[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.

[xyzzyz]

We are talking about grad students here, in case you missed that.

[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.