Leaflet Against the Pay Disparity

(The GSO does not officially endorse the views in this leaflet.)

Progressive Labor Party

Why are graduate students treated so terribly? Because graduate students are exploited workers!

Continuing graduate students at Boston University are paid from $9,500 (humanities and arts) to $10,500 (sciences) a school year to teach discussions and laboratory sections (and sometimes even lecture). Even though graduate students do much of the teaching and grading, they are seriously underpaid. Moreover, starting with the Fall 1997 semester, BU has decided to start paying new graduate student teaching fellows $1,000 more per school year than current teaching fellows. BU is paying this wage increase to new TF because other universities tend to pay more (although not much more). However, all graduate students are in desperate need of a serious wage increase (to match the continuing increase in the cost of living).

Graduate students, all over the country, are a major source of cheap intellectual labor at both public and private universities. They are woefully underpaid for the teaching and research work they perform. Along with other part-time university instructors, graduate students work long hours often with little or no paid health care benefits and little or no job security. Furthermore, 60% of all university teachers with Ph.D. work part-time and are not tenured. As with so many other workers, such as clerical or hospital workers, graduate student teachers and researchers are becoming more and more oppressed.

The socio-economic crisis facing college teachers and researchers is a microcosm of the general crisis facing the world's workers. Many graduate students like to believe they are not affected, as other workers are, by the growing world-wide trend towards fascistic misery and war. However, graduate students are workers, and the growing crisis in U.S. and world-wide capitalism has led to a general decline in the living standards of all workers, both academic and non-academic, as demonstrated by decreasing wages, increasing work hours, cuts in work benefits, and cuts in government expenditures for programs such as welfare and medicare. Over a billion people are unemployed or severely under-employed, millions starve and die from preventable diseases, children are un-cared for and their minds are not taught, and dozens of wars rage across the planet. Moreover, the profit motive ultimately constrains education and science which develop from the productive forces in society: capitalism stifles, rather than releases, the creative energies of the masses of people.

Capitalism by its very greed-oriented nature can never provide a meaningful life for the vast majority of the world's inhabitants. We need a communist society based on distribution according to need not profit. Under communism, most people will be trained to study and solve problems because science and technology will serve the needs of all of humanity. Knowledge will cease to be a commodity available only to the privileged few. Education will be designed to tap the immense creative energy of the whole working class. In the long run, progress towards a world free of elitist education and mass misery will be hastened if graduate students join with other workers in the revolutionary fight to build a communist society.