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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, $43/hour sounds like not such a bad deal.
For extra culture war angle, the LA Times quotes some tweets from graduate students unhappy with the deal. I will include one that does raise an interesting point:
You could probably estimate this by looking around for tutors for these subjects. I live somewhere cheaper than CA, and 35-50 dollars an hour seems common even for less specialized (although possibly more practical) tutoring. Given that they're working with many students, I agree that 43$ an hour is probably a good deal comparatively speaking. The real question is whether this should be subsidized by the government; just because some people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a nice car, doesn't mean that official government vehicles should be that expensive.
edit: I forgot to also say, graduate students occupy this weird split between workers and customers. What grad students I know have told me is that a lot of what the students are getting is training (a graduate degree does allow you to earn more money), which is actually the most expensive part (showing someone how to do hands-on scientific research is much more wasteful than just hiring a technician or postdoc to do the research). On the flip side, colleges can recover a lot of that cost because they take a large portion of most grants that researches are awarded.
If you think grad students are getting hands on training in scientific research, rather than a sink or swim opportunity to teach yourself (but with access to institutional libraries, journal subscriptions, and expensive lab equipment), then I have a bridge to sell to you.
I've never been a grad student; I can only go off of what other people I know have told me. Whatever they actually learn, or how they do it, I think a graduate degree (especially one in a scientific, quantitative, or computing-heavy field) does improve your income, and so that should be accounted for when considering how much grad students get paid.
Of course, I don't disagree that the group of people with such graduate degrees has a higher income than the group without.
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