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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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.

The tentative agreement would give graduate student workers in two United Auto Workers bargaining units an increase in minimum pay from about $23,250 to about $34,000 for nine months of part-time work.

"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:

“It gives us a raise that’s enough to disqualify us for govt assistance programs and bump us to the next tax bracket, but not enough to cover those new costs,” according to the tweet.

I am assuming this doesn't include the value of the tuition waiver, which could turn the $43/hour into something more like $143/hour.

I assume it's more complicated than that, but simply ignoring the tuition waiver doesn't feel fair either. Going forward, it would make sense for the U to hire fewer grad students, offer fewer waivers, and to hire most adjuncts (who make very little if I understand correctly). And it could be a good thing! Fewer grad students, more jobs for former grad students feels like progress.

A tuition voucher is certainly worth something, but the "price" of tuition is entirely fake and just dividing the stated price by their hours worked isn't meaningful. The college says it's high so that they can count discounted tuition against their own taxes (I think) but nobody or almost nobody pays full sticker price tuition for graduate school.

Yeah, what a silly fiction. We should charge grad students income tax on their tuition waivers. It would stop this falsehood.

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