Note that I'm not making any _moral or normative claims_ about not striking vs striking vs wildcat striking, nor about the interplay of rights and obligations between individual workers, unions, and employers. I'm speaking purely strategically here, in the same frame as your comment.
You're only looking at first-order dynamics here, while second-order ones are often in play. In this case, the 54 students weren't just striking, they were wildcat-striking: striking in defiance of not just the university they work for, but the union that represents them, who had already agreed to a contract with the university.
When the union has already agreed to, ratified, and entered into a contract, capitulating to a wildcat strike a couple of years later is a significant departure from even relatively pro-labor norms. Again, from a purely strategic perspective, the costs of this specific incident are potentially a lot less significant than the future costs of the university signaling that they're okay with contracts becoming meaningless if the other party changes their mind in the middle of the term.
This is all about what principle you are applying and whether it scales or not. It is a bit like restraining order. In some specific instances it might be safe to let the person in your house. However that kind of hurts the overall restraining order terms and sometime in future you can get into trouble.
Just like in a democracy, not everybody's interests can be fully satisfied in a union. So what? That doesn't necessarily mean we'd all be better off with autocracy or without any government whatsoever, not even the people getting the short end of the stick.
The fundamental problem in Santa Cruz, like many other universities in the state, is the cost of housing. UC Santa Cruz didn't build enough housing. Part of the problem is that most of UCSC's land is wildlife refuge, and part of the problem (like everywhere else in California) is the political and regulatory difficulty of building new housing. The cost of housing has been increasing far faster than UCSC's budget.
ref: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...
I know the same thing is happening at UCSD, where the student body exploded in size and despite additional housing being built, it is insufficient and very expensive.
It doesn't always work, in some industries I can see the relationship is much more confrontational and damaging, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Considering that many, many countries exist where this is the case (most of the time), this seems to be very well founded.
> Hermes: So you're telling me I could fire my whole staff and hire Grunka Lunkas at half the cost?
> Glurmo: That's right. They think they have a good union but they don't. [whispering] They're basically slaves.
Again without implying anything normative, what makes you claim that the students' representation by the union isn't "fair"? Simply because they want more than stipulated by the contract the union was able to negotiate? Is my (non-union) salary "unfair" because I'd much rather get paid 3x as much (or 30x, for that matter)?
That is very definition of 'Unions'. As an individual you have limited resources to take on a big adversary (employer) hence few people come together and pool in money. If this process is voluntary it is entirely up-to them to come up with the terms of engagement. Once you agree to those terms going back on those terms must be seen as dishonesty. If the union membership is forces them obviously union leaders have zero incentives to actually offer better terms to members.
The only way this can be resolved is by having some kind of "enlightened" union leadership. The superhumans who will instantly know what is the right thing to do and will have 100% freedom to do so. Sadly, such humans are very very rare.
Can anyone give me their actual experience being in a union that's not in the tech industry?
Like, medical mistakes are already crazy common -- and that's with the strict barriers of entry.
And, tell me how not having any union is better for all than an imperfect union.
Obvious answer: No dues. Not commenting on whether that's a good tradeoff, mind, but it's an answer.
And this is why unions exist in the first place and make binding contracts - no one wants to make a deal with another party when the other will arbitrarily decide the deal isn't good anymore and act like fools contrary to the terms of the contract.
This 13m number isn't arbitrary. In fact that $1400 per month bump is designed to put UCSC grad students in line with net compensation received by grad students at UC Riverside.
Here's news on the strike from 2018: https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/05/strike-updates.html
Here's news on the strike from 2017: https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/01/strike-message.html
There's reason to believe that no matter what deal was reached, they would just strike again next year, to try to get more money. How much is enough?
Here's the strike from 2013, with grad students and service workers going on strike together: https://afscme3299.org/media/news/ucsc-service-workers-grad-...
The comments on this UCSC reddit thread discuss how the unions have been coordinating their strikes over the last 3 years: https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSC/comments/ese6sz/to_everyone_wh...
Working with the right professor to shape your research agenda and future as a result, is the second cut.
"UAW local 2865, a labor union representing UC student workers and teaching assistants, recently estimated in over two decades about $1 billion dollars have been wasted in upper-level UC administrative costs. UC Berkeley Professor Charles Schwartz, who has conducted extensive research on this subject, estimated that the total cost of UC administrative bloat had been $600 million per year. He has also estimated that UCLA in particular squanders about $54 million per year, the most out of all the UC’s."
0. https://scaleatucla.weebly.com/ucla-senior-management-growth...
The $500K Club: Here are the hundreds of U.C. employees who made more than $500,000 last year
Q: What happens to the typical CIO and his/her package when returns aren't "good" ?
The person running your investments can make or break you. You're going to hire the best you can, and that's going to cost. And someone with a track record of making it rain is going to know this and know what they're worth.
If you want a golden parachute yourself, you're going to need to build a track record of success first showing you're worth it.
How would one propose to distinguish* someone who will deliver growth for - say - 25 consecutive years from someone who delivers growth for 5 years yet blows up your endowment in year 6 ?
* beforehand ;)
If you think that "25 years of not blowing up" is a sure-fire way to predict the risk of blowing up in year 26, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Besides, Warren Buffet has a stellar track record much longer than 25 years. People paying him to manage their money has made him very, very rich and those people very happy with him.
I think you kind of summed it up there... There are better things for a university to be doing than paying rainmakers
Dozens of university endowments are over a billion dollars, with significant returns when under good management. Ignoring the returns possible on that means the students and state has to pay more to continue the university. Endowments often consist of hundreds or more fund, usually set up by donors, to advance some part of the university, which very often is scholarships and other direct student benefits.
It's incredibly short-sighted to downplay them without understanding the benefits.
A lot of grad students are international students (like I was) and they simply can't work anywhere else due to their visa restrictions.
Given that there's hundreds of schools with thousands of grad programs to choose from, with none of them having more than a tiny percentage of the total market, this is not monopoly pricing.
It's simply supply and demand. People are willing to show up and work for the vast majority of these programs.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/
Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR.
Was that the annual base salary?
What was the value of the rest of the package?
The data set is fairly informative for it's size and publicity.
My question was more or less rhetorical, since institutions don't always rush to put a figure on all the elements of a package.
Anecdotal data point: the person at the top of the tree at my old university gets a private 200 year-old house inside campus (so long as they're in post). What's that worth?
I'm an UCSC alumnus, and I served as a student rep on UCSC's Academic Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB). I've sided with the graduate students in this case. If you follow the subreddit r/UCSC, you will see the student body is largely divided on the issue. Now, subreddit posts are a small sample of the student body, it does affect the perception as well as the notoriety of UCSC being a liberal school full of hippies that always fight for worker's rights. It is harder to rebuild that kind of reputation in the school's brand. And it also negatively affects alumni fundraising.
It puts the UCSC administration between a rock and a hard place. I've worked with the administration in the past. They are intelligent and caring faculty members trying to walk a tight rope every year with UCOP/Regents increasingly demanding in delivering in business objectives (increase enrollment/revenue) on one side and their academic mission on the other. I do not envy them.
UCOP miscalculated this entire affair. UCSC grads going on strike has also encouraged UC Berkeley's and Davis's grads to strike in solidarity. The administration has never been able to handle student protests with the best optics, and unfortunately, student protests historically do not succeed in getting their demands met. It is.. a teachable moment, well steeped in irony.
UC had to break the union before they got everyone involved.
Your calculus disregards the additional carry-on costs for parity when the 9 other UC campuses follow suit.
1 person who you give a good deal to might, just might, keep their mouths shut. A whole segment? No way.
I am confused and a bit curious, because that is not why I went to uni(not in US) and not how I had to deal with my studies. Also - can a foreign student apply for this free cheese and is UC diploma any good(also - outside UC, to have a real job)? And how UC is getting money? Any tax money involved(if that is the case, then why?) or only donations - from former students, who... work at UC?
The strikers want 1.4k more per month. With the current 9 month payment system, that’s about 13k more per PhD student per year. So 1k*13k = 13mil overall to put this problem to bed.
That seems...surprisingly little? Aggravating a big chunk of your on-the-ground workers and attracting all this bad press doesn’t seem worth it. Meanwhile, there appear to be a whole lot of UCSC administrators making comfortable six figures [4].
I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd.
[1] https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html
[2] https://planning.ucsc.edu/budget/reports-overviews/pdfs-imag...
[3] https://gsa.ucsc.edu/things_to_know/funding
[4] https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/