What are the pros and cons of well compensated STEM graduate students joining a union? [duplicate]

Question

Recently, my state has declared graduate students as employees giving them the right to unionize. The students in the Engineering School are very well compensated. The benefits that we get are

1. Minimum stipend of 29k$ (which was increased ~3 years ago).
2. Top tier health insurance plan fully paid for by the University and Engineering School
3. Deans that largely respect student needs and actively address current issues
4. Plethora of funding for student lead activities
5. Free services like legal council, psychiatrist, campus clinique, campus shuttle buses, etc.
6. TA opportunities are always available for those that need them.

Additionally, my department has a very high standard set forth for us. We have nice offices, the Chair actively addresses our concerns and complaints, funds for student activities and community building, computational resources, and more. The quality of life for students in my department (Applied Math) is quite high.

Lately, we've had outside people dropping by to advise us to join a union. The humanities students are largely in support of this movement since they are not compensated as well as the engineering students. In my point of view, there are very few reasons why I can see joining a union will benefit the Applied Math graduate students. Given how well we, the graduate students in my department, are currently treated, what are the advantages and disadvantages of unionization?

Edit: There is a similar question here, however, does not specifically address STEM students.

I am a naive graduate student and will like to be better informed about the advantages and repercussions of joining a union. Whenever administrative University personnel have approached us to dissuade the effort, their tone has been extremely diplomatic and ambiguous about why they are advising against unionizing.

A brief summary of the responses is as follows.

1. Advantages of unionizing

   • Security of current benefits
   • Bargaining power to timely address current, new, and growing needs of the entire bargaining unit
   • Guaranteed minimum pay
   • Improving circumstances of students in other schools who are not as well compensated
   • Human resources like representation for students facing abuse, harassment, or other adversities from their advisors

2. Disadvantages of unionizing

   • Partisan representation
   • Clarifying the distinction between student and employee (though some may argue that this is an advantage)
   • Paying dues (though contracts usually negotiate higher stipends to offset this amount)
   • Deterioration of student/administrative relationship

Additional STEM specific points that I'd like to add are

1. Advantages

   • Incentives to address issues such as a single student having to monitor experiments running for 8+ hours
   • For international students, alleviating fears of not being able to find an advisor which prevents them for settling to the 1st person that says yes regardless of their interest
   • Some departments in the Engineering school offer things like funds for all students in their 3rd year to purchase a new laptop. Adapting this or similar policies universally would be appreciated.
   • Guaranteed funding beyond X years as set forth by the School, especially when the average is just slightly below X.

2. Disadvantages

   • As funds are rerouted into increased stipends, there may be
     • Decreased support for professional development (conferences, workshops, etc.)
     • Decreased supplemental resources (rented compute nodes and hours, new lab equipment, etc.)
     • Fewer graduate student and postdoc hires

Thank you all for your comments; it is all very much insightful. I'll continue to look out for new responses.

Answer 1

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 2016 set a minimum salary of $47,476 for professional employees to be exempt from paid overtime. in response to this, the NIH changed its postdoctoral salaries.

While the NIH says

NIH is fully supportive of increased pay for postdoctoral researchers and has proposed to increase the NRSA postdoctoral stipends to levels above the threshold

their behavior suggests otherwise. What they did is simple increase all postdoctoral salaries below the minimum to slightly higher than the minimum. While historically a year 1 post doc made 4% more than a year 0 postdoc, after the adjustment they made the same. There was no increase in the predoctoral salaries. In FY 2016 the NIH predoctoral salary was $23,376 so slightly less than what you are currently being paid.

While you may believe you are well compensated, some would argue that $29,000 a year is not a fair salary if you are expected to perform unpaid overtime (and what graduate student doesn't work overtime). A union can help fight for things like fair salaries.

Answer 2

Some of the answers already raise good points, but I would like to add something:

Although you feel that the treatment you get is good, perhaps some of your colleagues with different situations or background have issues. For example : Do you have parental leave? Or politics concerning work-family balance?

A union could help represent minorities in their revendications, if there's any. And as someone stated, all this is very dependent on the chair you currently have, which can leave/die/change his mind.

The relation between an union and the university officials does not need to be acrimonius. They can have good relations, working both in the same direction, safeguarding the rights of students.

Answer 3

From a practical point of view, you rarely gain anything by joining a union or other similar lobbying organization. You either join if you feel that the cause is right, or you don't if you feel otherwise. Edit: I mean joining a union should be a moral choice, not a choice based on weighing the advantages and disadvantages.

As a member, you have to pay for the lobbying the union does, but the benefits usually go to all employees. Hence it is more cost-effective to just take the benefits and let the others pay. This assumes a legal environment where the employer has no right to know whether an employee is a union member or not. If the employer has the right to know, union members can have higher salaries and better benefits, but their relationship with the employer may suffer.

Answer 4

When I was in graduate school, my stipend was 19k. As the economy got worse, I had more trouble than usual making the ends meet. Yet, it was not this reason that made me consider joining a union. It was the climate in my department. Long story short, some of the faculty were extremely abusive and kept threatening to fire students, although everyone was working as hard as they could. In the end, we organized and pushed back against some measures our faculty thought about such as not allowing some people to TA simply because they had been PhD students for too long.

Around the same time, some union people came to get us to join their union, but nothing really happened in the end. I can only speculate why they didn't succeed, but I think it was because things weren't bad enough.

Going back to the question, joining a union benefits workers only if they need protection against their employer's abuses. In the case of graduate students, they aren't treated as workers, but as students. This opens the door to many abuses such as no overtime payment, unexpected firing, 12 hours workday, and so on. The faculty advisor has almost complete control over their student's life and many take advantage of that. Things like delaying forever student's graduation date simply because the faculty could use the cheap qualified labor were common at my graduate school. When I graduated, the average PhD duration at my university was 6.5 years.

To give an idea how things can go bad for graduate students, one needs to look at the famous NYU student strike in 2006. The striking students faced retaliation.

Answer 5

There are several huge disadvantages you missed.

Because student employment is not like a normal employer/employee relationship, the benefits of unions are diminished. The employment relationship is by nature limited in duration so long term contract changes not only don't benefit you, they don't benefit any of the students in the union.

But it's worse than that, with special consequences for several STEM fields. Power is placed in the hands of representatives who have no obligation to your academic progress, only to your employment. If you are in a field where experiments must go uninterrupted (monitoring disease states in virology and immunology, growing cell cultures in microbiology, and note that work in these fields is not limited to majors -- statisticians may be studying effects of drugs, mechanical engineers may be doing tissue engineering, etc) then having the union call a mandatory strike may ruin your ongoing projects and set research back half a year. Even when the projects aren't as long term, you can be forced to miss submission deadlines for conferences and journals.

It just isn't worth putting your education -- which is the primary form of compensation you are receiving -- at risk for some employment terms that may never benefit anyone but the union itself. How much would your salary have to increase to counteract the opportunity cost of a one-year delay in graduation (not only you lose the real world salary for that year, but you have a year less experience for the rest of your career)? The same moral argument that you need to subjugate your own needs to the best interests of the whole group, demands that you not place all the students who could suffer ruined projects at the mercy of the union, even if your own projects don't need that intradaily care.

In your case the decision seems especially simple: you (and the larger group of students you are most obligated to) already have the lion's share of everything the union could possibly negotiate for on your behalf.

Answer 6

Another advantage: A union can help your department extract more funding from your university, or your university extract more funds from your legislature (if you are at a public school). "We would like to pay our TA's better" is less persuasive than "If we don't raise TA pay, they'll strike!".

Answer 7

Instead of a direct answer to your question about unions and as to why supporting the "plebs" from human resources is to your best interest even though you re already far ahead from them, here is a quote from a poem that suits your "predicament" perfectly

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Answer 8

Pros:

1. It is harder for lazy workers to be fired, so if this is your goal in life union is good
2. Much more effective to get more money from employer if 1000x people are negotiating with the employer than if you do it personally.

Cons:

1. Morality (this depends on you personally so this could go into pros also), but for example some capitalists would say that it is unfair that employees can organize to fix wages while it is illegal for employers to do that.
2. Union leaders are like politicians - they do not care about long term problems caused by popular short term actions or about non voters(non union members). For example unions preventing people from getting fired seems nice, until you realize that there is a guy that works 12h/week and he can not be fired, although there are 5 qualified candidates for his place.

3. As mentioned in 2. Union leaders are populists, so for example they might pursue policies that would make salaries of STEM and gender studies employees equal if the number of gender studies employees is 4x STEM employees even if the private sector salaries would justify the discrepancy.

4. Unions can make work atmosphere toxic: like politicians they need to energize the voters/members and they do that by appealing to emotions so after a while part of the voting/union population really believes that other candidate is Literally Hitler/ or that employer is evil exploitative...

note that I know this A will be downvoted due to political bias of academia.