"Iâll start with saying that I believe in what I do. I love researching and I love teaching. However, my time in graduate school has really worn out my desire to continue these endeavors. The horrendous pay and extremely toxic environment has made finding work outside of academia much more appealing. If the UC wants to keep the people they are training in this line of work they need to treat their entry-level grad workers much better.
Since I have started at UCR three years ago my savings account has gone from being able to support me for six months to not being able to handle a $500 emergency. I have seen my department ignore abusers to âprotect the image of the departmentâ by saying âat least he is graduating soonâ. Who knows how many other abusers have stayed in our department under similar reasoning. I have seen my disabled coworkers get shamed and get campus cops called on them for using accessibility spaces.
Some of my colleagues live and work in constant fear of their PIs who are known to fire people without warning and drive unrealistic expectations of work that require working late and on weekends regularly. Throughout my time here and the strike many administrators, deans, and professors have scolded graduate workers and told them that grad school is âa time to be poorâ. This internalized notion of poverty and exploitation is ridiculous given that our chancellors and the president get six-figure salaries and six-figure raises each year. UC has the money and ability to give us a living wage, and it is high time that they did.â
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Nearly 4K academic student employees, postdocs, academic researchers, supportive faculty, undergrads, and community members marched through the streets of Berkeley to the UC presidentâs mansion yesterday in support of a fair contract!
The walkout involves nearly 48,000 unionized academic workers at the prestigious public university system.
Academic workers from four different bargaining units at the University of California are taking part in the largest strike in the U.S. since 2019 and the largest strike in U.S. higher education ever! On day 2 of the strike, the UCs have continued to refuse to bargain in good faith--TAs have not bargained since last Wednesday.
If you live near a UC campus, show your support by joining us on the picket line! If not, consider donating to the strike fund or signing a letter of solidarity to UC President Michael Drake.
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Faculty are struggling to hire postdocs, delaying research projects and pressuring universities to consider improving salaries and benefits as endowments are shrinking.
No paywall!
This is a great article (and while it focuses on biological science PhDs, it applies to all graduate programs and academia). It explicitly compares PhD pay to industry, and highlights that one of the big problems in the current wage crisis is that universities have been hiring more graduate students than they can adequately pay. The article posits itâs because no one wants to go into academic postdocs anymore, which may indeed be one of the many reasons why PhD enrollment has been outstripping wage increases all around.
But also, you know, our underpaid labor makes the universities run lol.
TLDR: My union has called for a strike, starting Monday, Nov 14.
I am not an official representative of the union but these are my personal thoughts, and my reasons for striking, with links to our official UAW platform.
Graduate students, postdocs, and other academic student employees are essential to the teaching and research mission of the University of California, especially as undergraduate enrollments rise. But as greater and greater demands are placed on our work as researchers and educators, we are falling into rent burden and poverty, and suffer unjust treatment by our employers.
We cannot provide the level of research and quality of education that WE WANT to offer our colleagues and our students in these conditions.
Therefore we are demanding:
Wages and raises that meet or beat inflation.
Making the University-owned housing AFFORDABLE.
Increasing access too and affordability of sustainable transit options for commuters
Enshrining protections for workers against bullying and harassment from their supervisors
Among other demands, which can be found here.
What can you do to help?
Undergraduates at the University of California can help us out! Check out @ undergradsforCOLA on InstagramÂ
Community members can donate to the Strike Pay Fund. As we strike, the university is allowed to withhold our pay for work we are refusing to perform. The Union provides a small stipend to striking workers who are actively supporting the picket line (as I will be).
Keep up on social media and amplify the voices of our union (Santa Barbaraâs is included here but there are others, and I do not attend the SB campus personally)
Write to (YOUR PERSONAL) representatives in the California Legislature, as well as the leadership of the University of California, in support of the strike and our demands.
IF YOU DONT LIVE IN CALIFORNIA: In addition to donating and amplifying the movement on social media, look at universities in your state. Theyâre looking at us right now. Many academic workers have unionized, following our example, over the past YEAR. This is a young movement that will live or die in the near future... and your support--even if itâs just encouragement--can give it power! Contact the local unions for workers like me and voice your support. Contact University administration and local political leaders to encourage them to support academic workersâ rights and compensation. And when academic workers go on strike, show your support with donations, vocal encouragement, and even volunteer on the picket line.
Please reblog this! Talk to people about it.
Below the cut, some more personal explanations.
Some of you may know that I am a graduate student, or more accurately, I am âpursuing my PhD in chemistry.â There is nothing âstudentâ about my situation. I do not take classes. Instead, I perform highly trained laboratory work for the University of California along with countless other Postdoctoral scholars, technicians, and so on. Though the word research might conjure just pictures of me, a scientist in a lab, there is invaluable work being done in Humanities and Social Sciences that take on many different shapes and forms. All of it is done under the auspice of the University of California, and it is THIS that gives the university its prestige worldwide.
When I receive my âdegreeâ I will continue doing the same work I am doing--currently on a $30k stipend--but the jobs I will be looking at pay $90k or much, much higher.
As a researcher, the work I do is severely underpaid in this university setting. It is something that we all DO agree to and put up with for the sake of having this âapprenticeshipâ time with prestigious professors and older researchers, at institutions that have technology, equipment, and libraries we need for our work.
HOWEVER, in agreeing to this severely underpaid work, we are offered things like guaranteed housing in the local community--communities like Berkely, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Irvine, and San Diego, that are INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE for people to live in otherwise. Or...some of us are guaranteed. Because EVEN in the University-owned housing, there are:
housing shortages
lack of significant subsidies
rent burden
More than 37% of my income goes to rent every month, and I live in the cheapest possible apartment from University-owned housing. Many academic workers are not even OFFERED the cheaper options, instead being given the âtake it, or lose your housing guarantee on campus and fend for yourself in the outer communityâ treatment...but their offers are for apartments that cost 55% of their income or more. The university is paying us. The university is also charging us through the nose for housing we desperately need and can neither find nor afford elsewhere.
In addition to the insane rent burden we undertake, there are inadequate legal protections from overworking us (our reputations and references entirely depend on our advisors and supervisors Approving, and many of them expect 7am-midnight-or-late work days, 7 days a week), bullying us, harassing us or otherwise abusing us. International workers--drawn here, again, by the prestige of the Universityâs research efforts--are most at risk, and most unprotected.
There are other issues of equality and fairness at stake here: child support and paid leave, affordable transportation (hey, if we canât afford to live in Santa Barbara, we will need to commute from somewhere else. Right now there are few options that are affordable, let alone sustainable, to do so), just to name a few examples.
The University also claims to be a leader in labor equality, fairness, and movements. We are among the historical faces of the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam War protests. We are the faces of labor rights research and progressive policy development and sustainable energy research. We are where the Earth Day movement started!
AND YET the University has antagonized union-forming efforts, incentivized anti-union sentiment, threatened and implied retribution for union activities, spends insane amounts of money trying to quash the union and send counter messaging, and seems to want to do ANYTHING other than pay us well.
Hereâs an example of one of the latest offers and how insulting it is.
And itâs not just us. Food service workers on campus, custodians, and many others on campus who make things RUN, have gone on strike in the past and showed us how utterly hypocritical our sterling, utopic University is.
Itâs just a corporation.
And so we are treating it like one, by going on strike.
I love what I do. I love science, and the research I do is focused on issues related to our energy crisis. The training Iâve received has prepared me to take jobs with IMPACT, that will shape our green energy future.
And I am a passionate educator. Right now I am responsible for ~ 250 students (a portion of our 900 students taking Chem1A right now), with classrooms of 50 students each. These are not ideal teaching conditions and yet I am DEDICATED to using the best pedagogy I have learned to help our most at-risk students succeed in this class. I have a history as a TA of improving student outcomes for underrepresented minority, low-income, and first-generation students who disproportionately fail our classes due to poor preparation at their local high schools, feelings of alienation, and the likelihood that they are working multiple jobs through college while more privileged students focus on classes. I have shown that I care about my students, in ways that even many professors do not.
That is why it is a heartbreaking and infuriating decision to go on strike, but I believe there is no alternative way to make the University improve our situation. We do it for other UC workers who are not compensated as well as we are, and we do it for future graduate student researchers, TAs, and postdocsâsome of whom we hope are in Chem 1A right now--and we do it for the students who are not being best-served by graduate students sleeping out of cars, forgoing meals, and suffering from abusive supervisors.
Thank you for your support in whatever form it takes. it has been really encouraging to have friends, family (my REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE FAMILY SUPPORTS THE STRIKE), students, strangers, and even my supervisor (again, a red Ohio man lol) supporting this exercise of our legal right to protest, and the demands we are standing behind.
Talking to my advisor was a terrifying ordeal, especially when the other members of my lab were too scared to do it and risk his ire. We have a good relationship with him, but the fact is that he is our supervisor, and his reputation depends on our hours worked, and he could be frustrated. But I couldnât sleep well if I didnât participate in this strike, so I resolved to sit in front of my advisor face-to-face, alone, and tell him I was joining the strike.
My advisor isnât the problem, the structure of the university is. But it was still the most terrifying conversation Iâve ever prepared for. And it went...so well. So, so well.
Our faculty understand that we are under a worse rent burden than they have ever seen or experienced themselves (they werenât, and arenât, paid super well either!), and they understand that we care about our work and donât WANT to stop.
So itâs with great relief, and fervent hope, that I will be joining the strike. I hope whoever is reading this feels INVIGORATED by this movement, no matter the outcome. We are a new generation that is saying enough is enough. We will not tolerate mistreatment. We will work together to make sure we are all uplifted.
My department treats its chem students better than MAYBE any other chem department at the UC. We have it REALLY GOOD. My primary reason for striking is:
Sure. I can put up with some things. Itâll be tight, but I can afford it. Barely.
But I know many, many others canât. They are my friends and colleagues. They were my mentors in the past. They are who I might be in the future!
