[durgiston]

The wages will never be high. Thats just the nature of the job. But unions can fight for things like working conditions for TAs and helping students deal with abusive advisers. Students are strongly incentive not to bring complaints against professors since they hold all the power over potential career advancement. Unions could help here too.

Really more than students unionizing its adjunct faculty that are being severely exploited. Whereas PhDs at least get a degree for their troubles, adjuncts just get straight up robbed, and too many of them are living on public assistance and non-guaranteed contracts.

[Fomite]

"...and helping students deal with abusive advisers."

This is one thing I hope the unionization movement will genuinely change. There's not much room to move the needle on pay, but having students have a means of addressing abuse besides "Throw myself on the mercy of the department and hope they don't shred my career" would be a huge step.

Interestingly, one of the grad student union's arguments in a place I was at was, essentially, "You're flooding the university with cheap adjuncts, and it's devaluing our career path", which I thought was, at the very least, an interesting take.

[newen]

There's actually a lot of room to move the needle on pay even. I know a CS department that is giving it's grad student a >$5000 yearly raise from $25K because it's grad student union (unofficial) found out that CS students are getting much worse pay compared to the other engineering grad students. 5000 is a lot of money for grad students.

[rubidium]

Agreed. It's about balancing the power dynamic, not the wages.