Massive pickets at my uni!

[notyoueither]

I do, now try to appreciate the stance of the poor social science TAs.

[Jules]

Here at Michigan State, graduate assistants get a tuition waiver, free health insurance, and a monthly stipend. Now all I have to do is pass my prelims in the spring, then I'm guranteed at least a TAship for the rest of my doctoral program.

[Az]

I've never gone to the TA classes (we call them "labs" at my uni) aside from one this term.

The TA is actually hot (this is compsci, do you know how rare this is!) and she's actually very very useful and the prof is very very bad. I go to the TA classes and not the actual prof lectures.

All the other TAs just mark papers. And it's not like it's hard to mark anyway...

Actually, here it's quite the opposite. If we skip classes, it's the lectures not the TA classes. I was talking about the times the TAs strike. and yes we get some of that here too. First couple of weeks of my first simester, actually. But they weren't picketing or anything. and the math TAs still took place, since they know that if they wouldn't the students would be MASSIVELY shafted.

[Ben Kenobi]

As with any negotiations there is always some posturing going on from both sides. But, again from my inside source, the UBC TAs were offered the 3rd highest TA wage in the country.

RedFred:

Inside source? You make it sound like a spy.

The UBC TA's are the lowest paid TA's in the country at this point. What they really want is the tuition indexing, in that their pay goes up with tuition.
The administration hopes to run the strike until April when they have a 30% yearly turnover for TA's.
This way they can get all the new TA's to be unsuspecting scabs.

Are you attending UBC as well?

Tuberski:

I think that's a 10% rebate on tuition, and not on the overall pay. So they will still be out 35% of total tuition, since we pay approx. 2500 Cdn/year, they will be 800$ short. This will be more if they are an engineering TA.

[Asher]

You guys only pay $2500CDN/year? What the hell are they complaining about????

I pay that much a term, right now, and it's only going up.

BTW, can we have some kind of source for the TA's pay? I want to see their actual wages and compare them with tuition...

[Az]

You pay esp. for TAs, Asher?

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Osweld
I wouldn't go even if there wasn't a picket line.

I wish I got to go to school for free like you.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Azazel
You pay esp. for TAs, Asher?

It's part of the cost of tuition.

I think you may have just misread obiwan's quote (or maybe I did):

I think that's a 10% rebate on tuition, and not on the overall pay. So they will still be out 35% of total tuition, since we pay approx. 2500 Cdn/year, they will be 800$ short. This will be more if they are an engineering TA.

I read this as they pay $2500Cdn/year in tuition...

[Az]

so you people do pay for college, in Canada? I thought that it is only in the US...

[Agathon]

From someone who's actually been a TA and participated in a TA strike.

I'm not surprised the TA's have gone on strike as we went on strike over the very same issue. We'd actually agreed to take a pay cut in the previous bargaining round because the university was in financial difficulty: so we got really p******d off when they wanted to effectively cut again without reason.

In a normal job you can go to the boss when it is bargaining time and ask for a raise which you may or may not get. If you are a TA you have to be a graduate student which means you have to pay fees, which means that you effectively lose any bargaining power you had since the University will agree to a pay raise and then increase fees so that the raise is effectively cancelled or turned into a pay cut. For people like me, who have cushy scholarship deals which pay all their fees, this isn't really a big problem; but for students in other departments who don't get such deals, the costs can force them out of school.

It's not about fees - it's about the ability to bargain fairly with your employer. Imagine if the government gave it's employees a pay raise and then instituted a special tax on government employees only that turned the raise into a cut.

What is required to avert this ridiculous situation is some legislation that makes it hard for universities to act like this. It's dumb in several ways in because it means that gifted students move to the states or less people undertake graduate work. Here at U of T our strike failed because our bargaining committee basically betrayed us (there are several people on that committee whom I'd really like to kill), but a change to a more enlightened administration has averted future trouble by ensuring a guaranteed funding package for all students that can't be messed with by the admin. The result: everyone is happy and we're all back to work.

Interestingly, TAs can have in some situations a great deal of bargaining power. At York the TAs did most of the work so they effectively shut the university down when they went on strike and then ended up making more extreme demands that the university had to give in to.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by obiwan18


RedFred:

Inside source? You make it sound like a spy.

The UBC TA's are the lowest paid TA's in the country at this point. What they really want is the tuition indexing, in that their pay goes up with tuition.
The administration hopes to run the strike until April when they have a 30% yearly turnover for TA's.
This way they can get all the new TA's to be unsuspecting scabs.

Such a familiar story. The problem is that the university is shooting itself in the foot here by alienating essential employees.

[Agathon]

Anyway, the whole "fees" movement is really a form of taxation.

University graduates on the whole end up paying more tax than non-graduates. Making them pay fees is essentially taxing them twice.

"Well, what's wrong with that?", you might say.

What's wrong is that the money is effectively being transferred to people your parents age (the notoriously feckless baby boomers) who got a much better deal at college than you're getting, and who are hoping to free ride off you in various ways when they retire.

So don't blame the government or the universities, blame your parents and their shiny new SUV.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Azazel
so you people do pay for college, in Canada? I thought that it is only in the US...

Yes, college is not free in Canada, just heavily subsidized by the provincial governments.

[Kontiki]

Originally posted by Azazel
so you people do pay for college, in Canada? I thought that it is only in the US...

Yet another myth implying that somehow Canada is a socialist country. We're marginally more socialist than the US, and a hell of a lot less than most western European countries.

[Az]

how much is a 1 CAN$? in USD?