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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 don't get why all graduate students need to be paid the same amount. (behind the scenes they aren't. Top fields and top students get external fellowships & endowments, but it's the exception) It makes even less sense for the entire UC system to negotiate together. The students at UCLA, UCI and Berkeley clearly have higher expenses than the other UCs.

It makes no sense that people in fields where they'd be completely unemployable are demanding higher pay, by holding more valuable STEM fields hostage. A STEM researcher at a top UC is foregoing a $100-300k salary to pursue their graduate degree. Most liberal arts students would struggle to make anywhere near the grad student stipend. Collective bargaining makes sense when there are collective risks. Eg: Line workers at a factory or screen writers. Research does not have that kind of uniformity.

I don't like how American Social-welfare continues to attend to the symptoms and never the causes. Most extra dollars given to a UC student, are going to go into them being able to finally move into livable houses. IE. This is a direct handout to local landlords and nothing more. (This is $7000/yr effective increase)

If a UC can get a subsidized student residential tower going, then the students might be able to have similar benefits as increased salary, all while getting lasting infrastructure, still contributing to the economy (let money go to real construction workers instead of a lazy bum sitting on his house), not eliminating their social-welfare by changing their tax bracket and saving a ton of money when amortized over a long time. Best part is, it might even force unproductive local landlords to finally enter the work force. (or more likely, it will eliminate their secondary vacation income. Neither will happen tho, politics always protects landlords)

California is a social welfare state, where all the handouts go to local upper-class landowners. Source

A STEM researcher at a top UC is foregoing a $100-300k salary to pursue their graduate degree.

Okay, I see this kind of quote a lot, but nobody ever breaks it down concretely. I am a bright-eyed young college graduate with my nice new BSc, I'm twenty-two, I'm looking for a job.

Where do I go to earn $100,000 a year for my first job with no experience and only a bachelors? Can anyone say "If you apply to Muggins, Juggins & Co. they pay their QC lab people that amount"? I want concrete examples, no "in general the field pays this, according to Glassdoor and so forth".

Software Engineering

In my experience, DoD contractors pay SWEs pretty terribly in comparison to the private sector. They're constrained by how the DoD itself ascribes value (e.g., credentials and YoE). That being said, a month ago, a buddy of mine with a 3-month bootcamp "degree" got an offer from Booz Allen Hamilton for 80k hybrid (3 days in the office). Granted, that's not 100k, but as I told him... just get 1 YoE and job hop for a monstrous raise.

My company is much more selective; but ~100k (fully-remote!) would reasonable for an impressive junior.