MIT Grad Students are to vote on unionizing. In the old days, yes when I was there, it was a highly competitive environment, kind of like the Marine Corps for techys. Now, under the current administration, it has become the Venezuela of Technical Schools, managed by a collective of administrators and influencers who want to tell everyone what they should be doing. Not the MIT I knew.
My father and brother were in the IBEW, electricians. In New York City even. You see, IBEW members in NYC make small fortunes, based on the union contracts. In addition in unions everyone is equal, unless you are more equal as a union leader. Kind of like Animal Farm.
As a Grad student, you should feel lucky that your tuition is paid for and you get some added experience. I did. Otherwise I would most likely never have finished. The competitive atmosphere of MIT back in the 60s made for the competitive bent of the entrepreneur. Unions despise compensation based on individual performance. They demand uniformity and compliance with the rules of the union bosses. It is the antithesis of a scientific and engineering environment.
Harvard managed to unionize, hopefully MIT does not see it that way. BUT, and this is critical, the management of the place has seeded the grad students with those compliant with such environment. The current management has trained the students perforce of the multiplicity of overpaid and unneeded Deans etc to indoctrinate students and moreover the make certain that no creative and competitive individual is allowed.
One surmises that the establishment of a union is just the next step in this ever forward vision of Marxist compliance. You see, Marx stipulates that individuals do not exist, or more strongly must not exist, but groups do. The proletariat is a class, a class that must conflict with the ruling class, but done so as a group, a class. Thus unions mandate that people belong to this class. It is, in my opinion, in an institution like MIT a truly Marxist step.
As an afterthought, unions make everyone equal, one is part of the grand proletariat. If so, and say someone wins a Nobel Prize, do all get to share in the prize since by definition we are no longer individuals but we are a single mass of people.
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