California State University faculty vote to authorize strike over pay and class sizes at all 23 locations
California State University faculty vote to authorize strike over pay and class sizes
A part-time lecturer makes $3100 for a 3-unit class for the semester. Basically volunteering.
(I'm very pro union but...)
I just started a college class after a 20 year break. It's an online, asynchronous, class so the only "interaction" from the teacher is that she made a youtube video for each chapter that I can watch. The videos are terrible and were obviously made in 2016 and from the phrasing she uses, it's clear that these videos are used for course at several colleges in the area. The teacher doesn't have office hours and said we can only ask her questions via text.
How much should one earn for teaching a class in 2023 by playing videos from 2016? She even monetizes her YouTube channel and makes us sit through ads. We use an integrated online textbook that handles all the homework and testing and automatically calculates grades. Her job is more like collecting residuals than a real job. Shes not really putting out new efforts and she could easily be working another full time job at the same time. I'm pretty shocked to see what the college experience has become.
Not sure if you did the math on my figure but even at 15 units, it’s $31k per year. You want to learn something from somebody with a lot of education and experience, you need pay them fairly for their time. If the job paid well, you’d get a larger pool of qualified and passionate instructors. It’s hard to be passionate about teaching students who don’t want to be there, who are all paying way too much for tuition, while being paid a poverty wage.
I’ve been on both sides of the classroom in the past 10 years. I have a full time job that makes $130k. I think $8 to $9k for teaching a 3-unit course would be a fair wage. Roughly triple the current rate.
Also worth noting my number is for a part time lecturer. These are mostly working professionals and retired professors. They are not represented by the College Faculty Assn. However, they do represent a significant portion of instruction at CSU, and they do displace/diminish bargaining power of higher wage workers in CFA.
That's a separate issue from pay scales. Quality of the courseware should be enforced by the institution regardless of pay rates.
But I am also curious, which campus is this?
That's definitely not most of the lecturers though, especially since classes are mostly back to in person
To be fair, creating online modalities while keeping students engaged and active is HARD. Yes, those videos should be updated (and maybe not monetized but… that extra cash might be nice) but it otherwise sounds like a streamlined course. I think the online courses either have to be all asynchronous or all synchronous, with no hybridity in between. And its all so hard to create and plan while keeping in mind the attention span of an 18 year old in 2023.
Good. Every union has won this year so far.
Since I went there mid-2010's the only investments they made were in the student union building and hydrostatic tanks at the gym. Meanwhile they couldn't staff enough people so I could progress in the ID program, having to wait semesters before they offered them. 70 students sharing the only working bandsaw (table saw was always broken). I ended up buying all the tools myself and setting it up in my garage so my classmates and I could do our work after hours. There are some degrees that need college, but the way the CSU Board of Trustees underfund some majors you may be better off getting real world experience.
Which CSU?
Long Beach
Something tangential I've been wondering...
Are the profession of doctors ethically allowed to go on strike? People would die if they did. Probably lots.
ive heard of ideas of nurses/doctors to strike by continuing to provide care but just not collecting payment/doing insurance paperwork
Based and free healthcare pilled
There are other tactics that can be used but striking isn't out of the question. I can't speak for doctors specifically but other hospital staff can and have gone on strike before, with good success. There was just a healthcare strike at Kaiser permanente hospitals a few weeks ago. They fired a "warning shot" of sorts by striking for 3 days and threatening to strike again for as long as needed if their demands weren't met.
Ethically, I personally don't see a problem with it. By not allowing medical staff to strike you're basically telling them that their life is worth less than someone else's because they chose to pursue a public service. Because they had the gall to want to help people, they need to accept deplorable working conditions (that absolutely effect patient outcomes and result in death), poor pay, and mistreatment. That trying to make their lives and places of work better means they're bad people, undeserving of basic human dignity
There are ways to strike while keeping the bare minimum of staffing for critical care units. The problem is that most American healthcare systems are already staffed inadequately to the point that it would make no difference in care if there was a strike. It's not a coincidence that the main sticking point of the Kaiser strike was to force Kaiser to increase staffing levels for patient safety.
Idk about doctors, because it's more nurses and other staff that strike. But speaking for nursing, we usually give the employer advanced notice so they can hire travelers (scabs, but also a necessity so you can't really hate) to work during the strike dates. /Cue the delicious scramble and shitshow lol.
Also sometimes there's an agreement to provide X number of employees who are allowed to cross the picket line (we want to strike, but not the bad optics of "selfish nurses killing their patients").
I was listening to the podcast "History of philosophy without any gaps" and they were talking about the origins of universities, and they were wild. Those motherfuckers would riot and destroy student towns because one of the staff/students was arrested for murder, and their strikes would last for years.
Dang. Imagine living in California and complaining about not getting paid enough.
Talk about privilege, lol.
You do realize California has a high cost of living, right? It's not like everyone in CA gets paid a million a year.
There's a workers Renaissance slowly taking shape. Let's not fuck it up.
We should be working 3-4 day weeks, 15 - 30 hours per week. We should all have maternal and paternal leave. We should have like 6 weeks PTO minimum. Our jobs should not be tied to our healthcare. We should all be making about 3-4x what we're making. The wealth is allll there. It's just in the hands of a few dbags that have gamed the system to the point where it's showing structural cracks and threatening to collapse.
Don't pussyfoot the negotiations. Start with a door in the face, not a foot in the door.
Stop I'm close