MIT Grad Students Vote To Form Labor Union (bizjournals.com) 82
Graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology overwhelmingly approved forming a union in a two-day vote this week by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. From a report: MIT is the latest Boston-area school where grad students have voted to join a union following pivotal federal ruling in 2016 recognizing grad students as employees with the ability to unionize. In all, 1,785 MIT graduate students voted in favor of unionization and 912 against, a figure confirmed by Jonathan Zong, a grad student organizer, and MIT. Three-fourths of graduate students voted, according to MIT. The vote seeks to join United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, or UE. MIT grad students were pushing for help with affordable housing, support for international students, dental insurance coverage, and a better emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion.
"We are grateful to the many members of our community, on all sides of the debate, who have engaged constructively and respectfully in this conversation," Melissa Nobles, the chancellor, and Ian A. Waitz, the vice chancellor, said in the message to grad students. The memo continued: "Indeed, as we wrote to you during this campaign: We agree that there are areas where MIT can improve, and we share many of the same goals as the MIT Graduate Student Union. ... With the election outcome now clear, we will continue to work alongside you to improve MIT for all of our students." MIT's Zong said being unionized will be a more democratic and formalized way of making grad students' concerns heard compared to MIT's Graduate Student Council. He described the council as more advisory to the school's administration.
"We are grateful to the many members of our community, on all sides of the debate, who have engaged constructively and respectfully in this conversation," Melissa Nobles, the chancellor, and Ian A. Waitz, the vice chancellor, said in the message to grad students. The memo continued: "Indeed, as we wrote to you during this campaign: We agree that there are areas where MIT can improve, and we share many of the same goals as the MIT Graduate Student Union. ... With the election outcome now clear, we will continue to work alongside you to improve MIT for all of our students." MIT's Zong said being unionized will be a more democratic and formalized way of making grad students' concerns heard compared to MIT's Graduate Student Council. He described the council as more advisory to the school's administration.
higher edu is suck in the past and the high cost g (Score:2)
higher edu is suck in the past and the high cost goes to admin staff and not the teachers or students.
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-progress
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You don't need to include the word "education" for that statement to be true.
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I've yet to see any real evidence of that particular claim.
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higher edu is suck in the past and the high cost goes to admin staff and not the teachers or students.
There are an awful lot of admin staff involved in running a university. You NEED admin staff: janitors, groundskeepers, payroll, purchasing, IT, cooks, etc. A university is more than someone standing around on a street corner talking to himself (or herself...)
Yes, we could roll back a lot of the feature creep that has happened in modern universities -but students keep demanding MORE, not less.
Re: higher edu is suck in the past and the high co (Score:2)
Yes, we could roll back a lot of the feature creep that has happened in modern universities -but students keep demanding MORE, not less.
Are these the same students that now want everyone else to pay off their student loans because they decided to spend 4 years at Club EDU, an all-inclusive resort that claims to offer an education?
Last I heard an Economics major from a middling university, earning $160K/year claimed she was being 'held back' because if her strident debt...
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Pretty much, yes.
But I was referring to the incoming students (and their parents) who are choosing university X over university Y, because university X has more/nicer/newer amenities.
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probably a weird deal. Trade unions have tenure, if you can graduate college with a year or two tenure in that trades union it may have benefits. Typically when you see things about international student support that's the school doing that, more international students bumps the colleges rankings, and the admins paychecks.
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Grad students are mostly international students.
Is that really true? MIT has a lot of international students but I don't think they're a majority.
Why work for peanuts as a research assistant if you have a choice.
Because you're getting an education. In theory you're paying the school for the privilege of being there.
Honestly, I expect schools will start reducing scholarships to match. From what I remember, virtually no one in grad school actually pays tuition. That's part of the TA/RA compensation package. If TAs/RAs start demanding more benefits, expect to have to start paying more elsewhere. Fer crying out loud, I tho
Re:Destroying value in primary/advanced degrees (Score:5, Informative)
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Post docs are often exploited too; same amount of work as grads, same amount of pay, but more stress. And sometimes universities illegally hire post docs by skipping the all the immigration requirements (falsely claiming that they're students, which also avoids minimum wage hassles); and sometimes those departments also have a huge scandal when they're caught.
at the very least make min wage (after tuition) co (Score:2)
at the very least make min wage (after tuition) costs and maybe some forced room and board.
as if they need to pay tuition to be able to work then that may be an min wage issue.
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From what I remember, virtually no one in grad school actually pays tuition.
You'd be surprised. We are actually among the lucky few.
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virtually no one in grad school actually pays tuition.
Not true. Some international students are so desperate to get an F-1 visa that they will accept an unfunded admission.
It is an abusive practice and perhaps one that unions can end.
I have no idea if MIT admits unfunded grad students. With the size of their endowment, it is unlikely.
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Don't know what you mean with "unfunded", unpaid?
Princeton does accept international grad students, free of fee, no idea about MIT, though.
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Don't know what you mean with "unfunded", unpaid? Princeton does accept international grad students, free of fee, no idea about MIT, though.
I don't know either. When I was there, I was charged tuition but had it paid via a TA scholarship. I just assumed everyone got charged tuition and there were various ways to have someone other than the student pay it. If you didn't find one, well, write a big check. I don't remember hearing anything about a blanket tuition waiver for international students but that doesn't mean there wasn't (or isn't) one.
Are you saying Princeton never charges international students tuition? That seems odd: I'd expect them
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That depends on the field you're in. IT type programs often have tuition waived - as long as you're working on your professor's pet project. Medical and law programs generally cost a lot. Programs with few research grants might also require you to pay tuition.
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Getting an education is only part of why you're there. You're also producing research, which is a valuable commodity for the university, and you're teaching, which is a core business of the university. As someone else has pointed out here, the relationship is much closer to master/apprentice than it is to teacher/student, and as such deserves remuneration.
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Getting an education is only part of why you're there. You're also producing research, which is a valuable commodity for the university, and you're teaching, which is a core business of the university. As someone else has pointed out here, the relationship is much closer to master/apprentice than it is to teacher/student, and as such deserves remuneration.
It sounds like grad students are journeymen in this analogy. They have learned enough to go out into the world and make their own way, but have chosen to remain and work with the master and are contributing meaningfully to the work of the master. As such, they deserve to be paid -perhaps not as much as if they were on their own in the world (they are still leaching off of the reputation of their master and not standing completely on their own merits).
Take the difference out of management salaries, sports programs, and prestige dorm projects.
Executive salaries are too high in both business and ed
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Sports programs tend to be big money makers for universities -at least the major sports (football, basketball) and they at worst break even when you factor in the lesser known sports (swimming, fencing, gymnastics, etc).
Some big name programs make money. If I recall my anecdotes correctly, only a handful of schools make money even with football. But they need to keep a big program going because it brings in alumni donations. I guess if you add it up that way, yeah the program is a net plus.
I'm pretty sure MIT absolutely doesn't make a dime on their sports teams. The headline sports were crew and fencing, not football or hoops.
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Take the difference out of management salaries, sports programs, and prestige dorm projects.
Or diversity administrators. Thing is, it doesn't matter where you or I would like to cut budgets. Universities have a lot of places they could cut. That they already pay for managers, sports, and first-class dorm space tells us they think those are valuable and probably not the first thing to be cut.
Unless, of course, it's retaliatory. "You formed a union. Fine. We're closing the gyms." Sort of like how when the national park service is threatened with a budget cut, they close the Washington Monument and Y
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It's a fair point, and one that illustrates how the incentive structure at higher education is messed up. Many (some? most?) people go to college for campus life, sports, and networking, not for the education, so is it any surprise that the colleges pay for dorms and sports rather than teachers? If the education really is that unimportant, then the colleges
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I most certainly paid tuition as a grad student. Of course I also got paid a very low salary which covered that with enough left over to buy ramen cups.
We also tried to get a grad student union, and the school was highly opposed to the idea because we're were "students" and weren't "working" for the university despite actually being paid. And particular asshole of a prof seemed to require a 23 hour workday but he eventually got kicked out.
Before this we struggled just to get group insurance, and finally s
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Because you get a PhD ... simple choice, or not?
If you work for money if you are below 30 years old, you are either an idiot or are already for some reason in deep depth.
Disconnect with Financial Reality (Score:2)
Why work for peanuts as a research assistant if you have a choice.
The problem is that they do not really have a choice. RA money comes from research grants and unless those increase suddenly there is no money to pay students more. Where I work our research associates unionized several years ago and negotiated far higher salaries so much so that now hardly anyone in our department can afford to hire one so we employ them instead as postdoctoral fellows.
Postdocs have a limited term so, after three years they are out with no possibility of an extension (as we used to do)
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That is typically the issue with minimum wage as well, it reduces the number of jobs at the bottom every time because the job no longer makes financial sense, and it actually ends up making the poor worse off, as it is that much harder to get a job.
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I believe the myth is on your side, as it is a well known and documented thing that the total jobs goes down when the minimum wage goes up.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/a... [oup.com]
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Securing Research funds is the primary responsibility of the professor.
True, but one of the things we are judged on when applying for grants is the number of grad students we train. So that means there is limited funding for grad students more or less determined by the funding agency. If you fail to meet expectations because your university's students insist on more than what the funding agency expects to pay then that research funding will get cut.
If you insist on a commercial-type example (which does not work well because academia is not industry) think of the government
Good for them! And Good Luck! (Score:2)
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the bounty hunters become student loan bounty hunters.
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University of Illinois graduate students unionized almost 20 years ago. [uiucgeo.org] So just look at those schools for any unforeseen consequences.
AFAIK, the only consequences were foreseen: TAs get paid more.
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As a counter to that, another personal experience is above:
https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
It made it so that they couldn't hire RAs anymore because there wasn't the money to pay the higher rates. The difference may be in the funding sources though, RAs are paid from research grants, while TAs are paid for with tuition. TAs demand higher salaries, it just snowballs down to tuition rising faster.
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very likely MIT themselves want them to be unionized. Typically if you're say coke a cola or something coke doesn't get a say on the level where they count your votes on it if the bottlers want to unionize.
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California State University category "Academic Student Employees" (TA and RA) are represented by, of all the bizarre possibilities: United Auto Workers.
If the TA's aren't grading undergrad homework with an assembly line method they are likely working much harder than necessary.
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Can I start a union of gays who eat at Chick-Fil-A and force the company to stop being so homophobic?
Too late, they were never, and have never been homophobic. Chick-fil-A has never supported what you have been told that they have. Their owners have spent their money on things they supported, which had religious slants because they are religious, which is what you are referring to, but if you look into it, Chick-fil-A itself is inclusive and does not discriminate against anyone, even the anti-religious bigots who yell and scream about how horrible they are.
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Union Focus is on Graduate RA's and TA's (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Union Focus is on Graduate RA's and TA's (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Where I went to school in Canada, both undergrad TAs and Grad students were unionized. This was separate from the greater student Union.
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Exactly. Where I went to school in Canada, both undergrad TAs and Grad students were unionized. This was separate from the greater student Union.
Unionized grad students? Canada?!? Is that some kind of communist land where you pay students a fair wage just because they are working human beings? Why in my day interns were paid in exposure, and a good reference in their CV. Washing your advisors car and doing some general landscaping as an unsaid requirement for passing one’s dissertation builds almost as much character as failing it because you grade too well and there isn’t help for next term. If you don’t crush the soul early
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In what school are grad students *not* employees?
Many grad students are. Most are not.
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When I studied, I was both: student and employee.
As a student I studied CS and Physics, and as employee I mostly long term did teach martial arts, and shifting from job to job C programming, Unix Systems Administration, Systems Operations.
Re:wtf? They're customers, not employees. (Score:5, Informative)
Because teaching some level of undergraduate courses is customary in post-grad work. However in the past two decades, it has become increasingly more exploitative. Universities are giving out fewer tenured positions, and increasing profits by putting that workload on the students. Traditionally that student-supplied work was intended to give the student experience, but it has gone woefully beyond that. And in non-Ivy league schools the same thing is happening, except they are slowly wiping out full-time teaching positions all-together, and increasingly beginning to rely on student-teachers who are paid less than minimum wage, and adjunct professors who have to juggle classes at multiple schools while making less than $30k combined a year for a 60 hour+ work week while not being eligible for any benefits. Higher Ed. is profiting off of exploitation, full stop. This is pushback, and it's about time.
Re: wtf? They're customers, not employees. (Score:2)
Guess I was lucky (Score:2)
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Glad I missed this (Score:2)
On the one hand, I'm glad I was a grad student eons ago so I didn't have to deal with this. Even in my 20s I knew wanted nothing to do with unions.
On the other hand, it would have been nice to be able to argue against it. Sheesh, being a grad student on a stipend was the kooshiest job I ever had. I've never been paid so much for so little work.
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Not the brightest then, eh? Are you sure you were a grad student? We not talking about high school grads here.
Wow, classy reply. Did you graduate elementary school? I sorta remember we stopped that kind of insult then.
I also distinctly remember applying for a job as a supermarket bagger in high school. Even then I knew I'd rather keep my union fee because it wasn't buying me anything. I'd rather have had the cash. And as soon as I started getting jobs which took more than five minutes of training, I realized I was a valuable enough worker to not need a union interceding for me in any case.
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I'd rather keep my union fee because it wasn't buying me anything
You actually believed that anit-union bullshit? Union dues easily pay for themselves. You'd have to be impossibly short-sighted not to see that.
Like said, you must not be the brightest.
Let me let you in the secret (Score:2)
Let me tell you a "known" secret of academia: There are *too many* PhDs...
Why? Because they offer cheap labor.
As simple as that.
I know, because I was one. They keep the professor to assistant ratio so much skewed that single assistantships stopped giving even minimum wage: in other words, in my later years sitting a single class would only give half salary, and you needed to take 2x work to get your earlier wages.
It will only get worse, because the universities know we will keep coming. Would I do it again?
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I feel like you're alluding to an issue that many readers are not aware of, but this description could use more depth to help the layman understanding. Could you elaborate more, so that us heathens could fully comprehend? thx
Re:Let me let you in the secret (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a two-fold problem here. One is the constant encouragement of more kids going to college. College isn't for everyone, plain and simple, but the encouragement pushes kids to go there even further. A related problem with this is the lack of career counseling; most kids have no idea what they want to do. So they're brought up getting good grades in middle school, then high school is the next step, then of course they go to college (which is really optional). At 22 they don't know what to do except how to take and pass a test, but have no idea how to transition that into a career. SO what do they do? They go the next step: grad school. On to a Masters, then a PhD, then a post-doc. At this point they're in their 30's, buried in debt with a PhD and a low-paying post-doc position. Next step is professor, right? The numbers show that less than 8% of grad students end up becoming professors because of lack of jobs and tenure; there's little turnover in professor roles. But the kids do this, because it's an easier option than facing the existential question of: "Wtf am I doing, and what am I going to do with my life?" Fortunately there's the second problem: college financing which is easy to get, yet super hard to pay off. SO by not giving kids a way to figure out a career for themselves, and making the path to grad school easy to get into via debt financing, you end up with a unique problem: a host of very smart kids who are basically debt-bonded indentured servants.
Why are the indentured servants? Because the kids have fallen into a trap that no one explained to them and yet is critical: Labor is a market. With the above two problems, the supply of labor in "higher education" has ballooned, and the demander of labor in academic science can't grow fast enough. As basic economics would teach you, this kind of situation results in a worsening situation for the grad student on the supply side. Many of the stories I've heard are:
A grad student picking up their professor's dry cleaning and groceries for them as part of their grad work.
Two grad students living 2 hours away from their lab to afford housing, often sleeping in sleeping bags in their shared office because the commute was so bad and sometimes they needed to pull 10-12 hour days in the lab.
Inappropriate pay practices. Pay set as the minimum to be considered salaried (in some states that's around $50k/year) so that overtime is never considered; when looking at hours spent teaching classes, lab work, training new staff, etc. they were pulling effectively less than minimum wage. In other cases, grad students would be classed as 1099 contractors so they would be forced to find their own health insurance and were refused the protection of a W2 employee.
In one case, a grad student was 3 years in, 1 year away from defending, but a grant fell through so the professor said he was going to be let go and not get his PhD at all. Fortunately the kid had a connection in a government agency, who moved some money aroudn in their own budget and gave him a grant that allowed him to continue his last year, otherwise he would be on the street, years of work, student loans and no PhD to show for it at all.
Professors who spend no time in their lab at all. Their job is to write grants and go to paid speaking events, and barely interact with their grad students, letting their post-docs train the staff and run the lab. However said professor is on every paper published and every patent filed.
In one case a professor had well over 50 grad students and 6 post-docs. How was he mentoring them at all? He wasn't; it was a PhD/post-doc factory; if they didn't perform they were out. When the post-docs term was over, he encouraged them to then start a startup on their IP, which they did. The university of course owned th
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Re:Let me let you in (Score:1)
Re: Let me let you in the secret (Score:1)
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Priorities (Score:2)
Something tells meactual workplace concerns, such as health insurance, hours, and pay will take a distant backseat to 'diversity' demands. This is after all a union run by students.
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I think it's really touching that you believe health insurance, hours and pay have any kind of priority in places where diversity "demands" aren't on the table.
Re: Priorities (Score:2)
Those are things unions tend to push for when not vehicles for political and ideological ambitions.
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Wrong. I suspect you don't know very much about unions, except what you're told by people who don't like or understand them.
Re: Priorities (Score:2)
Am I misunderstanding? If unions don't push for health benefits, pay, and hours then what do they do?
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Yes, you're misunderstanding. You're assuming unions can't do more than one thing at a time. You're also assuming that pushing for health benefits, pay and hours for some members but not others is a viable strategy for success.
You're wrong on both counts, of course.
good/bad (Score:1)
this is good the undergrads will be recognized for there work.
collage just got a whole lot more expensive
glad i finished what i wanted to.
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From the standard of literacy exhibited here, I'd suggest when you say you "finished what i wanted to" (sic), you're referring to a degree featuring shrubbery pruning, basic hygiene and remedial arithmetic as core courses.
What none of you know, I guess (Score:2)
Is that in 1970, 70% of all teachers in college were tenured or tenure track... and now it's 30%. Most of the instructors are grad students... and they have ZERO job security. They aren't "employed", they're on contracts... and they have no guarantee that they'll have a contract in the fall. Basically, they're gig workers.