> Again, as someone who went through this very recently, the problem is the power imbalance between the institution and the students. They have complete control over your supply of labor.
I'm pretty sure people were saying the same things during the early labor movements. "They'll just replace you, they have all the control, you'll just screw up your life." The thing is, they were probably right. For a while it really sucked. But the result in the long run was that the generations that followed ended up starting with a much less lopsided power imbalance.
You acknowledge that there are problems and have ideas for where you'd like things to go. What you don't have is a proposal for bringing about the cultural shift you desire. How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing the workers?
Organizing workers does not necessarily require joining a huge national labor union that was obviously not meant for the type of problems grad students face. It's fucking weird to me that so many schools have joined United Auto Workers. I don't see any real changes to the problems with academic training at any of those schools. And I don't see why UE will be better here. The power imbalance in grad school is very different from the typical labor situations:
1) Grad student roles are extremely heterogeneous compared to laborers. The union at Harvard for example is trying to represent both TAs and RAs, in departments ranging from literature to biology to math, all as part of one collective bargaining agreement. There are huge differences in the problems those students face, and that's before getting into how different student experiences can be even amongst e.g. biology RAs.
2) Grad students receive atypical compensation, not just the degree itself but also things that are clearly not quantified by the union orgs - the (often falsely promised) academic freedom to pursue independent research interests and the time and resources to do some learning for the sake of it. Further, for RAs it can be impossible to untangle work that counts towards the degree requirement and work that is being done in exchange for stipend/other benefits.
3) Graduate school is only a short portion of someone's overall career in the grand scheme of things, while existing unions mainly focus on jobs that can be/often are lifelong. Grad school is by definition a stepping stone. Nobody asks "what do you want to do when you're done being a cop".
4) Most grad students at least enter their programs with the goal of themselves reaching professorship. Auto workers are not trying to build towards owning an automobile factory.
5) There is not a sub-20% acceptance rate for becoming an electrical worker. At many of the schools that are forming unions lately, there are tons of departments with highly competitive admissions processes for the PhD. Some at MIT are easily in the single digits acceptance rate, and this is amongst a specialized pool to begin with.
Thank you for actually engaging in a meaningful discussion.
> How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing the workers?
I alluded to it, but this change requires massive changes at the government level. The first thing I would like to see changed is that universities cannot count waived tuition as a cost of a grad student. Trump actually proposed to tax these waivers taxed at the individual level. Short term, this would have crushed students. But, imagine working for a car dealership and part of your pay was a new car, of course it should be taxed. This tax would have really brought this distortion that this causes in the market. Second, the student-employee limbo needs to be solved. Personally, I think being allowed to pay your PhD tuition should be allowed. That is, if I can make $100k outside, I should be allowed to pay $50k in tuition and work at my own pace. I don't want to advocate for government intervention, but it seems to me that if there is a tuition, that is an implicit admission that that is the price a student would need to pay for the services of being a student. After the university admits me, they should have no control which route I decide to go: TA + research or work + research. This would require rethinking the F1/J1 visa.
Now, why do I think organizing workers won't solve this issue. Because, it does not break the student-employee limbo. As I have pointed out in other comments, PhD students enjoy many benefits of being a student. Chief among them, international students can come here to "study". However, the problem is that your status at the university is dependent on your progress as a student with many programs having hard caps on the number of years to complete certain tasks. This is fundamentally opposed to organized labor because they cannot bargain for changing degree requirements.
I'm pretty sure people were saying the same things during the early labor movements. "They'll just replace you, they have all the control, you'll just screw up your life." The thing is, they were probably right. For a while it really sucked. But the result in the long run was that the generations that followed ended up starting with a much less lopsided power imbalance.
You acknowledge that there are problems and have ideas for where you'd like things to go. What you don't have is a proposal for bringing about the cultural shift you desire. How do you propose to get schools to allow part-time work or to change any other bad practice if not through organizing the workers?