Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

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I got my PhD a while ago, but I think unionizing is a terrible idea. First, while the hours are long, tuition is usually paid for / waived and we got a small stipend and OK health insurance for 2-4 hours of teaching a week. I graduated with no debt.

Much more important though is that most unions make work predictable. Hours, duties, etc. However, most PhD research is highly unpredictable. If I want to set up the test while the conditions are good, I may want to work NOW; hearing that I'm out of hours and need to do it tomorrow is the last thing I need. If I got my test set up (in shared lab) and going great I may want to go as long as I can stand it -- it may be broken tomorrow.

At least last 2 years of grad school my #1 desire was to finish and go use my new PhD in real world for real money. If union imposed policies add 1-2 years to the process I would not want them.

I am at a university (Michigan) where the union is primarily for graduate students that teach. I could not tell from the writeup, but it sounds like this is for _all_ graduate students at UChicago.

Being in an engineering department, I never had an issue with having to teach a heavy load of classes. But, some of my friends in humanities departments had a teaching load of - 6+ hours of classroom time + discussions + grading long papers - for classes of 50+ students. Being part of the union allowed them to put pressure on their departments that they needed to hire other TAs so that they could focus on their research and not spend additional years writing their dissertation.

I don't think being part of a union is going to stop any motivated student from doing their own research. And part of joining the union is to ensure that their members do receive a good stipend and have their health insurance paid for while maintaining a reasonable teaching load.

It is definitely possible that my worries are overblown. However I did see a lab where researchers would close doors before moving a desk to a new location because they are not supposed to as moving furniture was a union job (and requesting this via official channels takes days instead of minutes).

When I saw it first I thought it was a joke and laughed, but the folks working there were serious and asked me to shut up lest I get them in trouble. Maybe this is an edge case, but this still worries me when I hear about unionizing -- formalization of duties is extremely inefficient in most research environments and is often a flip side of unionization.

Again, I admit that my fears might be overblown.

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