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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29300 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.

"Part-time work" here means 20 hours per week.

There's a lot that could be said about how exactly the graduate school ecosystem works, but I'll quickly note a few things that you may not know if you've never been a STEM graduate student that may change your read on the situation (I don't have time to offer anything more substantial):

  • The 20 hour a week contract you sign is a complete fiction and joke. If you are operating as a teaching assistant in grad school, that will take up at least twenty hours a week in-between classtime, grading, office hours, etc. and more realistically closer to thirty hours. This is on top of all of the research you are already doing; my organic lab had a minimum of 55 hours of research a week as the expectation and other synthetic labs I knew were worse. This is on top of any coursework you may also be taking, which will require you to go to classes and read papers and do homework and prepare for cumes and ... I had many, many weeks in graduate school of working 80+ hours where I'd get in close to 7 AM, go home for dinner and to see my kids, and then go back into the lab and work until 11 PM. The 20 hour a week contract is a complete lie. No graduate student I know in STEM worked anywhere near that.

  • The tuition waiver seems like a useful benefit to also consider as compensation (a decade or so back I remember congress was contemplating taxing it like other employer benefits), but it's similarly fictitious. It's not at all clear what you would be paying tuition for. After your first year, you aren't taking classes (you might be teaching them). You're doing research. Research space is not paid for by the university, neither is research equipment, neither is chemical inventory ... you pay for all of that using grant money! Graduate students shouldn't be charged tuition at all in my mind; they're operating much more as employees for the university rather than educational charges. Even your stipend, largely, is being paid for with grant money. I haven't the faintest idea what on earth the tuition is for ... except no, wait, I do, it's so the university can pocket a few extra thousand dollars of grant money from each lab every semester.

Graduate students in STEM are hilariously overworked and underpaid. I guess you get an (increasingly worthless) degree at the end and a job market flooded with competitors from all the other idiots who listened to college counsellors?

Don't go to grad school, kids.

According to ACOUP it is worse in humanities as you will not be even employable after going through this.

In theory, these responsibilities are usually supposed to add up to about 20 hours a week, though there is a lot of variability from week to week and assignment to assignment. I actually kept track of my work hours in the first year of my PhD and found they ranged from 60 to 80 hours a week and that was with all the tricks I had learned to read and work faster during my MA (for comparison, I rarely felt seriously stressed about schoolwork during my undergraduate degree, which I finished in three years)

(...)

And yes, every graduate student will come up with a whole host of reasons why they are special and the job fairy will favor them, but the numbers don’t lie: you’re not special and the job fairy died years ago.

(...)

At least flagellants, in theory, got to go to heaven as the reward for their self-destructive purification. The only thing pursuing a PhD in the humanities offers is the opportunity to go on the academic job market, which is frankly probably closer to hell at this point.

(...)

So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?

(...)

Have you tried wanting something else?

That doesn't mean you should be paid more for doing it. It means you shouldn't do it.

I agree that both can apply, and that in case of humanities less people should be doing this (I got convinced by lack of useful output and repeated calls to discriminate my ethnical group - and guess what, I am against racism, especially against myself)

I wholly agree. I got out about 6 months ago and have been much happier working a regular job

Graduate students in STEM are hilariously overworked and underpaid

"The US outlawed slavery, except against prisoners and grad students."

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