You are here: Home » General » Self-Serving Nonsense, In Multiple Variations
Henry’s compendium of anti-labor arguments from nominally progressive academics is very useful. Attempts to come up with arguments against grad student unionization that wouldn’t apply to any other context remain a massive failure.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
Get free advice on Law
Enter an top online casino where gaming is taken to the next level. Experience over 130 titles for pure casino action and fantastic site promotions.
Spin the Reels and enjoy the cash-filled at these top no deposit casinos.
Try your luck at the best online casino with games like slots, video poker, or play blackjack online with all the fun of a real casino.
Excellent link.
This is why I’m glad to be what I jokingly describe as a recovering academic. The hypocrisy and self-serving bullshit in academia are piled almost as high as in politics.
Some parts of academia. Scott is an academic too, after all.
There are honorable exceptions even in politics.
The worst arguments, though, come from non-academics about labor. I can’t say how many conversations I’ve been in with otherwise liberal people who say things like, “I just don’t see what labor unions are for anymore.” Or “With the shift to a high-tech economy, labor unions aren’t relevant anymore.”
What they’re really saying is “I haven’t done any physical labor in my lifetime and I don’t have regular contact with moderate and low income people.”
Drives me up a wall.
I like to ask folks like that if they work every Saturday. Then ask ‘em why not. Then ask ‘em if they think weekends were delivered by unicorns.
Plenty of employers nowdays think weekends are for wimps.
Or if you work with live animals or biological cultures that don’t have an idea of what a week is.
Were one to extrapolate from this comment and many (by couple of persons) on the CT thread, it really does seem that scientists think they are a new priesthood. Hint: New Atlantis was just a story.
I think that this really gets to the heart of a lot of this. Far too many academics are loathe to regard themselves as “labor.” I thank my father, an engineer from a blue collar background, for helping to ground me by continually referring to himself as a “glorified plumber.”
Indeed, jobs requiring 7 day a week staffing is utterly unique to scientific laboratories, and a problem that unions are wholly unequipped and unable to deal with. That’s why hospitals with unionized nurses close on weekends.
Hint: sometimes “weekend” is a concept with a metaphorical as well as literal meaning.
This is why God created overtime pay.
And shift work.
As you bring up shift work, and since one of the good things that unions have been able to obtain is limited hours+OT and shift work, let me ask you how you would expect this to work for my earlier example about biological samples.
As a graduate student, I had samples that needed about 1.5 hours of attention every 6 hours for two weeks (such an experiment was generally run about 2 or 3 times a year).
So, who is going to do this shift work in maintaining the experiment? I was the only grad student in the lab at the time, the post doc had his own project that was completely different than mine in technique (plus he wasn’t cleared for animal work), and finally the PI. The animal care facility technicians were available 24/7 (they’re unionized, btw), but their job description is most emphatically not to do someone’s research but to provide general care of the animals. An option would be to hire a technician (who are also union members at every university I’ve worked at), but apparently being part of a neopriesthood, us scientists are spending too much money on beatification garments, so there was no money in the grant to hire one (esp for just 6 weeks).
In concrete terms, what would a graduate student union do to solve this issue? Because every single alternative I can come up with (by comparing to unions I’m personally acquainted with through work and family – research associates/techs, HS teachers, coal miners (and nurses, though this one is indirectly)) would massively fail.
So, please, show me a workable solution. I hated the 6 hour time points, and would love to know how this could have been solved.
I did not say that it would always work in every situation, but it is a rather obvious solution to some of these issues (have people in the labs on shifts, rater than all at the same time. As for your situation, one could argue that your project was understaffed.
Hanspeter, I knew people with lab experiments that required attention at odd times, over weekends, etc. The unionization of RAs didn’t effect that work, because they didn’t bargain for rules that would automatically interfere with that kind of project. Insofar as workload protections where bargained for, we opted to bargain for them as quarterly averages rather than weekly limits, due to the nature of our jobs (this applies for TAs as well, we’d obviously go over our limit the weeks we had 75+ essays to grade).
This, remember, is part of the magic of unions. You get to choose what you bargain for! Since RAs take their scientific work seriously, they didn’t bargain for rules that would make it difficult for them to accomplish their scientific work. Unions aren’t a bunch of alien rules imposed on management and workers from an alien outside entity; they’re a set of rules negotiated between labor and management, giving both sides the chance to object to rules that would interfere with the basic functioning of the lab.
Christ, the commenters over there are anti-union.
Not everyone; if you get a bit down, you find it’s split between two really anti-union folks clutching their mental pearls over the thought of disruption to the sacred comity of the lab sciences and then a bunch of folks like myself who know what we’re talking about.
I stopped reading that thread because I needed to move on to some other things, but I don’t get the impression that anyone in the thread is anti-union per se. I don’t agree with their “but we’re different” argument, but they at least acknowledge union rights.
Eh. I would put some of them in a category of soft anti-unionism; they can’t openly bring themselves to be opposed to unions, they will claim support in the abstract, but they devote enormous time and energy into inventing seemingly insurmountable barriers to unionizing in their own patch, and they’re incredibly acute to any potential for unions to make their own lives difficult.
That’s right. We’re either with you or against you.
They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there…
Does Henry go out and get the money that pays his graduate students’ tuition and stipends or does he do the law professor thing and live well?
Just askin’
Why don’t you ask him yourself on CT?
Steve, Eli is a scientist. No backtalk!
Well I am too, so I’m not impressed. ;)
WTF is this supposed to mean?
As someone who works for a one of America’s glorious small businesses, in the employ of an occasionally drunk and yelling in the late afternoon owner, I think a union might be a-okay. We could collectively bargain for no wine with her lunch.
What a strange and irrelevant question. If it’s meant to score some sort of rhetorical point, I fear it’s rather missed the mark.
If you were sincere you’d ask at CT rather than here, so you’re almost certainly trolling, in a curiously abstract way. Since Henry is a political scientist, the answer is almost certainly ‘neither’. Looking at his online CV, it appears that he’s been awarded some grants that are sizeable enough to include some money to hire RAs. However, like the vast majority of political scientists, his graduate students probably get most of their support from TAships, fellowships, and non-grant funded RA work.
And if not, so what?
It’s very odd to think that the fact that people get grants and other people’s salaries are paid on that funding has anything to do with whether it’s appropriate for the workers to unionize (or even have the right to unionize).
Whether those workers are students are not seems entirely irrelevant.
I’m really amazed that there is any debate.
Let me start with the radical premise that a PhD student is both a student (in virtue of paying tuition) and an employee (in virtue of being paid a salary, paying payroll taxes, and have duties which are the same as those other workers do).
Qua student, the university (and its other employees) typically owe varyingly strong duties of care. Qua employee, the PhD students deserve the respect, dignity, and power that any work for the university deserves.
This strongly suggests that PhD students should have more power and protection.
And yet, any cursory examination of a random sample of universities and departments will most certainly reveal that this is not the case.
If graduate students were so well protected qua students, then they would have little to no incentive to organize, so no union and no problem in recognizing their right to organzie.
If they are not so well protected qua students, then I trust we all recognize that they should have the right to protect themselves qua union, thus we respect their right to organize and, indeed, encourage them to do so.
Isn’t really this simple?
Since when do phd students pay tuition?
When they don’t get full funding; when tuition rises and state aid drops; otherwise known as right now.
Don’t believe me? Then you can write me a check for the thousands I’ve chipped in when fee remissions couldn’t be found.
They always pay tuition. Sometimes, someone else pays it for them and that includes remission from a special University account which is a cost on the books.
TA’s for example, have their tuition paid by the school, it’s part of the package. In the case of RA’s it comes from the grant or a school account.
It’s an expense and it has to be covered. As one of the people who has had over thirty years come up with funding for my students it is dispiriting to watch the magisterial wave of those who have not claiming that graduate or professional student tuition is “not real”, “funny money” and whatever.
I don’t think it’s right to say that it isn’t real (having paid it out of pocket it’s damn real to me!), but I do think one has to be careful about overstating the benefit to the student as something that compensates for the often absurdly low take home pay and other benefits. The actual marginal cost of a PhD student to the university (not counting tuition; I mean primary costs such as insurance, materials, etc.) is, I warrant, low to nonexistent. In that sense, tuition is a “made up” cost (for the university, not for people and departments who have to cover it).
I explicitly paid tuition for every year of (philosophy) grad school (i.e., not “had it paid for me”; at UNC-CH, we had to walk over to the registrar and pony up out of our pockets every term; the dept would cover the out-of-state bits for those of us not classified as in-state).
At Manchester, we fund PhD students out of EPSRC funding, off grants, or out of dept. funds. Any student which is not funded by some other source (e.g., a company, self funding, or some other scholarship) is a cost.