Research Assistants
just a student? or an employee? or what?
For some time now CUPE 2278 has been running a union drive for research assistants. I have been quietly observing this on the side.
DISCLOSURE: I have always been a union supporter. During my time as a graduate student at York University I was a member of the then Canadian Union of Educational Workers and served on the executive committee. I was also a member of the TSSU at SFU in the early 1980s. During my life as a commercial fisherman I belonged to the Deepsea Fishermen’s Union. At UBC I have served as an executive member of our faculty union.
Nothing stated here is an official, approved, or vetted opinion of UBC or the Board of Governors. I am reflecting on UBC actions from my vantage point as a UBC faculty member and in my role as a governor sharing my thoughts on a matter of public interest. On this matter and as of this date, I am not privy to any confidential materials and in fact have been excluded from employee relations discussion by virtue of being a UBC employee.
In The Tyee article a UBC representative, Matthew Ramsey, is quoted as saying:
“It is our position that under the B.C. Labour Relations Code the students in question are students, pursuing academic and scholarly activity toward their respective degrees, not employees,” UBC spokesman Matthew Ramsey said in a statement. He pointed out that some compensation those students receive is considered scholarship money for the purposes of filing income tax.
When I hire research assistants (RA’s) I expect them to actually work for the specified hours they are hired for. I do not hand over research grant funding to support their personal learning agenda as a fellowship. I expect them to produce defined outputs linked to research/community projects I have funding for. I also work with them to ensure the hours we have set are appropriate to the tasks I have assigned to them. We monitor and adjust if necessary.
I am currently, for example, digitizing all the video footage from projects back home in Laxyuup Gitxaala that I have directed. I am preparing to return to the community cultural centre and museum these materials accumulated over a couple of decades of work. I am hiring two grad students to each spend 8hrs a week over the next three months digitizing and cataloguing these videos. The grad students may well be involved in research linked to repatriation of cultural belongings, digital journalism, data management, etc. However the project I am hiring them for is not specifically because they are students (though the policies make it easier to hire students), but rather because they have skills and expertise that is needed to fulfill a research project commitment.
For decades I have hired RAs and used the CUPE 2278 contract for teachings assistants as the benchmark for setting wage rates.
Sometimes, like when they joined me in field research the field assistants were paid an honourarium plus travel/accommodation expenses. In this film (see below) you can see the kind of field research assistant work being done. The production of the video was also linked to a research assistant position as well in which pay was hourly and tied to producing the video itself.
Other times RAs working with me are paid hourly, like the several undergrads over the years who helped analyze soil samples and percussion cores from my archaeological research.
Always the students were doing work related to my research projects. Yes they learned, but they were not “pursuing academic and scholarly activity toward their respective degrees” (Matthew Ramsey, quoted in The Tyee). This particular line of argument is in many cases factually incorrect. Some students (typically graduate students) do go on to build their own thesis projects from the foundation established working as an RA with me but the work they did on my projects was always tied to specific terms of references, stated objectives, and expectations of productive output. Conceptualizing it as anything other than work seems problematic. The notion that payment for research assistance work is a fellowship, not tied to specific hours and conditions of work, is just a mischaracterization. If this is how some RA’s are currently treated then it is also ethically wrong to expect anyone to work unlimited hours for minimal pay.
It is in the best interests of the university to be clear in how we characterize the work our research assistants do. It is also in the best interests of the university to acknowledge we - as a university community- have a duty of care to the people who make up our community of labour.
There's so much wrapped up in this I don't know where to start, and I think it's a great piece from you. To give some insight of my perspective, I work as a science communicator whose mission centres on critique of academia from the understanding that it's primary function is to serve the interests of all people through education, and the development and dissemination of knowledge. I concede this is idealistic and that the reality is somewhat different in it's foundation really being enabled by concentrating an excess of resources in a small demographic (by way of patriarchy, colonialism, slavery etc) who conducted research according to their own interests and curiosities. Nevertheless, since academia is enabled by the surplus value produced by working people, I think it should be held accountable to them.
Just a little more context here, particularly in relation to the exchange with Katie here, my background is in molecular cell biology, where I had a 20 year research career including time as a PI. My work was medically relevant, although basic science in principle, which meant my collaborators, colleagues and I tended to seek funding from CIHR primarily, although NSERC was an option too. Obviously the latter is involved in funding very large projects, particularly in Big Science from hard disciplines like physics, and more commercially focussed engineering projects, but in general funding levels for disciplines I'm knowledgeable about tend to be obviously higher from CIHR. I'm quite naive to scientific disciplines involving field work or are adjacent to that, in terms of their culture, but expect the budgets I'm familiar with to be grotesquely large in comparison. This is a substantial factor in me leaving my research career, or as I see it, reconfiguring it.
Now to address the issue under discussion. It seems quite clear to me that UBC is actively misrepresenting things in that piece. I don't think I've ever seen a student funded primarily as an employee of any kind, although it has happened where they've done that work as an employee outside the research related to a degree. I gather this is not as clear cut in less well funded areas, and might be best expressed as a privilege of those who work in areas with more funding like I used to. That people might do this strikes me as people making do within unnecessarily restrictive bureaucratic circumstances, and with scant resources. This situation seems very much to me the university administration's doing, given the funding situation. If only they saw themselves as operating with a mission to facilitate researcher's activities directed at generating knowledge, rather than seeing itself as an authority on what's appropriate, this work would at least be categorised appropriately (employment Vs education).
It's also so telling how far university bureaucracy is from its mission that it's seeking to prevent people organising under any technicality manufactured by the state. It's like a symbiotic relationship between government and university aimed to parasitise broader society. If they make it much more explicit people won't be able to ignore it at all.
Radical politics aside, there does need to be some consideration put into the structure of research and how labour is allocated. Certainly from my area of interest, there's some writing on this-- many more research degrees are granted than there's really room for in terms of employment, and that considers a significant commercial and industrial sector. Very few older heads like mine occupy stools at lab benches, because they cost so much, and instead almost all labour comes from people with less experience, and a real diversity in success (measured in actual findings, not career progression) results. There's an element of exploitation here to be sure, but it's not well enough considered to lay the blame on conscious design. It's more cultural norms emergent from broad alienation. People, especially academics themselves, are so bogged down with extensive bureaucracy that even if they identify these problems, it's truly heroic to both find the time and courage to push back against them.
Again, thanks for writing this blog. It constantly provokes thought, informs and inspires.
I think this is one of those areas that is a bit murky and varies among departments (and of course UBC interprets in the light that is most favourable to them). In my department, graduate students are rarely hired for "extra" work--their RA stipends are directly paid for the work that they do for their thesis. On the rare occasion I have an external contract, I would buy a grad student out of their TAship, but again, the expectation is that this work would end up in their thesis.