under the contract.
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the school tried to take advantage of undergraduate students.
Indeed. It is sickening how people can't even walk down the street in America without someone offering them a job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDbvVFffWV4 [youtube.com]
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I love how there is always the approach from the right that it is their and all companies directives to always fuck over their employees. Sign a union agreement so we think everything is fair. Then see how we can fuck them again. It is this race to the bottom that will put all but the elites in the poor middle class or just poor class.
What happened to make a fair profit, pay a fair wage, offer a good service.
Instead the right always wants make the most profit, offer the cheapest wages, give crap service, bo
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So schools should operate as inefficiently as possible, that seems to be your point. Instead of getting X work done for $Y, they should get X work done for 10*$Y. You're right, sounds pretty left wing to me.
That said, I agree there are issues the other way. They should pass a few simple laws. First, if you are a university and receive Federal dollars directly or to be eligible for student loans, absolutely nobody in the school must make more than $250k. Second, for nonprofits same rule - to claim nonprofit
Re:Ahahaha. (Score:4)
No, the point is that they should operate fairly.
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Agree with you. Except nothing that is a part of Cal should be described as RIGHT, at best Cal would be considered Left wing radicals in any other part of the USA, so lets see what is going on here. Union signs a contract that specifies a benefit window that adds up to 15000 dollars a year (7500 per term, 2 terms a year - except I believe Cal is on quarters, note semesters - so lets possibly double that so 15-30K per year in tuition benefits alone). Student works 8hrs a week for 52 weeks a year that is 4
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CEOs make too much money. It's high time their pay was cut, hard. You could probably get some undergrads to do the same work for much less . . .
Re:Ahahaha - more to it (Score:3)
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Union busting, lol. No. That's my only problem with unions is government collusion and special "rights". If a union was simply a collection of people who got together and decided to negotiate collectively or withhold their labor I'm all for it. It's a balance.
When you start defining anything that goes against the best interests of unions as "union busting" then it becomes a corrupt rabble rousing venture that hearkens back to the days of Hoffa.
Abiding by the contract you have made with the union is not unio
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Looks like someone wants Creutzfeld-Jakob.
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And now who wants to bet on how many fewer grad assistants they hire the next year?
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How is this post a troll?
Years ago, I knew a guy who worked as a Transitional Employee (TE) for the US Postal Service at one of their Remote Encoding Centers (RECs). The full-time employees (30% of the workforce) were unionized under the American Postal Worker's Union (APWU). The remaining were temps - TEs - to whom the union would refuse representation. One of the stipulations of the APWU contract was that anyone who worked at the REC for more than a year would automatically be hired up as a member of t
Colleges got Free Labor for years! (Score:2)
More then that people pay the colleges to work for free there, all for Education Credits.
While I respect colleges and universities. They are aspects which are stuck in Victorian times, Including a rigid hierarchy of titles, expectation of complete focus, and a general disregard of what is happening in the real world.
It seems natural for a grad student to teach undergrad classes, while they are studying for their PHD. It is similar to the traditional Master and Apprentice model. If the student is full time,
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If the student is full time, They have room and board.
What university provides room and board as part of a TAship? The norm at the major public universities near me--and I assume most in the US--is that tuition is either partially or fully covered, along with additional salary (which most would certainly use for those purposes, but they're not "included").
Academia not stuck in Victorian Times (Score:2)
They are aspects which are stuck in Victorian times
Academia is not stuck in Victorian times. As you point out we still use the apprentice (student), journeyman (postdoc) and master (faculty) model in academia which is Medieval or even Roman, not Victorian!
Mandatory binding arbitration clauses (Score:1)
Literally LOLing out loud.
UC didn't arrange things such that they got to pick the arbitrator and that the outcome of the arbitration would be secret? Looks like they have a lot to learn about how to properly abuse mandatory binding arbitration to thwart the cause of justice.
can student athletes get in on this? (Score:2)
can student athletes get in on this? Maybe just Basketball and Football
Outrageous cost (Score:1)
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Tuition is a fake number, waiving it is like an informerical guy giving you a HUNDRED DOLLAR VALUE for only 5.99
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^^^MOD UP^^^
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I think the point is that waiving tuition does not represent an actual cost to a university. It's certainly a benefit to the student. I think you're right from the student's point of view, but not from the university's point of view.
Waiving tuition for undergraduate TAs means that the university is looking at an exchange of services. According to this contract, those services have equal value to the university. How is that possible? Why would the university value 10 hours of tutoring time by an undergraduat
Re: Outrageous cost (Score:2)
This highlights the reality that the cost to the university of educating one additional undergrad is far, far less than the tuition collected from that one additional student. Or more bluntly, tuitions are absurdly disconnected from reality.
So what? This is the reality in any large human endeavour. The cost for a phone company to provide service to one more customer is far, far less than what that one customer pays. Does that mean that phone service is absurdly disconnected from reality Of course not. The cost of the entire infrastructure is spread out amongst hundreds of thousands of users. The only reason that the whole thing can exist at all is because it maintains a large base of users. One user more or less makes no difference.
Same
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Poster declares the entire concept of "opportunity cost" to be non-existent.
Poster declares that because marginal cost is less than average cost, tuitions are "absurdly disconnect
The Union Contract In Question... (Score:3)
For the legal beagles out there, here are the pertinent first-hand documents that news agencies continually omit:
All Contract Sections: https://ucnet.universityofcali... [university...fornia.edu]
Fee Remission: https://ucnet.universityofcali... [university...fornia.edu]
Childcare: https://ucnet.universityofcali... [university...fornia.edu]
Also, the University of California does systemwide collective bargaining, so it's really quite possible that this "UC Berkeley" case affects all the campuses.
No thanks to Pelosi, faux crat! (Score:2)
United Auto Workers.... (Score:2)
... representing engineering grad students? Huh?
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UAW? (Score:2)
Some background. [freep.com]
Good news! (Score:1)