Students on strike

Graduate students in California have been on strike for three weeks, pushing for a livable wage.

The cost of living in California is amongst the highest in the USA, partially due to expenses for essentials including housing being pushed up by tech workers on much higher salaries. It's hard to carry out deep research if you are distracted by worrying about whether you will have enough food to last the week, or whether the next rent increase will leave you homeless.

Unfortunately universities have little incentive to increase the pay of junior researchers. The majority of graduate students are foreigners on temporary visas with little bargaining power; a few years in poverty can be a pathway to permanent residency, which opens up many more opportunities compared to their home countries. 

Moreover, salaries funded by research grants are often fixed by the funding agencies, with top-ups explicitly forbidden in some cases. Even when professors may be strongly in favour of paying their team members a livable wage, they have little power to effect change with salaries controlled by upper university management.

Despite these hurdles, the University of California system has now agreed to pay rises of up to 29% for postdocs and researchers. 

Will this lead to broader change within the broken academic system?

Meanwhile, in the headlines a few days ago Singapore and New York were tied as the world's most expensive cities. This comes amidst an absolutely insane rental market here, with monthly rents up by more than 70% in some cases.