HAMILTON, ONTARIO--After a 5-week strike, the McMaster University Teaching Assistants (TAs) returned to work on January 10. Unionized as the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 3906, the TA union won improved TA wages, a better dental plan, and permission to supplement their incomes with other work. McMaster's TAs have recently been caught in a crushing financial pinch. In the past fe...
SAN FRANCISCO--After nearly 15 years of opposing unionization for teaching assistants, the University of California (UC) administration agreed earlier this month that it will recognize and bargain with a union of TAs at UCLA. Although UC's new policy applies only to the Los Angeles campus graduate student employees at seven other UC campuses, are celebrating--they're confident this victory will s...
SAN FRANCISCO--Graduate student labor organizers at University of California (UC) campuses, still fired up from their brief labor strike in December, say a recent state board ruling leaves university administrators only two choices: recognize the grad student labor union or disobey the law. The administration argues that it still has other legal options and does not plan to give up the fight. Gra...
HAMILTON--Denys deCatanzaro has seen it many times: A lab rat bites a graduate student, and the student winds up in the hospital. In most cases, the bite can be cured with the barking of a few choice words and, at most, a couple of stitches. But if the student is allergic to rats, the consequences can be much more severe. In one case, says deCatanzaro, a member of the McMaster Faculty of Science ...
Displeased with the offer of settlement tabled by York University administration last week, 2230 York teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and contract faculty walked off the job after over 20 bargaining sessions. The York University strike is the latest in a series of organized Canadian student uprisings beginning almost a year ago at McMaster University and followed at the University of To...
HAMILTON, ONTARIO--Frustrated that their salaries don't provide enough money to even pay all of their tuition, University of Toronto (UT) teaching assistants (TAs) walked off the job on January 7. Negotiations between the UT administration and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents the striking TAs, immediately broke down and the university locked the TAs out. Currently, ...
Two years into his Ph.D., Zachary Trull * found himself beginning his thesis over again--for the second time. After his first supervisor was denied tenure, he moved to another lab. One year later, compatibility problems forced Trull to split with his second supervisor. Unfortunately, the department he was in had a 4-year limit on his funding, which did not reset each time he relocated labs. Now e...
HAMILTON, CANADA--University of Toronto Teaching Assistants (TAs) resumed work on February 3 after a quick 3-week strike. Unionized as the Canadian Public Employees Union (CUPE) Local 3902, the TAs successfully negotiated for a signing bonus, doubled their dental coverage, and won a seat on a University Task Force that studies the funding situation of graduate students. But despite these gains, t...
Graduate school may prepare students fairly well for a career in academia, but it's not great training for the jobs at private companies that at least 75% of all graduate students eventually take. To address this problem, the United Kingdom's Research Councils send graduate students to camp. For one intensive week, the grad students engage in game-playing activities designed to hone marketable sk...
After years at the laboratory bench, Kathy Barker has seen many neophytes enter the lab and blossom into competent scientists. The first week in a new laboratory can be exhilarating, bewildering, and chaotic, and while Barker has observed many fledgling researchers struggle to make good first impressions, get organized, and learn new techniques, she has also witnessed their common mistakes. In At...
After more than 10 years as a microbiology professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Dolores Furtado learned that she was being underpaid. "It was a routine audit by the university in the early 80's," she says. It showed that her salary was several thousand dollars less than that of two male professors with comparable qualifications. While Furtado did get a minor salary increase, in t...
Julie Lakefield, * a Ph.D. candidate at McMaster University, began her Master's degree in a shiny new lab with a keen, young investigator. She soon discovered that her personality was incompatible with her supervisor's. She knew something had to be done about her work environment if she wished to leave graduate school with a degree and an inkling of self-esteem. After trying to work things out to...
