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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.
"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:
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
Amen. I wish this got more coverage especially with insane laws like Proposition 13. Literally just froze property taxes for everyone that owned land at that point - legally if you continue to own a property from when it was passed your taxable valuation just never changes. It's insane.
That's not insane, that's the way it should work everywhere. What's insane is that you could own some property, work hard to pay it off, and then be unable to keep it because property taxes went up/your income went down and you can't afford the taxes. That's insane.
Why should new landowners subsidize lower property taxes for incumbent landowners who had some good luck in where they bought a few decades ago?
If somebody is truly worried about high property taxes, they should either accept that's the price for living where they want, or want more building to lower their property values. You can have high property values or low property taxees - not both, unless you want the current housing issues that California has.
If anything, one of the positives of Texas's tax laws that helps incentivize more building is a decent chunk of their income comes from property taxees.
Texas property tax rates are not set by the same organizations that make zoning laws. In general, an absolute majority of Texas property taxes go to the local school district, which has the right to set its own tax rates, within certain limits. It doesn’t take much imagination or specific knowledge to know why this tends to push Texas property taxes up very high in comparison to other states, but school districts do not set zoning or construction rules in Texas- that’s largely municipal governments, which earn the vast majority of their revenue through sales taxes and are more likely to cut their(generally much smaller- my itemized property tax bill from last year gave 23% of my total tax bill to the city versus 53% to the local school district. The rest was divided between county administration, community colleges, and hospitals in case you were wondering) property tax rate than raise it.
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I don't think anyone has the right to demand high property values, so I think you're putting words in my mouth there. I simply think it's a travesty that people can lose their property that they worked hard for, through no fault of their own.
It is, but the better way to deal with it seems to be through targeted property tax relief. For example, give credits to people who are above a certain age and below a certain income who have used the home as their primary residence for a minimum number of years. Yeah, some people can't afford it, and it's a shame, but it shouldn't be an excuse for people who can afford the taxes to pay below what's necessary.
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