Part of the ecosystem we need to contend with is that the federal grants from which many research assistants and postdocs in science are paid set the pay for RAs and postdocs too low. Faculty may feel tempted to shrug and pass on the bad pay without pushing back. That’s fucked.

If your grant doesn’t allow you to pay certain salaries, be up front during the hiring process about that. I talk openly to my students about why the numbers are what they are, depending on my funding source.
It is also the case that when I apply for grant money, I try to ask for a higher than typical salary and I do try to justify my request in my budget justification. I still haven’t won a grant with a postdoc in it so I don’t know how that’s going.
In the long run, I’ve reminded my students and postdoc that I think unions are great!

A union contract that binds the university to pay them a certain among actually makes it so that my request to federal agencies is “this is what I am required to pay.” Academic unions ftw!
I also think that all faculty should, to the extent of their ability given their circumstances, participate in advocating for an increase in minimum wages and an increase in federal and state funding for science and universities to cover the increased cost.
It is unethical to insist that labor stay cheaper because it benefits your research career. These are human beings we are talking about, not pieces of equipment.

I also acknowledge there is a structure out there coercing us to do that and we need to change that structure.
Academic funding is organized around the idea that junior researchers should be paid below a living wage.

It is up to faculty to resist the coercion, but that is not enough. It is up to all members of our society to recognize and dismantle the structure in the first place.
Pretending that this is all up to individual faculty or even individual departments individualizes a structural problem and lets the structure off the hook.

And faculty unions where we exist have a part to play here, including in supporting contingent lecturers and their unions
But I also want ppl, when they see the $$ for science grants, to be okay with this especially if it is paying people’s salary. A grad student and postdoc at current wages can each cost $70k/year. Funding will need to grow for wages to grow w/o shrinking hiring.
A note to folks about unionizing junior researchers: scientists letting humanists do all the work is trash. Just because science students tend to be paid more doesn’t mean that you don’t benefit from union organizing. Show some solidarity. Help out.
Insert the part where I go on a long rant about how we are all dealing with huge multi billion dollar institutions and students would benefit a lot from learning in detail where the leavers of power are and how they work on faculty and this is necessary to organize effectively
As a student, I assumed individual faculty had more power than they did. As a postdoc, I saw how these juggernaut institutions knew exactly how to keep faculty in place. It’s an economic and psychological art. And the solutions to the problems produced require solidarity.
Case in point: until the Obama administration, the NIH literally barred postdocs across the life sciences from making more than like ~ $40K/year. Federal policy!
tl;dr
It’s easy to hate on the professor who says she can’t pay more off her grants (and whose research helps mass incarceration so you shouldn’t work for her anyway) but you need to confront the system that is at work producing her stance on how wages affect academic hiring

More from Society

You May Also Like

Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)