[epistasis]

I'd like to remind people about the terrible working conditions in extremely wealthy places such as California too. Right now, University of California grad students and researchers, who produce a massive proportion of science on the West coast, are on strike. In most locations, it's nearly impossible to pay rent on their stipends. Grad students may be in training, but they are also the source of nearly all the novel ideas and the analysis and the basic work that goes into moving science forward. Principal Investigators these days write grants, and perhaps collaborate on the ideas and analysis, but in nearly every major paper I have seen come from a lab where I know the people well, it's the grad students at the heart of the intellectual work.

This inability to pay rent isn't as much because wages got lowered, it's mostly because certain cities decided that they didn't want any more housing, in order to appease land owners and drive up housing prices to astronomical levels. But it's also unethical to pay somebody for a job if they can't use those wages to live.

Fortunately I'm not aware of any police violence against the grad students yet, but there has been plenty of UC police violence in the past against striking workers.

This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article. But as tech heavy as HN we may not be as in touch with a workforces that get squeezed on basic ability to survive, such as assembly in China or grad students in California. (Or dare I mention the farm workers that put all the food on our table...)

[lasky]

“This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article.”

Not even close my friend. I would trust that instinct. People working 6-7 days a week, doing labor, in a factory, in shit conditions. Desperately clinging to each paycheck that comes along.

Vs academic bureaucrats in one of the most Labor sensitive institutions in the world, who can’t afford the Bay Area…? The most expensive region of the US to live in. Not. Even. Close. Just a reminder, employees at UC Berkeley are entitled to a pension after five years.

Police violence against UC Berkeley staff? Seems highly doubtful.

As far as not being able to afford rent in the Bay Area, hard to disagree, that is a real problem that impacts quality of lives in a very negative way. Hopefully, with all the brain power at Berkeley, people begin to more honestly and openly contemplate the actual source and solution to this deep problem in the Bay Area’s housing supply not quite matching demands of UC Berkeley staff. Asking bold questions for a campus like Berkeley like.. what policies and stubborn attachment to specific world views might be contributing to the constriction of such supply and demand conditions?

[epistasis]

> Not even close my friend. I would trust that instinct.

Not sure what instinct you are referring to here. And just a reminder that when there's a strike, the people who go out to support are those with the least pay, or those who are already in unions. Trying to split grad students off from the rest of the labor force is not something that I am trying to do, if that's what you are implying.

> Just a reminder, employees at UC Berkeley are entitled to a pension after five years.

This is false, grad students never earn a pension. Grad student researchers are who I'm talking about, the people who are currently on strike.

Even still, what good is a pension if you can't pay rent today?

I bring up grad student workers both because they are currently striking, but also because HN readers are probably more familiar with them, and can commiserate a bit more. It's not work that is as hard on the body as farm work, but desperately needing each paycheck in order to get enough food to eat, in order to pay rent and not end up homeless, living in terrible filthy conditions such as homes with mold, or in in insulated garages, or in sheds behind a primary house, with shared use of the kitchen and bathroom... those sorts of poor living conditions, barely able to be paid for are common.

[lasky]

Let me ask you an honest question.

If you had to wake up tomorrow, as either a foxconn iPhone factory worker, or a Berkeley graduate student, which would you pick? How different do you think those experiences are?

[Spooky23]

You don’t have that option, because manufacturing and other roles was shipped to China.

That’s the leverage.

Almost of third of workers are on disability, another third have minimum wage jobs and the rest have prospects. The business model in college is taking advantage of pride of tenured professors who don’t want to teach and pushing adjunct and temporary faculty.

A lot of people don’t get it and get stuck in the academic funnel. That Berkeley grad student isn’t breaking her body, but is sacrificing core working years, mostly to support the $$ faculty and administration.

Long term, especially in humanities, you won’t have tenured professors, just some assistant professors on two year contracts grinding a meager living along with with sucker grad students who either don’t get it or need the work to keep a visa.

[latchkey]

foxconn workers have jobs... try south sudan and living in a slum that was built because the people around you want to kill you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydnnRyPPLs4

[rayiner]

Comparing factory workers anywhere to grad students in California is remarkable. Grad students endure the conditions voluntarily. They would have tons of alternative options in the private sector if they chose to do that.

[rybosworld]

The difference of extremity does not make comparison unreasonable.

Exploitation of workers is at the core of both circumstances. Downplaying/ignoring one set of circumstances because it is lesser on the scale of abuse is the more remarkable point of view, in my opinion.

[epistasis]

Perhaps grad student workers should just struggle in silence, due to the difference in their circumstances with other workers. Or perhaps all workers should band together in solidarity due to the commonality of their circumstances.

[xyzzyz]

No, they should just quit if they don’t like it. The reason they don’t is that they are getting extra compensation in the form of status and credential they are working towards, or legal immigration status for many foreign students. It is silly to ignore these and focus exclusively on financial compensation.

As a thought experiment: imagine that these grad students were offered a deal, where their pay is doubled, their job responsibilities are unchanged, but they are removed from the students roll, no longer can qualify for PhD degree (though they can still and in fact are expected to publish just as much as before), and their job title is now “lab technician” instead of “graduate students”. How many of them do you think would have taken the deal? My belief is that basically none of them would consider double the pay to be worth it.

[epistasis]

So your position is that they should quit instead of negotiate for better conditions? Who is that better for and why? You don't provide any argument for why that's a better course of action for anybody.

As somebody who benefits, indirectly, from their work, since their work benefits all of society, I'm much happier with them improving the working conditions and continuing to work, rather than quitting and losing that investment in their specialized knowledge.

[xyzzyz]

No, my position is that their situation is not so terrible as claimed by the people who compare the grad students to low paid workers in retail or manufacturing. They are compensated highly in non-financial terms.

More importantly, the main reason people negotiate with one another is that they hope to achieve better outcomes than they can with either a default of no action, or unilateral actions. Imagine that the grad students sit down to the negotiating table with the people determining they pay. They ask for higher pay, and the other side says straight up “no”, and offers no concession whatsoever. What then? At this point, the only option available to the students is threatening some form of quitting, as they don’t really have any other means of leverage.

The point here is that even if they do negotiate, they must be ready and willing to quit if they want these negotiations to go their way, and if they aren’t (and they very much aren’t, as people who are willing to quit grad school simply do exactly that), they’ll keep making a pittance in terms of cash benefits.

[AstralStorm]

Oh, they can do far more than just quit. The threat of a strike is one of explicit disruption of work and distribution of products.

Potentially even including violence against strikebreakers.

There can be other threats against people responsible for salaries and work conditions directly.

[Spooky23]

They have skin in the game in terms of their education. Walking away will impact references as well.

The nihilist attitude towards human decency at work in the tech industry is so gross. As someone outside looking in, as tech plateaus and consolidates, it will be amusing to observe this flip. All of the former FAANG people will be crying the same way the IBM, DEC, HP hotshots of yesteryear did.

[rayiner]

The circumstances have little in common. Grad students are cognitive elites who put up with poor working conditions on a temporary basis en route to high status positions. They are like medical residents or overworked junior professionals in law, banking, journalism, media, etc.

You can’t have meaningful solidarity between people who aren’t similarly situated, and who have differing incentives.

[legutierr]

So graduate education should only be available to the children of the wealthy, in your opinion?

[rayiner]

I think graduate students are aspiring members of the petit bourgeoise, and typically are going to come from such families anyway, and shouldn’t dilute real workers’ movements with their quite distinct interests.

[legutierr]

So, workers' movements don't benefit from their members going to graduate school?

Perhaps you have identified graduate school students as aspiring members of the petit bourgeoise because only individuals with such aspirations would rationally pay for graduate school in today's system.

[wstuartcl]

I don't think anyone is discounting the problem -- but they are reacting to the scale. Its like you jumped onto a story about a child stepping on a landmine to complain about your paper cut.

[dbspin]

Defending paying people less than a living wage is remarkable. There are an endless number of contrarian positions to take, but 'scientists shouldn't protest being paid too little to live on' takes the cake. Incidentally having worked both in a factory role and as a graduate student - the former was significantly better paid.

[wstuartcl]

There may be issues on both fronts but yeah, scale does matter -- there is a difference between someone that is basically an indentured (and locked up at night) servant and a grad student that is doing research that is not making comfortable wage in a high COL area.

[pryelluw]

Ok then list just 5 options they have from the tons you claim exist. Go ahead, no hurry.

Please make sure to provide factual options that can be corroborated.

[xyzzyz]

My friend just got a job as a delivery truck driver here in WA. Works 4 days a week, from 4 AM to 2 PM, and makes north of $100k. He tells me that the trucking companies are hiring like crazy. Do you think this is beyond the abilities of grad students?

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Wow. Does their job require a CDL?

[xyzzyz]

Yes, but if grad students are good at anything at all, passing exams is one of those things.

[camjw]

Just to clarify, your position is that, without "corroborated" proof to the contrary, you doubt that there are 5 jobs that a graduate student can get with better pay and conditions than a worker in one of these factories?

[jwie]

It’s unfortunate you’re catching heat for this 1000% true comment.

The reality is that Apple systematically robs value, specifically the value delivered by foreign slave labor. This same process occurs in graduate schools across the United States. Universities rob graduate students of the value they deliver to higher education. It’s just done in a white-collar patina with lies instead of force.

The “oh they’re in training” is nonsense. They will not obtain even an adjunct position after a PhD. It would be one thing to have a true apprenticeship with a guaranteed job, but that isn’t how this scam works.

It is all grist for the mill.

[epistasis]

Is this heat? The opposition seems very minor, IMHO! After years of fighting for more housing in California my skin has thickened. If I'm not slandered with five different slurs and and accused of at least four different blatant lies delivered with utmost confidence, then it's a friendly conversation IMHO.

[googlryas]

What kind of standards are we talking? Can't afford 25th percentile studio apartment in the region? Can't rent and walk to work?

[epistasis]

They go without food, and double up and triple up in rooms that they rent. And though homelessness is more prevalent among undergrad students, it also happens to a lot of grad student workers too.

[googlryas]

But I'm curious if that is a self imposed condition because they simply can't rent exactly where they want to.

As an example, there was a googler famously living out of a moving truck, because he wanted a short commute and couldn't live right next to the campus in MTV. That was his choice, I don't think anyone would argue google doesn't pay people enough to afford rent.

[epistasis]

How many hours of commuting a day amounts to living "exactly where you want to"?

If you can save $1000/month in rent by adding 200 hours of commute, why is that OK? And once you add in the extra thousands of miles of car travel, and having to pay for a car rather than being able to bike or take a bus, and it doesn't actually save any money...

Here are the estimated costs of living for various campuses, by three different methodologies:

https://twitter.com/weinberz/status/1596299620266962944?s=46...

The highest cost of living is where there's no escape to cheap housing by adding long commutes.

The people running these towns with high cost of living could add plenty of more housing, enough to reduce the cost of living, but have been spoiled brats about it. The level of entitlement among homeowners about not even seeing an apartment is absolutely astounding.

[andsoitis]

Can you point to statistics of homelessness and food scarcity amongst university students in California?

I would be surprised if it is more than a rounding error, but open to being shocked.

[hansvm]

5%-20% of college students were homeless at the time of this study [0] (closer to 5-10 for universities).

[0] https://oshi-la.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cts-state-of-...

[epistasis]

Figure 1 here from the state:

https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4014

Homelessness is far higher than a rounding error, it's 5% of UC students, 10% of CSU students, and 20% of community college students.

I live in a town with a UC campus, and come across packs of students living in their cars. They do everything they can to have minimal impact and hide from view. It makes me terribly sad, and shocked every time I see it.

[andsoitis]

I also found this article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/18/california-univers...

[epistasis]

Hey, that's where I live! Locally, the degrowth community from the 70s has allied with more conservative locals to stop all housing and maintain a firmly anti-university stance that prevents the building of dorms, of housing, and even results in ridiculous stances like trying to cut down on bus service since students use the buses a lot (and therefore cut down on traffic a lot).

I fight as hard as I can against the people causing all the suffering amongst those who aren't super wealthy, but their ability to understand other humans can not see beyond the comfort of their own yards. In contrast, they complain viciously about a building that they can see. A very strange sort of sight.

[gavinsyancey]

https://www.ucop.edu/global-food-initiative/_files/food-hous...

A 2017 study found:

- 5% of UC Graduate students had experienced homelessness.

- 26% of UC Graduate students had experienced food insecurity.