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Why are grad TAs still so overworked, 11+ months in?
Attacks on staff are central to #highered austerity. The negative effects trickle down to every level.
Here's how.
#protectpurdueworkers #boilersagainstausterity #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
@AFTAcademics
1/23
Attacks on staff are central to #highered austerity. The negative effects trickle down to every level.
Here's how.
#protectpurdueworkers #boilersagainstausterity #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
@AFTAcademics
1/23
The work and learning done at any university is impossible without the labor of its staff and grad students, but since we are excluded from having a seat at the table where decisions are made, cuts that hurt us worst are always made first and most often.
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Here are a few examples from @LifeatPurdue:
More and more frequently, Purdue administrators have decided to offer staff early retirement packages (yay!), and not replace the retired employees with new hires when they retire (boo!).
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More and more frequently, Purdue administrators have decided to offer staff early retirement packages (yay!), and not replace the retired employees with new hires when they retire (boo!).
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Instead, the work done by the retired employees becomes the responsibility of an existing staff member, or a lower-paid temp worker. So after a while, one staff member is obligated to do the work of many people without receiving a proportional raise.
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In fact, constant restructuring and inconsistent policies mean that many staff members have to leave their jobs and be rehired in a completely new position (often in a different department) just to get an increase in pay.
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These changes are offset by adoption of automation, replacing tasks done by real staff members doing administrative work with software (eg SuccessFactors), which other workers--faculty, grad students, postdocs--have to figure out themselves.
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Often, these specialized software systems are pretty complicated for the novice user. So the burden of teaching those systems often falls to grad students (acting as tech support for their PIs), and the IT department.
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Even when researchers and other faculty have learned how to use these programs, doing these types of administrative tasks still take a large chunk of time that would otherwise be devoted to research or teaching.
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Since faculty funding and publication pressures and teaching responsibilities aren't going anywhere anytime soon, profs (especially ECRs) spend longer hours trying to get the same amount done. Also, inevitably, more of these responsibilities are offloaded to grad students.
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Another issue with automation specifically is that implementation of these software programs is often painful in other ways. One key example is the adoption of SuccessFactors in early 2019, which resulted in #PurduePay.
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Pre-2019, many Purdue employees were paid bimonthly. The switch to SuccessFactors meant that everyone's pay schedule had to switch to biweekly, meaning that there would be more (but roughly ~15% smaller) paychecks per year.
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Graduate students are consistently paid low wages, and as a result, many of us live paycheck to paycheck. A slight decrease in one paycheck would be somewhat hard to manage, which many grad students mentioned.
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So to ..."ease the transition," @lifeatpurdue administrators decided to frontload paychecks to what they would have been on a bimonthly schedule for the first part of 2019, then subtract the frontloaded amount during two months in the summer.
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Since this was confusing, and poorly communicated, and for a while our *checks looked like what we were expecting,* it was a huge shock to many grad students when our paychecks in the summer were slashed by ~50%. So people went hungry. People sold treasured belongings.
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This was an entirely predictable, and entirely preventable problem.
If grad students were making these decisions for ourselves, we would have known it's easier to budget for a one-time paycheck that is smaller by 15%, than for 4 or 5 paychecks that are smaller by ~50% each.
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If grad students were making these decisions for ourselves, we would have known it's easier to budget for a one-time paycheck that is smaller by 15%, than for 4 or 5 paychecks that are smaller by ~50% each.
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If the administrators weren't trying to "streamline" (AKA save $$$ by replacing staff with software), none of this would have happened. And if staff or faculty were at the table in a capacity to make decisions, "streamlining" would not be happening.
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So, to recap: higher workload for staff, faculty, and grad students; pay instability for staff and grad students; temp-ification of staff jobs.
How does this affect undergrads?
Buckle up...
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How does this affect undergrads?
Buckle up...
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Another part of this staff-slashing story: Outsourcing to independent corporations, and replacing current @LifeatPurdue employees with contract labor. How can corporations afford to give @LifeatPurdue administration such a good deal?
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Answer: Exploitation.
Employees of such contract companies are often paid far less, or given fewer benefits.
Also, replacing existing employees (who have established friendships and social ties, and shared grievances) makes it harder to unionize.
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Employees of such contract companies are often paid far less, or given fewer benefits.
Also, replacing existing employees (who have established friendships and social ties, and shared grievances) makes it harder to unionize.
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An example of how this works: Recently, @LifeatPurdue replaced many of its existing dining services with Aramark. Aramark is famous for profiting massively from cutting corners on food quality (eg. getting incarcerated people sick due to rotten, maggot infested food).
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And quality issues will affect undergrads, many of whom rely on dining services.
Not that this is limited to dining services. There are also rumors of outsourcing custodial jobs as well. While this hasn't happened yet, it will also have consequences that trickle down.
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Not that this is limited to dining services. There are also rumors of outsourcing custodial jobs as well. While this hasn't happened yet, it will also have consequences that trickle down.
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Common root of all these problems?
> Austerity.
Why are austerity policies be put in place?
> Because workers don't get to make choices about our workplace, and we can't trust admin to make us their priority.
How do we fix it?
>Collective action!
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> Austerity.
Why are austerity policies be put in place?
> Because workers don't get to make choices about our workplace, and we can't trust admin to make us their priority.
How do we fix it?
>Collective action!
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The only way to prevent and reverse these changes is to stand in solidarity together with other workers, across categories of labor. We must demand to be included in the decisions about our workplaces.
What hurts some of us hurts all of us.
#NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
23/end
What hurts some of us hurts all of us.
#NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
23/end
