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Notes -
Graduate students in the University of California (UC) system have been on an official strike for the past five weeks. They are unionized by United Auto Workers (UAW). The union representatives have reached a tentative agreement with the UC representatives.
"Part-time work" here means 20 hours per week. That's the official cap for UC graduate students receiving stipends. Translating into hourly pay: the graduate students will go from earning $30/hour to a bit more than $43/hour.
So, culture war angle:
On the one hand, I don't trust government representatives negotiating with representatives of government-employed union members to fully represent taxpayer interests. In particular, I fully expect that everyone negotiating on behalf of UC was fully sympathetic with the striker's cause, and not strongly motivated to maintain low costs.
On the other hand, graduate student workers tend to provide specialized services. So a reasonable question (that I don't have an answer to yet) would be: how much would a professional grader of introductory writing courses charge? What about one for differential calculus? What about one for organic chemistry? From that perspective, $43/hour sounds like not such a bad deal.
For extra culture war angle, the LA Times quotes some tweets from graduate students unhappy with the deal. I will include one that does raise an interesting point:
Fundamentally I suspect that everyone would be much better off if there were fewer, better compensated graduate students. The situation which presently exists is that there are many graduate students that have either mediocre talent or are independently wealthy (or both) that use graduate school as an opportunity to slack off and enjoy their 20’s. This group is an enormous beneficiary of the stipend and probably mostly only puts in 20 hours a week.
This is in contrast to a second smaller group which conducts substantial amounts of valuable scientific work, usually putting in 40-60 hours a week while receiving shit compensation and negligible benefits. This group mostly consists of international students whom can’t get other jobs and domestic students whom are either brilliant/delusional enough to believe that they will get an academic job.
I was in this category making 25000 a year (in Colorado which is much lower coa than California) working weekends so I left for a job in the private sector where I make considerably more money and don’t work weekends. I would have stayed if a hard core graduate school option that paid me 40-50 k a year to work weekends had existed (which is vastly less than what I make outside of graduate school) and insulated me from having to deal the obnoxious activist type whom mostly come out of the first category.
Graduate schools should serve this second group of students and treat them like salaried employees hired to do research. Teaching/grading jobs should be simple hourly jobs open to any student and tuition wavers need to disappear (since no one besides extremely rich masters students actually pay tuition, stated tuition is ridiculously high).
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