Re:Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote
by _aavaa_ on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:15AM
(#36631269)
> > 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.
Re:Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote
by autoexec on Friday July 07, 2023 @08:31PM
(#36640059)
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.
Re:Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote
by _aavaa_ on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:08AM
(#36681201)
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.
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.