Phd students at Columbia get 5 or more years of full ride support: all tuition and fees and $30k a year in stipend and discounted housing. For three of those five years they teach or do lab research up to 20 hours a week.

20 hours of work a week for three out of five years being paid 30k plus tuition and benefits. Real rough half time gig you've got there, you privileged kids.

For going to school.

They are not workers, they are well paid students. Columbia does not rely on their labor. These aren't adjunct faculty.

And a Columbia PhD has a excellent shot at a tenure track gig compared to graduates of all but a few peer institutions.

I hope NLRB rules against them. This is not solidarity. It's frippery and play-acting as workers. If these were state university TAs it would be different. These are the 1% of graduate students, however.

Some are research fellowships. Guess what we do while completing our academic requirements for graduating.

We work. We teach and/or conduct research. Any idea how good you have to be to be asked to do that at a major university?

While we're at it, any idea how good you have to be to get that fellowship in the first place?

This is not a position where your below-average GWBush type can slide through while others do his work for him.

Privileged kids, my ass.

And was a phd student on full ride once at an R1 public.

It is a privilege of the highest order.

You expose your ignorance about how universities function and how hard these students work and are taken advantage of by the universities. The fact that they are only paid for 20 hours shows how much they are being used.

I suggest you add that to your "only paid for 20 hours".

I'm a tenured professor who supervises PHD students. You're the one who is ignorant. They are paid for 20 hours because they work 20 hours because IT IS NOT A FULL TIME JOB. They are given health care and full tuition and often subsidized housing and research funding.

I'm talking about a place like Columbia, discussed in the OP, not some godforsaken tier 3 state university.

Don't tell me I don't know how universities work. I was a phD student once at an R1 public university. Best job I ever had.

The value of a full ride fellowship in dollars at a place like Columbia is near $80k a year including tuition and housing subsidy. In exchange they work 20 hours per week for 9 months in each of three years of a five year package AND THEY GET AN IVY LEAGUE PHD at no cost.

People on less luxurious rides can complain. Students at Harvard or Chicago or Columbia have nothing to complain about.

As a labor representative in the first right to work state in America, I deal with union animus on a daily basis. I never thought I would see it on D.U. though. Instead of bashing workers who seek to better their working conditions, we should be standing in solidarity with them. Union busting 101, divide and conquer, Jay Gould would have been proud.

Good luck to them and to all the graduate student workers.

Seems a different union would be a better fit.

As union membership declined unions started raiding other unions territories.



http://www.uaw.org/page/uaw-uniting-academic-workers

The UAW is the union of choice for more than 40,000 workers at America’s colleges and universities.
The UAW’s long and strong experience in organizing, bargaining and political action has brought important results for a wide variety of workers at institutions of higher education including:

Pay raises

Improved health care benefits

Child care assistance

Job security

Is the UAW the right union for you? Many workers in higher education have decided the answer is YES, including:
Teaching assistants

Research assistants

Post-doctoral researchers

Adjunct faculty

Full-time faculty

Administrators

Clerical and support staff

Technicians

Maintenance workers

Tutors, readers and graders

UAW members are workers at a variety of locations coast-to-coast, from New York’s Columbia University to California State University, from Oberlin College in Ohio to Wayne State University in Detroit, from the University of Washington to the University of Massachusetts.

Higher education workers are organizing in response to tighter budgets, increased workloads and a reliance on part-time and contingent employees by colleges and universities.

For example:
The largest group of post-doctoral researchers in the U.S. -- nearly 6,000 in the University of California system – have organized to become part of the UAW.

Over 500 clerical, technical and shipping and receiving workers are UAW members at Wayne State University in Detroit, one of Michigan’s largest universities. UAW Local 2071 president Judy McClusty says that number is growing with the recent addition of members from WSU’s housing department and post office.

Teaching assistants (TAs), Research Assistants (RAs) and Graduate Assistants (GAs) at the University of Massachusetts have been UAW members since 1996, after a multi-year campaign ended with a unanimous vote for unionization. Members recently negotiated a new three-year contract that includes major gains, including higher pay, lower student fees and lower costs for workers’ health care.

More than 2,000 adjunct faculty, members of UAW Local 7920, won an “amazing” first contract agreement at the New School in New York in 2005. Richard Boris of the City University of New York, an expert on collective bargaining in higher education, said at the time the UAW-negotiated pact ““might well serve as a template for contingent faculty throughout the country."

This year, negotiating their second agreement Local 7920 members won another landmark deal. Despite negotiating in the midst of a severe economic downturn, New School adjuncts won across-the-board pay raises as well as enhanced family leave protections for part-time faculty members. “Unionizing and empowering ourselves,” says Maida Rosenstein, president of UAW Local 2110, is the way to achieve “superior wages and working conditions.” Local 2110 represents workers on several New York-area campuses, including Columbia University, Barnard College, Mercy College, Teachers College and Union Theological Seminary.

I read UAW and was thinking what do auto workers have to do wth graduate teacher assistants and PhD students