> “Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package,” explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser.
Here's the problem -- that's a business solution. This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university. The administration is too busy filing TPS reports to realize that they're curating something actually important -- the future of this country's youth.
In other ways it's just cookie-cutter union-busting from coal-mining days, 120 years ago, and I expect in the long term it will work just as well (i.e., not).
>"This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university."
More and more it seems like academics are just a front for running a hedge fund - one that gets very favorite tax treatment. Growing the endowment is the most important thing in the minds of the leadership.
Yep. After all, where on Earth does all the tuition money actually go? The buildings are nice and there are way too many overpaid administrators, but even still that can't possibly account for all the $$$ flowing in.
The whole idea behind endowments used to be that they could maintain the institution through tough times. But nowadays, there's an expectation that endowments should continue to grow during a recession, even if that means cutting the institution to the bone. And administration hierarchies keep getting deeper; they're never on the chopping block.
Working at a pretty famous institution with a 6+ billion endowment...in June 2020 the president basically said "we're performing layoffs, stopping all retirement contributions, hiring freeze, and no raises for anyone."
Then gave some additional reasons as to why they couldn't dip into the endowment to save jobs/help those laid off.
I agree with the argument that this is being done by administrators, not academics, but there's a simple solution: tax endowments of private universities and use the money for state schools, trade schools, and community colleges.
Temple is a state school. (Okay, I think I should clarify it's kinda complicated, it's not technically a state college, but it's a peer of penn state in the weird PA hybrid scheme. So if you thought Penn state was public, Temple is equivalently so.)
Any activity that gets preferential tax treatment is going to be used as a pretext for otherwise low margin business activity because if you can run the pretext part at a break-even you can do the other activity and have an edge over everyone else. Follow the incentives...
Well, they hired a university president out of Goldman Sachs and consulting, who wrote a book that basically argues that universities need to base their curriculum on what corporations tell them to do, so I'm not terribly surprised at the path they're taking.
But it is a business. We are not talking about a YouTube channel of lecturers, we are talking about an organization with 2.7 billion dollars of annual revenue.
It's far easier to optimize for profit then theoretical ideals. The issue here isn't that they are optimizing for profit, the issue is that incentives have put that pursuit at odds with the university's core mission (education/community), as opposed to keeping it aligned with it.
Pursuit of profit should keep you accountable for the services you provide, not detract from them.
How can your core mission be education but "you're optimizing for profit?" Either your core mission is education or it isn't.
I feel like this is the kind of goal setting miss I see businesses make all the time. They'll be doing be doing some version of the ubiquitous value setting activity, and as ideas are pitched someone will be like "wait, isn't our most basic value to just make money?" Sure, whatever, but what does that tell us? A distraction. If money is really so important, just remember the story of the new CEO of iirc a failing iron production business that repeatedly answered the board's questions on how he'll turn profit with "we're going to be the safest iron production business in America." The goal was achieved by fostering a culture of transparency, adopting new technology like emails for internal flat hierarchy communication, etc, and it did become the safest, but also highly profitable.
Persuit of profit alone justifies short term behavior constantly. The firing of 20% of your workforce could be seen as justifiable when your goal is persuit of profit.
Basically I think it's wrong to try to go cross eyed having "persuit of profit" always there while also trying to set some other "idealistic" goal. Just stay focused!
> Basically I think it's wrong to try to go cross eyed having "persuit of profit" always there while also trying to set some other "idealistic" goal. Just stay focused!
It's a purely practical constraint. I too would love if organizations were capable of functioning in some other capacity, but in your own words:
> someone will be like "wait, isn't our most basic value to just make money?"
And also according to you:
> Sure
So, the best way to get businesses to act in the interest of others is to tie their profit to those other interests, which is the basic principle of the free market. Want resources? Do something for others such that they voluntarily give theirs to you, I.E. do something of value for your customers.
Yeah, Mr. Bright, usually I think you’ve got your head screwed on pretty well, but this is a religious statement, not a matter of fact.
1. Find me a free market. Otherwise we’re just going to devolve into “no true Scotsman.” The USA, for instance, is light years from a free market in basically every respect.
2. In a truly free market the way to maximize profits is to create and maintain a monopoly. Nearly every large business trends towards this or explicitly attempts it.
3. Customer satisfaction only matters if the customers have true choices, and true customer choice is antithetical to profit maximization.
How would you describe an economy in which customer satisfaction actually matters? Regulated free market? Free market with guard rails?
Or do you really think that a 100% unregulated market is at all supportive of human benefit? I believe a 100% free market would mean the removal of all worldwide government entities and the creation of a few mega-cartels that ran basically everything.
1) Market != Country. There are plenty of free markets within the U.S.
2) There are multiple ways to maximize profits in a free market depending on the market. Not all markets allow you to create monopolies. Monopolies only exist, in practice, were market dynamics are compromised. For instance, power companies are able to be monopolies because power delivery infrastructure is constrained and supply cannot be increased (imagine if anyone who wanted to throw up a power poll was allowed).
3) Choice is literally the defining characteristic of a free market. If customers aren't able to choose, you aren't talking about a free market. This is kind of moot for this topic though, as colleges are very clearly something one can choose.
> How would you describe an economy in which customer satisfaction actually matters? Regulated free market? Free market with guard rails?
Regulations can make markets freer the same ways they make people freer. You are free to walk on sidewalks because laws say cars cants drive there.
> Or do you really think that a 100% unregulated market is at all supportive of human benefit?
The counter point to "free markets can help this problem" is not "you must think laws are stupid and money is everything."
Gotta be careful when talking about "Free Markets".
Thing is, there are generally two different things that people can mean when they say "free market":
1. A "market economy", as contrasted with a "command economy"—ie, more or less the way the US does things, as opposed to the way the Soviet Union did things.
2. An "ideal free market", as described by Adam Smith, which can, in theory, ensure that many systems find a stable, efficient equilibrium that balances consumer desires with producer desires.
The problem is that, however much many (particularly of the Libertarian bent) wish to believe in it, the latter is not real. It is a thought experiment, and it requires a bunch of conditions that don't always apply (eg, perfect information, commoditization, etc). The other problem, of course, is that as I said, the two are often called "free markets" interchangeably without clarification, which leads to much confusion.
You seem to be referring to #1 when you say "there are free markets within the US"; however, what WalterBright is talking about is clearly #2, since he's referring to ways that idealized free markets theoretically operate.
I was using free market in a practical sense, as in a market (a pairing of buyers and sellers) that has functional supply and demand dynamics. I wasn't relying on any larger context, like an economy.
I didn't interpret WalterBright's comment as invoking some 'ideal' market either. I don't think talking about 'ideal' anything is even useful outside of an academic context, so I don't assume anyone here, that isn't explicitly talking about theory, is invoking an 'ideal' version of whatever they are talking about.
I don't know where this requirement comes from. It is completely unnecessary for a free market. The free market prices in lack of perfect information - i.e. "risk".
Complaining that free markets not being perfect is like complaining that friction in an engine isn't zero. You can't make it zero, but you can get pretty close to it.
2) Monopolies usually form because of government failure, not because of free markets. What you state is true, but its only true because because its a means to an end: It is substantially easier to manipulate government into currying you favor, than it is to build innovation that sticks. The former is just dollars. The latter is dollars + sweat + luck.
1) OK. I challenge you to find a free market that has produced a monopoly company without some kind of govt helping hand. Examples of helping hands: artificially low interest rates (derisking M&A), regulatory capture, or failure to enforce laws (antidumping, antitrust).
3) That's true. And who's fault is that not all true (cheaper) choices are offered to the market ?
Hint: Why so few $1000 new cars, or $200 surgeries? Its not the market that is not willing to make them, rest assured. Its that a certain large body is not allowing others to make their risk:reward choices.
The closer one gets to a free market, the better it works. This is unlike socialism, where the closer one gets to it, the worse it fares.
> I believe a 100% free market would mean the removal of all worldwide government entities and the creation of a few mega-cartels that ran basically everything.
A free market requires the existence of government to enforce our rights and provide a mechanism to resolve disputes.
> How would you describe an economy in which customer satisfaction actually matters?
Invoking the free market in a discussion about a market as distorted as higher education is laughable. No, the way to maximize profits is to get government(s) to ensure that you are in a favorable position to earn profits. In this case, demanding that most well paying jobs necessitate tertiary education and providing free credit.
The only problem they were created to solve was soaking future taxpayers with debt and a devalued currency, while keeping taxes low in the past and present.
The government should either fund higher education directly, or give students cash.
This is the same playbook with deferred compensation like defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare for government employees. Government avoids paying cash now so taxes are lower now, and use liberal accounting assumptions to understate the debt.
> The only problem they were created to solve was soaking future taxpayers with debt and a devalued currency, while keeping taxes low in the past and present.
They were created to allow poor kids to fund their education with a vehicle other than government grants.
> The government should either fund higher education directly, or give students cash.
Maybe, maybe not. There is a cost/benefit argument to be made there, but I doubt you have the information necessary to say this with the level of certainty you are presenting.
> This is the same playbook with deferred compensation like defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare for government employees. Government avoids paying cash now so taxes are lower now, and use liberal accounting assumptions to understate the debt.
There are differences in the risk, and therefore pricing of these two forms of government debt, but yes, the government, like all entities, tries to pay things off as late as possible.
That's my point. It doesn't necessarily mean it is in their best interest - the free market doesn't optimize for people's best interests, it optimizes for people's perception of their best interest (which is usually fine but it's not always the same thing)
No. I'm just pointing out that the free-market isn't perfect. I think we should be open to improvement.
Let me ask you something: do you think this is how we're going to run things for the rest of time? Feudalism came and went, mercantilism came and went. Probably we'll come up with something better than what we have now, some day. I admit it's hard to imagine what, though
It's too bad that truly free (i.e. competitive) markets don't survive capitalism for long, due to the inevitable concentration of capital that it produces in the long term.
I think it's generally under appreciated just how unstable free-markets are. Our historical experience with economics has shown that 100% of free-markets have devolved into a less free form and generally that devolution is violent and extremely unpleasant and it can take quite a while for a market to self-correct into a semi-free market with non-abitrary regulations.
Free markets are like pretty much any element north of Plutonium - the half life is extremely short and if they are forced to exist in nature they'll quickly decay to a more stable state... often violently and sometimes with a loud bang.
The US economic system by my eyes has changed quite a bit in 240 years. The dissolution of slavery was a pretty big milestone, for example. There's distinctly different eras defined by very different laws, such as the gilded age or the era of the train baron.
I guess if you want to call that entire 240 years "capitalism" and use that as evidence that it's, ah, more sustainable than other strategies, well that's fine, but that means free market capitalism has no mechanism preventing things like slavery or company towns. In fact it seems it continually fails to provide for anyone other than capital holders until another philosophy enters the picture, such as government regulation or worker's unions.
You say freedom requires vigilance, what's that mean? When the only way to eat was to work in a company town and scrape together barely the means to a living, everyone is vigilantly aware of how shitty the situation is, so then what? History teaches us the "and then what" is strike followed by reactionary state violence followed by bloody revolution, so there's your case history of devolution to violence.
Require? Genuinely require? It seems to me the high cost comes from attempting to create profit margin. If the profit is basically eliminated, the person can have the high wage, and we can have the nice things.
You can set up marxist organizations in a free country. They're perfectly legal. They just cannot force people to join, or prevent people from leaving.
Yup - a relative of mine has been an associate professor there for fourteen years. Giving out tenure is something I'm pretty sure they'll only do if they're backed into a corner.
Some institutions/departments will promote to associate without tenure. At those same places, they'll typically let you stick around for quite a while as long as you keep bringing in the money. In every field there are at least a few departments that are notoriously stingy with tenure.
No, they are an associate professor - although I may have misspoken about tenure, I am not certain about their status. I was under the assumption that associate professors weren't covered to the same extent.
As various lawyers have commented on Twitter, this seems like an insanely blatant violation of labor laws. Just a straight up written confession of illegal retaliation.
Unless they have some obscure exemption that nobody else knows about, I cannot imagine how the university's legal counsel signed off on this.
for-profit companies do not have to pay strikers wages and benefits while they are on strike. Unions have strike funds they use for that.* When workers go on strike, they want their absence to disrupt the profit making of the business, that is their leverage; but they sacrifice to do it.
Part of the claim in this current "unionize graduate students" drive is that they do work and get paid an income to support themselves, that's why they should be allowed to unionize. I mention that because the headline "students on strike" undercuts that claim, when the grad students want to avail themselves of labor law to make it a regular worker-employer dispute.
Another point, universities are non-profits and would be better able to say "pay them with what?" if they are not working (some courts decide issues on the basis of equity, where ability to pay is factored in. ianal)
(*Did you know that most picketers you see, like next to an inflatable rat outside a real estate development or construction project, are not "employees of the site on strike", but are instead union members who happen to be unemployed from elsewhere and get paid to stand there and do it because it's some income, and helps the union.)
There are reports from strikers trying to refill medication that the medical benefit suspension has already unilaterally gone into effect. The university has gone ahead with their threats in that regard (which is especially shitty since it's pretty standard in the US to give employees a health insurance grace period on termination).
I am really confused about what the university thinks they're going to get out of these actions.
What do you mean? The university is trying to teach a lesson by inflicting pain on those who stood against it. I thought that was clear.
Do you maybe mean "what makes them think that this is legal?" I doubt they do. But they likely decided that value of sending a "don't fuck with us" message was higher than the cost of the likely mild consequences.
Oh - as far as I'm aware it's quite legal for them to be doing all this. But, especially in the US where healthcare is not guaranteed universally, cutting such an essential service is just going to create an even bigger wave of bad PR. A lot of people in the US have very strong feelings about the healthcare system and Temple just decided to highlight how cruel it can be in their dealings with a strike and bring that debate into the middle of their labor negotiations - that isn't a good thing for Temple as it's more likely to attract big names and get political.
But legally, they're certainly in the clear - after Reagan forced air traffic controllers back to work it's been pretty clear that unions in America have essentially no guaranteed rights.
Then, the university has already lost. Systemically its convinced itself that some of the core providers of its value are its enemy in some way, rather than a cooperative part of its being.
It's always been clear cut to me, the relationship between workers and owners: one tries to get the most work for the least money, and the other, the most money for the least work.
What's surprising is a university was happy to jump feet first right into that dynamic. That's really how it wants its relationship with its junior faculty to be? The ones that are ostensibly applying the university mission at ground level?
I'm confused by that. When my health care ends by termination (of any flavor), I can continue to use that policy number and card for some time. I can then sign up for COBRA and continue my coverage using the same cards. Perhaps there's something else at play, but very strange to suddenly not be able to fill prescriptions.
They could also just buy a plan directly from an insurer, but if it's massively expensive like COBRA coverage (especially for the kind of premium plans universities frequently offer), it's not really a practical option.
Perhaps from the University POV the point is less to not be wounded as to exact as high a possible cost for striking so that anyone involved and any future strikers don't think they have anything to gain from it, even if the University has things to lose from their choices.
Or to use a phrase that goes around these days: the cruelty is the point.
They should all be eligible for COBRA, but COBRA is pretty insanely expensive (which is hard to pay for if you're striking and don't have a regular income - especially if you don't have much money in general like most grads). And people weren't actually informed their healthcare would be cut so they weren't aware they'd need to apply for bridging coverage.
COBRA is the real cost of healthcare insurance, which is hidden because the employer pays for X % + because the employer and employee both paid with pretax dollars (something that is not possible for COBRA since you are now a former employee)
Its not that COBRA is expensive, but that all tax-subsidized employer insurance is prohibitively expensive and typically costs 15-25% of the median worker's after-tax earnings
Healthcare insurance subsidies by employers are the biggest piece in wage increases... that are hiding from most "wage growth" statistics
1. For young, single people, especially if they have the option of a high deductible plan, I wouldn't call it "insanely expensive" (now, family coverage I'd agree). In any case, what the sibling comment said is correct - it's just the full cost of the premiums since the employer isn't paying any.
2. Every time I went on COBRA I had a "grace period" of something like 4-8 weeks between when I left employment and when I had to make my first COBRA payment. Even if, for example, I got injured before I decided to officially sign up for COBRA, I still had the option of gaining coverage backdated to the date when I left my employer if it was before the end of the grace period.
I really wish people would stop trying to redefine the word "violence" to mean anything they don't like. In almost every instance it's a strong signal that you're dealing with an emotional person who is incapable of having a rational conversation.
Violence usually implies direct physical force. I find this to be a core aspect of the word.
It’s punitive action, sure, but it isn’t violence because *nobody got hit/shoved/shot/etc. I don’t think any unfair, bad, or evil thing that indirectly affects another persons bodily health is violence. You’d start seeing violence everywhere, it seems.
Bit of a stagnant, but is a tax increase violence because it affects an individuals ability to afford medicine?
Just writing this comment makes me realize the main issue I have with this sort of reasoning is that it distracts from what’s actually happening. It’s playing games with semantics for pizazz, as opposed to critiquing with clarity.
No. I wouldn't call it peaceful, but it isn't violence either. Plenty of things that don't involve the application of physical force are nonetheless bad, and there are plenty of negative descriptors that don't derive their oomph from the implication of physical force. "Despicable" and "heinous" are good ones.
Given that some are arguing that we open the definition of violence to include things beyond what society has traditionally thought of it to be (punching people in the face) to society's detriment imo, how do you feel about the statement "removing healthcare is violence?"
Can you think of other forms of similar violence that may sit well with you? Some might argue that a strike itself is a form of violence against profits.
Imo once healthcare is touched, which I do agree is a form of violence to remove, the strikers should absolutely respond in kind, by escalating the strike to slow some other part of the operation, perhaps by disrupting deliveries, switching off power to things, whatever else.
> Imo once healthcare is touched, which I do agree is a form of violence to remove, the strikers should absolutely respond in kind, by escalating the strike to slow some other part of the operation, perhaps by disrupting deliveries, switching off power to things, whatever else.
Exactly. Punching faces is probably not stategic, and the strikers likely have other ways to respond in the course of this strike. But we should not mince words about what they're responding to, and we should bear the university's violence in mind when examining and discussing whatever the strikers decide to do next.
Can you point to some of those Twitter comments? I'm honestly curious of which labor laws they are violating. For example, I just did a search regarding healthcare for striking workers, and there is no federal law that prevents cancelling healthcare, to the point that some congresspeople have introduced bills in the last year to specifically outlaw that (but, to emphasize, those are just bills, they haven't been passed).
The NLRA governs what actions companies can and cannot take in response to protected labor bargaining actions such as a strike. It's currently unclear whether TU, as a "state-related" semi-public school is covered under the NLRA like any private school or business would be. If it's not, it would be subject to regulation under Pennsylvania Labor Relations Act, which covers public employees in Pennsylvania and seems to follow the national law closely.
In this case, withholding tuition remission for the entire semester simply for participating in a strike action for a small part of that semester would almost certainly count as unfair retaliation, since it goes well above and beyond withholding payroll for work missed during the strike.
I think tuition remission is part of their overall W2 compensation - as noncash compensation, similar to what would be for RSUs, Merch, etc and other fringe benefits employers provide.
Arguing otherwise would make it seem that an employer can only withhold a prorata portion of an RSU award during a strike period, but that on its face seem wrong. I think the law allows for all comp on its tracks during the strike, regardless of the period covered.
If its comp, its table stakes for doing a strike.
There's nothing preventing the university to re-establish the fringe benefits once the strike is over (but of course, the limitations on not being able to register matter now, not in 2 months).
Original note below the line. Unfortunately, as pointed out by tptacek [0]:
> The wrinkle is that Temple's employees are public-sector employees, who are exempt from the NLRA --- but they're not necessarily exempt from equivalent Philadelphia law.
tptacek appears to be correct [1]. That said, there is a Pennsylvanian 1970 "Public Employe Relations Act" that could cover unfair practices including retaliation but I can't tell if it is still in force [2]. [3] appears to imply that it is still active.
> I'm honestly curious of which labor laws they are violating
Interfering with Employee Rights. [1]
Discriminating against Employees because of their union activities [2] specifically Grant a benefit to nonstrikers and/or replacements that is withheld from strikers, or impose a burden on strikers that is not placed on nonstrikers or replacements.
That almost certainly refers to rewarding non-strikers relative to strikers after the strike has been resolved. It is not against the law to cease paying wages and providing benefits to strikers while the strike is in progress. Of course with tuition there is a pro-rata issue, i.e. the benefit should return after the strike is over.
This (see below) seems to be the problem - students are being forced to pay for something that was originally gratis (punished) because they are protesting about something.
That is not normally how a liberal democracy works. We don't punish requests for comments, we engage ...
=================================================
Dear Temple Student:
As a result of your participation in the TUGSA strike, your tuition remission has been removed for the Spring semester. You now owe the full balance listed in TUpay, which is due by Thursday, March 9.
If your balance is not paid in full by the due date, you will be assessed a $100 late payment fee and a financial hold will be placed on your student account. This hold will prevent future registration.
But look at this closely, with engagement. Currently, they are on strike, so tuition remissions cannot be issued. If that remains the case until March 6th, they will need to pay. If the strike is resolved before March 6th, and then they still refuse to issue the remissions, that would be a significant violation.
> Currently, they are on strike, so tuition remissions cannot be issued.
That's... not how tuition remissions work. The remission would have been issued before the semester starts (as tuition bills are generally do at the very beginning of the semester).
You're also putting a lot of faith in an entity that goes to considerable effort to monetarily punish people for striking [1] is going to be willing, out of the kindness of its heart, to go through that effort again to reward people for no longer striking. I do not think it wise to rely on that faith.
[1] This is basically retroactive actions in terms of finance, not to mention that this probably causes issues for grants that are supposed to be used for tuition remissions no longer being used for this.
> “Any Temple employee that decides to strike forfeits their pay and complete benefits package,” explained Temple University senior vice president and chief operating officer Ken Kaiser. “Tuition remission is part of the TUGSA benefit package. Therefore, they are no longer eligible.”
No because the loss of benefits extends to a period outside of the strike. It’s like taking somebody’s entire year of wages because they went on strike for a couple of weeks.
There is prob some room for a judge to side with students after protacted litigation, but the university is banking on them leaving and not earning the fringe benefit, (and therefore, willingly foregoing the fringe benefit making the university not liable) so it probably matters little.
You can't retaliate against workers for taking a protected concerted action to change something about their workplace. The wrinkle is that Temple's employees are public-sector employees, who are exempt from the NLRA --- but they're not necessarily exempt from equivalent Philadelphia law.
You can take health care away from employees (absent a contract) in general, but you can't do it in retaliation for striking.
Temple is subject to Pennsylvania law and section 1006 of PA Act 195 states "No public employe shall be entitled to pay or compensation from the public employer for the period engaged in any strike."
> The wrinkle is that Temple's employees are public-sector employees, who are exempt from the NLRA --- but they're not necessarily exempt from equivalent Philadelphia law.
It appears that you are correct [1]. There is a Pennsylvanian 1970 "Public Employe Relations Act" Article XII that could cover unfair practices including retaliation but I can't tell if it is still in force [2]. [3] appears to imply that it is still active.
> You can take health care away from employees (absent a contract) in general, but you can't do it in retaliation for striking.
That's simply not true. Many companies in the past have cancelled health insurance for workers on strike. That's the whole reason there has been a push by some legislators to change the law in this area.
Yes, exactly, apologies if I misunderstood your comment. I haven't been able to find more concrete information if the University is threatening to just not pay for health insurance now, or if they said they'd cancel health care flat out.
Yes, they're separate from wages that graduate students earn. Roughly—graduate students attend college for free, but for financial aid / regulatory / internal budgeting reasons the college can't say they attend for free, so they instead set extremely high tuition numbers and then "pay" that tuition for the students, from one hand of the college to the other hand.
But also AIUI Temple took away the whole of the tuition remittance for the entire semester. Companies are allowed to stop paying wages for the time workers are on strike and not working, but taking away tens of thousands of dollars for the entire semester simply for participating in a strike action during a tiny piece of it is absolutely beyond the pale.
> financial aid / regulatory / internal budgeting reasons the college can't say they attend for free, so they instead set extremely high tuition numbers and then "pay" that tuition for the students, from one hand of the college to the other hand.
It's not just internal budgeting, it also allows them to accurately charge faculty grants for that tuition. Faculty are given grants by various organizations, but they don't get that money up front, they have to identify a cost relevant to the grant that was paid, then the grantor reimburses. In the case of tuition, the grantors generally require some documentation that the charges are reasonable and allocable, so they are charged whatever tuition would be charged to a student with no TAship or Research Assistant position.
> taking away tens of thousands of dollars for the entire semester simply for participating in a strike action during a tiny piece of it is absolutely beyond the pale.
Temple is also pushing this way down the calendar. The tuition demanded does not have to be paid until March, and even if not paid then, it only blocks registration for the next semester (presumably Fall). They seem to be minimizing the impact to the degree possible. Hopefully the strike will be over long before then, and this will all be moot.
But it's not pay. Their stipend would be pay. The tuition would be a benefit, just as tuition assistance programs at companies are benefits. It's perfectly legal to suspend benefits and pay during a strike, but they must be reinstated when the strike is over. Right or wrong, it seems primia facie legal.
Edit: why disagree? What have I said that's factually incorrect? Please, educate us all and add to the discussion in the spirit of the forum.
Right but they’re not suspending the benefit they’re cancelling it. If they pro-rated a portion of the tuition assistance as owed that would be defensible. But this is a rug-pull.
Where do you see that they are cancelling it? Nothing in the statement I see precludes Temple from paying the remission if the strike resolves in two weeks, well before the due date. Even if the strike goes on longer, and the tuition so due is not paid, the penalty is still relatively a minor; a fine, and inability to register for the following quarter (presumably Fall, over 7 months away).
> Nothing in the statement I see precludes Temple...
Nothing precludes them from doing anything, and nothing precludes students from seeking legal remedies for those actions.
Look, I'm not sure. Temple might have a defensible claim for charging tuition; it's a really complicated situation and I wouldn't take advice from anyone who isn't an employment lawyer.
But the letter that Temple sent out is probably going to get Temple into some trouble for the reason identified by your parent comment.
> But the letter that Temple sent out is probably going to get Temple into some trouble for the reason identified by your parent comment.
It's certainly gotten them into reputational trouble. I don't think they'll get into legal trouble until there is an actual harm when either the fine is charged, or a registration is blocked. Courts don't generally rule on hypotheticals.
I'm sure Temple has good lawyers, but I'm skeptical.
My employment contract as a graduate student was one page long. There was definitely an implicit consensus ad idem regarding tuition remissions for graduate students.
It was not spelled out what exactly entitled me to the remission. It DEFINITELY wasn't an explicit benefit given in consideration for my labor as an RA. In fact, that situation might even be uncredible for universities to claim given the tax structure at play here.
Temple's "and therefore you don't get benefits and therefore YOU owe US money!" reasoning might make sense to a Goldman mouth breather, but I somehow doubt that anyone else involved in this agreement going back 5+ decades has ever thought that this is how things are supposed to work. I am genuinely skeptical that the COO (or whatever)'s interpretation of the contract is spelled out in writing in the contracts, or that there was ever a meeting of the minds on this matter.
And it's pretty trivial to show damages here without a bill coming due. If I were a grad student I'd put $xxK in a money market account, document my investment plan (or three ;) ), and sue for the opportunity cost plus treble damages even if this all gets resolved.
Is it pro-rated for students who dropout, or more accurately continue to study while dropping out of work-study, during the semester? Depending on how the explaination of benefits is written, it may not pro-rate. Hell, most companies require you pay back tuition assistance if you leave within 2 years after they pay.
but taking away tens of thousands of dollars for the entire semester simply for participating in a strike action during a tiny piece of it is absolutely beyond the pale
Beyond the pale morally or legally? The grandparent claim is that this is a slam dunk violation of labor law, but I’m not sure that’s true.
That said, I’m not a labor law expert. I’d like to hear from one without an ax to grind. Too often advocates conflate what the law currently is with where they think it should go. I’m often interested in both, but want to know which is which.
Speaking from present experience: "tuition remission" is a sort of imaginary quantum payment. I call it that because first they "charge" you tuition, then they issue you a "remission". The result is that no money ever actually enters or leaves your bank account, and they write something in a database somewhere to say that you "paid tuition" and are therefore legally a "student" (eg: legal to treat as a student, put under university behavioral discipline, exempt from certain labor laws, etc). You could try to say that it really is "tuition" for "coursework", but most graduate students, most of the time, aren't actually taking any classes that use a classroom or get taught by a professor. Most of their/our "credit hours" are in things labeled stuff like "Readings" or "Dissertation Continuation" that, again, help the university maintain a bureaucratic fiction that someone who has a cubicle and a workstation and spends their time in a lab is not, in fact, working for the university but instead being done a favor by the kindness of the university.
But as I said, you don't actually make a penny, so I wouldn't really call it "wages".
But my point is, you're not getting a payment, in any form. Most of the time, you are not taking courses. You're being charged a fee to do your job, and then having that fee "waived". Now, with the remission "withdrawn" for the strike, you have your employer demanding you pay them to be considered their employee.
Edit: A slight twist on this is that Temple University is a public university and and the NLRB in theory does not have jurisdiction over other parts of the government. PA law, however, offers similar protection. This is off to court for sure.
Yes, but if you were a grad student your W-2 almost certainly didn't include your tuition rebate as part of your total income. And the university sure as hell didn't pay taxes on it.
I have been explicitly told by a tax accountant that I cannot. If a third party makes a payment to one of their own offices, even presuming that money exists at all to begin with, I can't claim it on my taxes as income or a credit.
If this income is not in your W2, then this is very-murky-grey-area-danger-zone stuff.
Students and Universities both could be accused of underreporting income or tax witholdings.
I suspect there are armies of education lawyers that vetted this, but in any other industry, this is simply a no-go zone. You report what you get and what you pay as comp, cash and noncash.
Grad students are Very Special in tax code. For example: guess how much grad students and their universities pay in FICA taxes for graduate stipends (can be north of $40K; typically 8% of gross for employee and 8% of gross for employer)? $0.00.
Tuition remissions in particular definitely do not show up on your W-2.
Now, to the question in this thread. If you choose to report tuition as income, you might be able to do that in certain cases, but it's probably because you have some strange reason for wanting to report a higher gross income. I can't even begin think of any reason why that might be. So, murky and likely to cause an audit? Maybe. But then the gov is complaining about getting extra $$$, unless your situation is really fucking weird.
Mind you, this is exactly why I find situations like this so reprehensible. Universities get tons of breaks in how they treat grad student labor. For universities to turn around around and fuck grad students like this, on top of the insulting wages, is beyond the pale.
I'm not familiar with these Twitter lawyers. Why would suspension of pay and benefits be illegal?
"Generally speaking, those who are part of a legal strike cannot lose their health insurance or other benefits. While they may not receive them during a strike, these benefits must generally be made available to workers after they return to their jobs."
As a father of a baby I wonder what higher education is going to be in 20 years time.
I see a fairly long, gradual decline in prestige and effectiveness of universities - at least in the English speaking world - going back a couple of decades at this point. More bureaucratic, more corporate, filled with ever more political extremists. In my jurisdiction at least it's largely used as a pathway for migrants to get a permanent visa - language skill requirements are barely enforced and cheating is rife.
I'm questioning what the value of a piece of paper from such a place will really be in 2040. I question what it is now.
>As a father of a baby I wonder what higher education is going to be in 20 years time.
>I see a fairly long, gradual decline in prestige and effectiveness of universities - at least in the English speaking world - going back a couple of decades at this point.
I see a long and continuing decline of all of society in most English-speaking countries right now. I think in 50 years, English may still be the universal language of business and international commerce, but the Anglophone countries are going to be very different from now, probably collapsed and/or broken apart, and definitely not leading the world. They're certainly not a place I'd ever want to raise a child, especially America.
For reference, during the recent UC-wide strike, student strikers were allowed to keep their tuition remission (however, the university is clawing back paychecks for striking workers, as they are legally allowed to do. We had strike pay anyway, so it's fine)
This is important, because if it depended on administrators deciding to love their grad students again (vs mandated by judge, vs required by law), that cannot be the basis for certainty into the future.
> Bone headed move. They must have miscalculated if they think the students will cave to this pressure
It´s not about caving, I don´t think. It´s about maximum damage. University administration is one of the most ruthless groups you can come across. They´re well aware that they hold the future ambitions of these students in their hands. Even if they get sued, even if they lose, they´re well aware that they can utterly ruin a sizeable portion of the students they hit with this. They simply can´t afford to fight back, or wait to get the situation resolved.
Which is what I really think the core of the problem is. These people make decisions that can ruin of a whole host of people, but face no accountability for it.
I'm of the opinion that there should always be a remedy available for those wronged, and the ones doing the wronging should hope it's only via the court system.
Well, just look at how administrative errors, and professional misconduct by instructors is handled. I had a professor fail half the class because he lost the final exams, and another cohort because he made serious errors in the grading. The university did absolutely nothing to deal with it. While I was able to get the grade removed, I was directly told by the vice-dean to get out of the faculty for making a stink about it.
It took four years for the university to take action against the professor. Apparently the line wasn't even him telling students to kill themselves if they failed his course.
I concur. The person in the lawsuit Beth winkelstein is an absolute academic bully, eveyone who has ever come across her knows it. It just goes to show how little accountability there is in the University.
It's a new level of unthinking Kafkaesque bureaucracy. I always felt that admin at university don't only forget they're dealing with humans, but they're borderline misanthropic.
>They must have miscalculated if they think the students will cave to this pressure.
Have they miscalculated?
Not a comment on the right or wrong of this action but the article says this 80% of similar grad students have not gone on strike. Would be good to know how distributed across academic fields this strike is. If it is a few from each, then it seems Temple can just wait them out. If it is focused on just one area maybe not. This article is very light on detail.
No, the article doesn’t say that’s, it says that in a statement the university said that. They are (if not outright lying) surely calculating that number in the most favorable way possible probably doing things like include remote grad students, etc.
true, but if we want to get technical it says over 80%. Could they provide misleading stats sure. But the article also uses a pic from provided by the union which is very tight and so hard to gauge how many people are physically walking the picket line. Could also be misleading.
If there is any group that is unlikely to back down and fold it's probably students. Of course the university also has an endowment of $873 million and whatever administrator wrote that must have a very cushy job. This seems really poorly thought out.
Certainly a garbage administration. This is a huge signal to prospective graduate students not to apply to Temple University, a clear signal that they care more about money than your education. Grad students being at the bottom of the administrative priorities is nothing new, but threatening to prevent them from taking classes is a new low.
Higher education has grown disgustingly large. There is no reason grad students, which have driven a good portion of this growth, shouldn't be somewhat rewarded.
Once again workers in this country are asking for the bare minimum as they continually get screwed over. Just another cartel taking away from people doing the actual work, with their endless army of bureaucrats.
The problem doesn’t stop at the university either. US federal student loans have higher interest rates and fewer forgiveness options than for undergraduates.
Many grad students are pretty much completely at the mercy of their advisor and university.
Grad students are also very disposable, and, normally, prospective new students will have no idea of the wronged-student body count of any advisor or university.
One exception, in this case, is you have a group of students in the US national news, so it might be harder for this university to get grad students in the near future.
(Though US affluent families will be sending kids to ride out recession in grad school, and there's only so many admissions slots, so some kids can't be picky about where they go, even if they happen to have been paying attention to the news. And there's also international demand for US grad school slots.)
> Many grad students are pretty much completely at the mercy of their advisor and university.
If your advisor is sympathetic, there's nothing that prevents you from continuing to work on your thesis. If you still have coursework, then you're probably out of luck, but if you're ABD, then you might be just fine. But that would require a sympathetic advisor.
Shitty people push/bend the rules as far as they can, to see what they can get away with. If they lose, they don’t lose much. If they win, it becomes the new normal, in their favor.
I too hope they lose and are shamed (assuming they feel any shame at all). But I think they know what they’re doing
I'm a bit confused - striking workers don't normally retain pay and benefits. I don't understand what would make graduate students any different?
If they were being punished just for organizing or demonstrating it would probably be a different matter. But I think the University probably has good legal standing here to say "we're just not compensating them for work they didn't do".
Worse than this, they charge faculty grants this amount. Beside the percentage, they take from the grant itself. On average, we are talking about the university taking anything between 50-70% of any effective money for research. The other 30% pay for student's stipend, research expenses and equipments.
And even worse than that, there's a good chance that most of the grad students being charged for "tuition" in this case aren't even taking any courses for most of the semesters they're in grad school. I have no doubt some of these students are being charged huge tuition bills without being enrolled in a single course.
To be honest, I don't really get the point of the strike.
The grad students are not only getting a free education, they're also getting paid a stipend on top of that. Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc.
At least in STEM fields, anyone in grad school probably could have gotten a higher-paying job in industry, but chose to attend grad school, knowing the tradeoffs, because it's what they wanted to do with their life.
"On average, such workers make $19,500 a year, according to the Temple University Graduate Students' Association (TUGSA), a union that represents nearly 750 affected workers. In recent negotiations, the university had proposed increasing base pay to $22,500 by 2026."
https://www.businessinsider.com/temple-university-suspends-f...
> Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc.
The flexibility doesn't mean less hours. A majority work 40 hours or more. Many work way more:
We possibly have encountered graduate students with differing lifestyles, but a lot of the grad students I know in the natural sciences have grueling schedules between taking classes, TAing, and conducting research. The way these activities are structured may not correspond to a typical 9-5 but they’re still intense in their own right. To add onto this - attending conferences isn’t always on the universities dime, often it comes out of grants and other associated project costs that are allotted for your research. Maybe the university does foot the bill in other cases, but these are marginal costs when compared to the realizable value brought by graduate students in the form of monetizable knowledge and subsidized teaching costs. The latter point is at the crux of most tension between graduate students and university administrations, and there’s a large imbalance between the tangible value that grad students (and most academic researchers) bring to universities and the way that they’re compensated.
Master's students, or early stage PhD students, are typically continuing their undergraduate education. They should be considered students for all intents and purposes.
People doing research for a PhD should be considered junior professionals rather than students and paid accordingly. When I was doing it, the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry. That was a fair sum, considering the freedom and flexibility that came with the job. When I look back at that time, it was the period in my life when I had the best balance between income and free time.
> When I was doing it, the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry
You must be quite old or not in CS :) It was conservatively 1/5 when I was a PhD student (30K was a quite good stipend vs 150K was a kinda mid MS offer). It's as low as 1/10 now.
If STEM PHD students at Temple are really making 19K then it's gotta be at most 1/10 and as low as 1/20 for the good ones.
I do agree, though. We should just separate MS from PhD and pay post-MS PhD students something like what post-docs make. I think that would be very fair -- way less than industry, but a proper wage for a real laborer.
CS, in Finland, 10-15 years ago. I think the initial salary was something like €30k and it increased to €40k, which would be roughly $40k to $50k using the exchange rates at that time. Typical industry salaries for people who started their undergrads at the same time as me were ~50% higher.
The reason why PhD stipends are so low in the US is probably the same as the reason why industry salaries are so high: a culture that favors the top 20% at the expense of the bottom 50%.
>the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry
I think this is very high amount compared to the situation today. We are talking about people here making ~19k per year in a city where the minimum cost of living is ~30k.
"Free" education, except that they have to work for the university, and, as you note, they lose out on all the income they could have earned during those years. It's effectively quite expensive.
Some of the complaints from prior strikes were rather basic issues like not being able to afford nessesary dental care.
Who is going to teach anyone in your equation, if everything was about money there wouldn't be professors to educate the STEM majors. There is more to building a society than balancing the checkbooks.
This is really interesting because I couldn't reach the NLRB website: If you query cloudflare's dns server 1.1.1.1#53 for nlrb.gov it returns ABANDONED. This prevented me from finding relevant regulations until I diagnosed the issue and disabled Cloudflare DNS. If you're currently unable to reach nlrb.gov, that might be why.
If these grad students are in research-oriented programs, with an RA or TA job, the tuition might be Hollywood Accounting anyway -- a number the students might not have even seen before, nor even realize exists -- and now it's been weaponized.
Yup - quite the same as healthcare prices in the US. Because all the white collar folks have good insurance those costs are hidden and the insanely astronomical amounts are only ever levied against those without any recourse. The actual graduate program prices are just paper numbers to make accounting go brrrr - and suddenly a bunch of people (and bear in mind grad students are usually super broke to begin with) will need to come up with those BS charges and face escalating late fees if they fail to comply.
The article leaves out the fact that PA law doesn't allow paying or otherwise providing any compensation to striking public employees which these grad students are.
Meaning one in five classes will lack an instructor or grader, one in five professors will lack people they can pile work onto, and the placement rates this year might be abysmal, tanking their program in the future.
It's a strike. Don't confuse percent striking with impact of the strike. A 20% haircut on essential, low paid laborers is a big haircut.
According to a university official, with no explanation of how they came up with that number. Unions typically needs a certain percent of the vote to approve a strike.
IMO — this will impact prospective students’ opinions towards the university for a longer time period than the strike.
If I were a CS grad student at Temple, I definitely wouldn't strike. But after this hooplah I definitely wouldn't be slinging code at $10/hr either. After all, I'm a good programmer who can write papers and prove theorems and I make $2xK a year. What are they gonna do if I fuck off from running recitations and work on my own stuff or try and sell out my advisor's few half decent ideas to the local VCs? Fire me? LOL.
Graduate student compensation and treatment is a serious problem at many Universities across the country. I had a pretty good experience in grad school... great department... great advisor... a stipend on which I could actually live.
But man oh man... I know of a lot of work colleagues who were treated like shit in grad school:
- effective pay far below minimum wage
- no medical or crappy medical, far below university staff benefit levels
- forced 6-7 day a week schedules
- verbal abuse and intimidation from professors
- Advisor's holding students back from defending their thesis for years to squeeze more work out of them (this should be a crime)
I hope everyone thinking about going to Temple is watching this carefully and making other plans.
Also... under the circumstances, I find Temple's DEI statement (https://diversity.temple.edu/) to be complete bullshit.
If waived tuition fees is part of the graduate students benefits do they have to include it in their tax declarations? Do they pay tax on this "benefit"?
> Free or reduced tuition provided by eligible educational institutions to its employees may be excludable from gross income as a qualified tuition reduction. Whether a tuition reduction is a “qualified” tuition reduction and excludable from income depends on whether it is for education below or at the graduate level and whether the tuition reduction represents payment for services.
Higher education is like what they say about airline pricing: No two people on the plane paid the same price for their ticket. When I was in grad school, we referred to tuition as "funny money." The tuition level is arbitrary and simply represents a worst case maximum. What each student pays is determined by some other means.
There was also a threat to tax the tuition waiver during the Reagan administration, when I was in grad school. It caused a lot of consternation among students, but the university eventually told us that we'd be taken care of, and we didn't worry about it.
That was the focus of a fight when Trump was pushing for tax reform in 2017. Students would need to pay taxes on the remitted tuition which can be a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, which is a lot of money -- many don't even have $20k in total annual salary. In the end that part of the law did not change and students did not pay that extra tax.
Graduate students are the “individual contributors” of academia. A Computer Science PhD student typically makes somewhere between $25K and $40K. At well-regarded universities, the bar is relatively high. Most of my office mates in Graduate School either had an FAANG/high-finance offer or actually did 1-2 years at one of those employers before starting their PhD program. Universities get skilled labor at a six figure discount. Professors are also comparatively under-paid.
Maintaining a productive university environment is not easy. They are delicate environments that can go sour very quickly under bad leadership. And when they go sour, everything grinds to a halt in a way that's difficult to see from the outside before it's way too late.
I serve very regularly on grant review panels both for my employer and for federal agencies. To be a bit blunt, I'll probably have a bit of a bias against especially junior Temple faculty... that might not be fair, but shrugs my priors about the quality of new Temple faculty and their ability to get good work done in Temple's environment have cratered watching this play out.
Tuition remission is just a made up number. It's not like money you get paid or have to pay tax on our anything like that. Half the time you don't even have any corresponding coursework.
I know a lot of people who've worked in University administration and they weren't bad people at all, they genuinely cared about students and wanted to improve their livelihoods and the society around them.
Prescient that the character Alan Snyder, from 2016 TV series Colony, is by vocation a college administrator, who wheeled and dealed his way to a position of power in the collaborationist government of a post-alien-invasion Earth.
Temple University is one of the worst universities to go to. They have one in Japan, and the locals _know_ its a terrible university, yet people still got o it for some reason.
No idea how they're still around. Good marketing I guess?
This isn't a halting of paychecks during the strike. Tuition remission is awarded at the beginning of each semester a student is working. This would be like clawing back a signing bonus made to workers before a strike action, which from a cursory google search seems to be legally ambiguous at best.
> you can't take a signing bonus then not show up for work.
You can if your union goes on strike between you getting your signing bonus and your start date. Striking is not the same as quitting in the eyes of the law.
Striking is not the same as quitting. If negotiations were ratified next week, workers would return and could not face retaliation in benefits or pay for striking. The university could withhold pay for missed shifts during the strike and potentially clawback a prorated portion of the remission at best, but clawing back remissions in their entirety and charging late fees for not paying by a deadline is bad faith and won't be looked upon fondly by the NRLB. While the decision will likely end up being made by a court, to me this definitely seems like illegal retaliation and not a case of students biting off more than they could chew.
If you are part of a strike, then yes, actually, you are legally protected against some forms of retaliation, including possibly this form. We'll see how it plays out in court, but it is by no means as simple as you're laying out. This is not "people decided to not show up for work," it's a collective bargaining action against a very clearly hostile employer.
People are not complaining that they are not paid for the period they are working. They are complaining that participating in the strike has revoked their tuition remission for the entire semester. Idiot leader. This will play out incredibly poorly. Grad students put up with more than they ought to already.
If they had already been paid out, yes. Company bought you a $10k car in January, you strike in March. The company isn’t allowed to retroactively “unbuy” the car and declare that you now owe them $10k. Even if the condition for keeping the car was a full year’s employment you can’t take it — striking isn’t legally quitting.
Even stronger, if employees usually get an annual bonus but the year of the strike they don’t you might get bitten for retaliation.
I feel like yes, you would get options in your contract. But it doesn’t matter. The legality of this isn’t why it’s stupid. It’s the immense bad will from a class of poor students that are already doing a ton of work for very little. They would effectively now be asking students to pay to work.
If you had been issued options to buy shares that had already vested it'd be pretty insane for a company to try and claw those back. Pausing the vesting schedule might be a bit more understandable but is honestly pretty damn petty for what you're getting unless the strike lasted a good chunk of the year.
During COVID temple was gratuitously cruel in allowing students to cancel and forcing in-person teaching. I'd assume any cancellation window is as minimal as possible.
I was actually wondering if they'd specifically waited until after a key deadline to announce our implement this, just as a targeted "eff you" to the students.
In my experience the union pays, both with fees and also through fundraising. See: the Harper collins union strike was able to go 50+ days, including holidays, with the crowdfunding of a supportive literary community.
Your intuition fails here. Resources generally scale with the size of the group, while the price per individual goes down. If you order in sufficient quantities, you should be able to get a decent t-shirt with a single-colored print for ~$5.
There is no good reason at all for society to accept and institutionalize the sense of entitlement that unionizing workers have. You don't get any moral right to extra-contractual benefits just because you agree to an employment contract.
Almost all of the problems society has emanate from the ideological narratives of victimhood (e.g. the superficially plausible but fundamentally fallacious notion that parties with different levels wealth cannot engage in fair negotiations in the absence of a regulatory straightjacket being placed on the wealthier party) created to rationalize this sense of entitlement.
This institutionalized entitlement creates massive rent-seeking/inefficiency:
In the private sector, it guts industries, and thus harms workers at large, for the short term benefit of a select group of workers, e.g. Detroit was the richest city in the US, with the highest per capita, in 1950. 70 years later, after it was taken over by the UAW Union, it's a shadow of its former self.
The problem is not people walking away en masse from a job. The problem is laws that suppress the free market to favor unionization, like prohibiting employers from offering yellow dog contracts.
Along the same line of argument - why do employers feel entitled to continuously cut the effective wages of employees? The real wage in America has been on a steady decline while worker productivity has been increasing.
Why do these employers get to play the victimhood card when denying employees fair benefits and wages?
One of the benefits the unions is asking for is an extension of parental leave (maternity leave but for both parents). Grad students are currently allotted five days - a week after giving birth they're expected to be enthusiastically back at worth.
I loathe this entitlement/victimhood argument because it's absolutely baseless - nobody is entitled to anything at all - no higher being came down and said "And thine workers shalt have two weeks of vacation gaining an additional week every five years" - things like those are benefits that are fought for and strikes are one of the ways we fight.
>> why do employers feel entitled to continuously cut the effective wages of employees?
They are entitled to offer anything they want, as it's their own money they are offering. See this is the sense of entitlement I'm referring to, which is implicit in your question.
I spent years spreading the "gap between productivity and wages" graph on the internet. I later learned that this supposed gap was a distortion of reality, created by bad statistics:
It's funny that you complain about the 'ideological narratives of victimhood' while directly crafting a narrative where poor companies are victims to the vicious labor force. That said, you seem unfamiliar with the history of unionization and why these laws came into place. I recommend looking up what the Pinkertons did in order to stop companies being 'victimized' by workers.
“If they choose to strike, i.e., stop working, they would lose any benefits that are connected to their jobs, including pay, free health care and tuition remission. Over 80 percent of the TUGSA-covered students have chosen not to strike, and are still working and still enjoying the benefits to which they are entitled, including tuition remission.”
Here's the problem -- that's a business solution. This decision is intended to benefit Temple the business, not the Temple the university. The administration is too busy filing TPS reports to realize that they're curating something actually important -- the future of this country's youth.
In other ways it's just cookie-cutter union-busting from coal-mining days, 120 years ago, and I expect in the long term it will work just as well (i.e., not).