Alas, I'm not sure a union can begin to fix anything except a few cosmetic things. The biggest problem is the massive oversupply of people who want academic careers versus the number of real jobs. The individual unions at the schools can't tackle this oversupply at all because it's caused by the schools acting independently. The natural game is to protect the insiders by restricting admission like many of the other unions like the AMA that actively campaign against too many doctors.

Indeed, the unions risk the bad optics of campaigning to reduce new admits in order to maintain opportunities for those already in the pipeline. In other words, slamming the door shut on people who want to learn all to restrict supply of work for the privileged.

I suppose the unions might be able to help in the rare case of a real jerk of a professor who mistreats her students, but I think most professors are smart enough to play passive aggressive games instead. The schools nurture the ability to act passive aggressively.

The rest of the time, the students in the union are going to waste their time arguing about something instead of working on their dissertation, the one thing that will spring them from the jail.

There is a vast oversupply of people who want academic careers vs. the number of currently-existing tenure track jobs. In most fields (CS is somewhat different since industry is so attractive, so often even teaching faculty receive tenure), almost all of the teaching is done by contract workers and adjuncts. So the need for labor is there, just not the funding to give everyone secure jobs.

If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad. This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts. Graduate workers have a lot of power since they can gum up the graduation pipeline and piss off wealthy parents and donors.

Of course it is a band-aid solution since the system is fundamentally pyramid-shaped.

CS is rather unique in that regard (along with maybe economics and business, though to a lesser degree).

For everything else, the vast majority of incoming graduate students intend to get a job in academia and then "settle" for a high-paying job in the private sector that doesn't really use their skills.

> If public funding returned to higher levels and the number of tenure-track jobs was increased, then the oversupply would not be quite so bad.

This is unrealistic. You'd need to increase tenured faculty by at least an order of magnitude to soak up all the grad students currently being produced... But that doesn't even solve the problem because all those professors are going to want to do research, and they're going to want to have graduate research assistants. So now you have the same problem as before, but an order of magnitude bigger.

The only real solution is to reduce the number of PhDs produced over a professor's career from ~20 to ~2. Which of course means reducing the number of grad students.

> This is a sector-wide change that graduate worker unions could push for at each of their individual institutions, especially if they worked in tandem with the unions representing adjuncts

Universities will never go for this. You have to understand your counter-party's BANTA. This is like Brexit: If your position is that you want terms that are strictly worse for your counter-party than if you just don't exist... well then you're not going to get a deal.

Agreed. I'm pretty cynical about academia but I don't see graduate student unions fixing the problems.

I voted against a graduate student union at my institution ca. 7 years ago after a couple very frustrating conversations with organizers (both students and professionals from the SEIU) where they were doing the equivalent of promising everyone a free pony (scholarships for international students, lower tuition, etc.--things that aren't included in the mandatory bargaining subjects for a union). It was deeply manipulative and dishonest.

Graduate student unions aren't aiming to tackle this, and I don't know of any that are. At Stanford, the unionization campaign centered around Stanford's stipends (which have not kept up with inflation and put students in the "extremely low income" category per the county) and Stanford's status as both employer and landlord for many students.

It's pretty much the same at all Universities in HCOL areas.. UCLA is the same. UCLA actually had to build graduate student housing to offset the market and it is still overpriced. Talk about levitown.

> a few cosmetic things

Show me someone who thinks a living wage and a boss who can’t overwork you anymore are cosmetic and I’ll show you a university administrator.

TAs aren't overworked, even without union representation. You'll never be asked to do more than an average of 20hrs/week, ever. You can always just refuse to sign the end-of-semester certification.

RAs are overworked, but unions can't do anything to help that. As a grad student, you need to publish papers, which means you need the cooperation of your advisor. If you bring a grievance or work to rule, there are a million innovative ways your advisor can sabotage you as retaliation.

They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out. Or run out of budget before ordering that $THING you need for your experiment. When you still haven't defended after ~8-10 years, the university's policies will automatically kick you out. Problem solved!

As for a living wage: I wasn't represented by a union in grad school, but all the commenters here who were have pointed out that their unions didn't fight for higher wages.

> If you bring a grievance or work to rule, there are a million innovative ways your advisor can sabotage you as retaliation.

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing a union could address.

> I wasn't represented by a union in grad school, but all the commenters here who were have pointed out that their unions didn't fight for higher wages.

It's possible that they were fighting for other things considered by most members to be more important. Ultimately though, if a group has a union and they feel that the union isn't representing their interests there are remedies for that. Members can vote to change leadership, or in extreme circumstances dissolve the union and form a new one designed to prevent the problems you had with the old one.

> > They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out.

> That sounds like exactly the kind of thing a union could address.

Short of having a group of union members becoming your defacto supervisor and doing the guidance your supervisor should be doing, I don't see how they could help in this situation.

Union puts rules in their contract saying 0 retaliation when grievances are filed or disputes arise, explicitly calling out commonly seen retaliations while still leaving room to account for other sneakiness or else X and if students who have complaints feel retaliated against they can now appeal to the union who (if convinced) proceed to X where X can mean anything from disciplinary action against the supervisor, lawsuits, or strike.

Supervisors who want to avoid X will then be forced to reconsider retaliating against students or at the very least find ways to do it where students don't feel like they're being retaliated against which I suppose is the best you can expect since assholes exist and some percentage of them will end up as supervisors.

Yes, I understand the idea of such clauses. My specific argument was that for academia it's very easy for them to retaliate in ways that are very non-obvious as being retaliations, especially to outside observers:

> > They can let you pursue ideas that they know are not novel (and the papers will be rejected). Or suggest you try something they know won't pan out.

in my experience, the overwork of the RAs wasn't being pushed by a ruthless taskmaster advisor. it was that students understood the hypercompetitive academic job market and knew that they had to build out their CV if they wanted to be lucky enough to get a postdoc once they defended.

Grad student unions can stop TAs from being overworked for their classes. But most of the overwork actually stems from trying to start a research career.

there’s nothing a union can do to fix research-based overwork because youre a) doing it to yourself, not because a boss is making you and b) you are competing with researchers from other institutions that aren’t in your union to build your CV.

"There's nothing a union can do to fix structural inefficiencies" seems like an obvious and irrelevant take. Unions are for securing benefits within the existing system, not for changing the system per se.

A PhD is a path to citizenship which isn't a bad thing in theory but the side effect is it reduces graduate student real wages and lengthens the time to graduate as demand is so high. I'm surprised economists haven't studied it (or maybe they have) and figured a way out of this fundamental trap.

Also University administrations are basically corrupt in the way they nickel and dime grad students across the board. The whole student/employee/apprentice thing really needs a systematic reevaluation since it can be exploitative.

Maybe they need to pay incentives to professors to graduate PhD students. In general the market for PhDs is expanding and high paying jobs are available at least in STEM fields which is a good thing as new technologies find wide applications.

The advice I always give people (who ask) is that unless they're SO passionate about a subject that they can't imagine being happy away from it... look at industry, not academia. Maybe this sort of vote will be the beginning of the end of that sort of advice being applicable.

This is not the first university where grad students have unionized. Most of the UC's have been unionized for decades.

It will be interesting. Some federal grants seem to have pay limit maximums lower than the new minimum pay requirement.

Maybe this will have the effect of sending more federal grant money to lower cost of living research institutes. That could be an interesting outcome.

Grad student unionization is already well on its way in the US. It started strong in the 90s. It was hamstrung because grad students weren't recognized as workers in 2004 by the NLRB; that was overturned in 2016. Since then, graduate student unions have been having some massive contract wins.

Its a pretty complex & shifting situation historically. In fact, its illegal to have a grad student union in some states for public universities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...

It is a growing movement in academia: Harvard(2018), Yale(2022), NYU(1998), BU, Brandeis, Tufts, UMass Amherst(1991), Columbia(2017), UPenn(2016), Brown(2014), Stanford(yesterday, not even joking), UNC(?), etc. Duke is unionizing like right now

Grad student unions are such a large body of new union members that the UAW has done some weird things to dilute their power in the UAW. like splitting NYU and Columbia into different locals. They're some of the largest inductions of new members in NLRB history.

Its a pretty fascinating history and on going movement

A first step, maybe, but far from enough to fix it.

Toxic: That won't be fixed until they start firing tenured profs for abusing grad students. Nothing else will do.

Broken: There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.

Or permanent positions that are reasonably paid and not professors. Like teachers, researchers, ...

I don't get the impression that everyone becomes a manager in software, not everyone becomes a line manager in a factory. Not every wants to become CEO eventually. Why should academia be any different?

In Germany for one we used to have positions at universities that focused exclusively on teaching. That was, like, their specialty. And frankly a lot of researchers shouldn't be teaching, they only do it because there's nobody else left to do it.

In the US, less than half of all college teaching is done by professors. The remainder are "adjunct" teachers, whose job focus is on teaching. An adjunct job tends to have low pay, is short term, and you sign away some of your rights under the labor laws. You have to re-apply for your job every semester.

Perhaps the real difference is how Germany treats workers.

The US has community colleges, that focus on teaching. In my state, the community college teachers are unionized, and teaching is treated more like a career.

Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, more than 25 years ago. My spouse has worked there as a non-faculty researcher since that time.

German higher education is based in large classes with only an exam at the end of a class and no TAs, except at maybe the top institutions. They don’t need so many teachers, so they can treat them better.

It’s a system that we might want to try here in the USA, but it doesn’t coddle students.

There is also a USA non-adjunct job called "lecturer" that is meant to focus on teaching rather than research. But while better pay and job security than adjunct, it's still usually pretty bad. (Also not tenured).

This doesn't solve the problem. If schools have a ratio N students per teacher, then at most 1/N students can expect to become a teacher. This works fine for things like B-school of CS where there is heavy industry demand for the credentials and less than 1/N students are trying to be teachers. But for other departments, especially humanities, there is essentially no private sector demand for that credential at the graduate level. This means that almost all grad students are aiming to teach, and since one teacher can teach many students, the majority of them are destined to fail.

This is a thing at US universities. There are pure teaching professors, pure research professors (who might teach one class a year), and others who do both.

>There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.

There's value to graduate/post graduate education other than a chance of tenure. I'd assume many do MSc/PhD without an expectation to become a prof, or work in academia at all (like I and most of my peers did).

What seems to be the problem is the lack of a clear indication that only few percent student have a chance of ever becoming a professor, or students' wishful thinking on the matter.

> There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.

What we really need is for professors to produce fewer PhDs over their career. When each professor produces 20 PhDs, you need an exponentially increasing number of professorships. That number needs to be closer to 2.