[lordleft]

I've heard ghastly horror stories from PhD friends of mine at the Ivy I attended. I don't think the average person appreciate how unbalanced the power dynamic can be for doctoral students. An advisor can exert a fearsome pressure on their subordinates. You can also get lose funding, forcing you to pay an outrageous rate of tuition to the university (100k~ per annum) if you can't find another source of funding.

[sybercecurity]

Not just PhD programs, but also masters programs. Especially for foreign students because not only is the pay a factor, but also their visa status can be held over the student's head until one more* paper is published.

*it's always "just one more"

[einpoklum]

... and this is almost entirely due to the lack of recognition of the employee status of Ph.D. candidates as junior researchers.

That is, the assumption that payment somehow naturally goes from the Ph.D. candidate to the university rather than vice-versa.

Luckily, there has been a very positive development in this front a few years back - 364 NLRB 90, Columbia University vs UAW:

https://columbiagradunion.org/wp-content/uploads/NLRB-Case-0...

[tnecniv]

Also, at least in the state my grad school is in, graduate students are not employees which means that they aren't bound by worker safety laws preventing them from working in a lab setting for over 40 hours a week.

[einpoklum]

Two points about that:

1. A graduate employee/reseacher union can demand a cap on lab hours regardless of employment status. (Actually it can demand anything regardless of employment status if it's capable of concerted action to put pressure on management). That would also be a trivial an extremely justifiable demand, which would make management sound evil if they try to deny it. A media campaign about the poor lab rats might do the trick.

2. "in the state my grad school is in, graduate students are not employees" <- That's probably wrong, in two ways.

First there's the question of whether you're an employee as opposed to the question of whether you can unionize and bargain collectively in the framework of US labor law, and those are two different things.

Second, the fact that management treats you as non-employees does not mean that that is the legal reality. I mean, NLRB rulings are binding in all states. And regardless of legal issues - at the bottom line it's a matter of organizing yourselves, getting in touch with other organized graduate employees in other universities/states, and educating yourselves collectively (= talks, workshops, rallies, whatever, in which you explain things; print materials; departmental discussion+Q&A sessions; orientation sessions with new graduate employees and so on). The struggle between yourselves and management is first and foremost about your collective self-perception and beliefs.

[jseliger]

Word about these problems has been out for ~20 years if not longer: https://www.chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/... and yet people keep going. Grad school will change when people stop going.