#student employees

[nationallawreview]

IRS Issues FAQs Regarding Long-Term Part-Time Employees in 403(b) Plans

The IRS recently issued Notice 2024-73, which provides much-needed guidance on long-term, part-time (“LTPT”) employees in ERISA-governed 403(b) retirement plans. Following passage of the SECURE 2.0 Act, an employee is generally considered a LTPT employee if he or she works at least 500 hours per year for two consecutive years. Among other items, the Notice sets forth the IRS position on the…

[sleep-deprived-luka]

Vbs a Christmas Carol, for reasons I can no longer explain

[habken]

my aus have aus, it's like a big tree and all the little branches are the slightly different situations I've put my favourite little guys in

[transmutationisms]

(If you're alrght with another poorly articulated question from an obnoxious high schooler) Do you have thoughts on academics and their position in a labor framework? I know some grad students and have never been quite sure where they fit because they don't always work with "capital" in a traditional sense. Professors are odd to me because they are under university contract, but rather than get paid by the university they often get their own funding from the government. Or graduate sudents, who are often unionized, but I know a paleontology student who studies shark fossils who says he doesnt really consider what he does "making surplus value."

ok well that last person is simply confused lol. graduate students exist because the university profits from having us; it is a capitalist institution. most directly we usually work as teaching assistants or research assistants (or else pay tuition) and more indirectly, graduate programs get funding and university support because their existence contributes to a university's rankings, prestige factor, &c, which is to say its (perceived) profitability. plenty of us study things that don't produce much directly lucrative research, but this does not mean the university keeps us around for shits and giggles or some kind of laudatory interest in knowledge for its own sake. it is a capitalist institution and acts in the financial interest of its owners / beneficiaries.

anyway wrt faculty members, they are also employed by the university because it profits from them (or hopes to, anyway). i think many people get confused by tenureship; tenure is indeed fairly cushy as far as employment contracts go, but it is is still an employment contract, and most faculty are not actually tenured anyway. academics are a classic example of the 'professional-managerial class', which is not a marxian term but is a useful one for identifying those 'upper-middle class' members differentiated by their professional qualifications and status; the prestige and perceived utility of academic knowledge production is partially what makes academics an attractive target for a lot of government and NGO funding. state funding of academic research ofc has numerous functions but, and not to put too fine a point on it, a capitalist state also invests money in things because it is hoping for some kind of return on investment, eg in the form of directly profitable inventions, soft power, &c.

there are distinctions here between different academic employment statuses. an adjunct or contingent hire is paid by the university solely to teach, making their labourer status fairly straightforward. with tenured or tenure-track positions, yes there may also be money coming from outside; however, this doesn't negate the fact that the university is trying to profit from its faculty (else it wouldn't hire them). the professional-managerial class has certain characteristics of both proletariat and bourgeoisie, and there is some variation between academics as a very select few do attain the kind of household name status that can turn them into basically a personal brand. again though: the university wants to extract value from the work (both teaching and research) of academics it hires, and so do outside sources of funding for research projects. knowledge production should not be mystified or abstracted in ways that obfuscate the financial interests of involved parties; though it attains a prestige that few other commodities do, this is still a process that is embedded within the overall operating logics of capitalism.

an additional consideration wrt internal academic class politics is that many faculty use graduate students, postdocs, and even undergrads to perform or assist with their research. these arrangements vary in structure (and between disciplines) but in general, this does mean that many academics produce papers, books, &c that depend upon the labour of many people and rarely compensate these people equally to themselves. this can take the form of a more overtly employer-employee relationship between a professor and their underlings (for example, some labs are run this way) or it can be the case that it's another party (a publisher, say) who is reaping most of the surplus value squeezed from grad / undergrad / postdoc labour. in any case it is important to keep in mind that professors can and often do take on employer (ie, small capitalist) roles in relation to other employees of the university, even though the professors themselves are there because the university and other institutions pay them and profit from their labour.

i hope this is a useful start; obviously there is lots else to be said about the economics of the university and knowledge production as a capitalist process. in general when you are trying to think through this my advice would be not to let the presentation of the university as some kind of cerebral place of enlightenment confuse a materialist analysis of the flows of capital. plenty of workers and capitalists deal with commodities that are immaterial in the sense that 'knowledge' is, or are imbued with similar social meaning and value; the university deals with knowledge production but this does not make it any less an employer (ie, a capitalist institution) than any other institution operating in a capitalist context.

[kimbapisnotsushi]

can you imagine being a hardworking thirty-something bouncing ball corp employee in like idk sales or some shit who spent YEARS before that trying to climb the corporate ladder and succumbing to the 9-5 workhorse race that makes you dead inside but now your boss is a college kid who shows up to important company meetings in sweats and brings his homework to the office so he can get it done on time and haphazardly stuffs paperwork and legal documents into the same binders as his lecture notes and doesn’t give a shit if you don’t properly file for time off bc he can barely be assed to email his professors the same and will still PAY you for it????? can you imagine???? i can’t but it’d be REALLY fucking funnny

[empressofthewind]

Honestly a Meronia teacher AU would go so hard though 👀

[curiositysavesthecat]

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[silusvesuius]

the interior architecture of the college is in the actual trenches bc the way they gave nobody in that little dorm section doors is truly Nasty like what if i wanna scratch my ass or something .. placing the beds in the center too i'm speechless

[nando161mando]

Literally this

[macbethz]

Not to be dramatic but this is the worst idea ever conceived by the human mind

[atla-milf-month]

ATLA MILF Month will happen in March 2025! This month will celebrate all the ATLA-verse moms and older women who... well, you know!

Click here to submit prompts! Click here to check the event guidelines! Do you have any questions? Do you want to be a mod? Please send us an ask.

Thank you for participating. We hope you enjoy the event!

[yingxtkm]

Modern AU FFVII

POV Sephiroth decides to find a part time job somewhere near campus and immediately regrets it.

*References used

[morningstar-darling]

pov you invite me into your new office after your promotion to enjoy the view

[haunthouse]

least favorite student at work today: person who came in 15 minutes before we closed, ran directly up to the print desk and plugged their flash drive in without even saying hello or how are you or hi i'm here to print is it okay if i plug my flash drive in. gave me their files to print but hadn't bothered to actually resize them to the size they wanted them printed, and when asked would not tell me what size they wanted, just that 8.5x11 was too big for their postcards and they wanted them THIS BIG [holding their hands up in a very vague way meant to indicate a size smaller than 8.5x11]. additional context is that our printers literally have 2 settings and they're 'scale the image to fit on the page' or 'print at 100% whatever size the image already is' so i could not make it smaller for them. so they ran off and shrunk the images (cool), came back and i got them printing (cool), then ran off AGAIN and i was like "hey i need to ring you up" and they went "no i have another file i need to change the size on." five minutes pass. we are now at 6 minutes to closing. they come back. they drop their file. it's too big for our quick easy printer so i ask them what size they want it to be and they go "idk a2?" and i say "i'm so sorry but i do not know what size a2 is, you have to give it to us in inches" and they say "no i just want a2 size, indesign let me export it as a2 size," and i say "sorry but i am not indesign and i need you to tell me in inches" and they say "it's 430 wide" and i say "four hundred thirty inches???" and they say "no" and refuse to elaborate. we are at 3 minutes to closing. i finally get their massive file to load and it's like 25 inches tall, which is too big for our quick printer. i say "do you want it 25 inches tall" and they say "i want it a2" as if we had not already just had this conversation. they keep giving me looks like i'm the stupid one in this conversation. i say "listen we close in 2 minutes, that is not enough time to print something that big, i could print it at 12x18" for you." my boss goes "just print it it's fine" and i quietly seethe because neither of us should have to stay past the time we're meant to close just because some entitled student refuses to google what size they want their prints to be for ten christian minutes

least favorite student of yesterday was the girl who, when i came into work first thing in the morning after 24 hours of one of the worst migraines ive ever had, was standing at the desk on her phone while 5 people waited in line behind her, blocking the computers people have to put their files on, and i said very politely "hey you know there's a line, right, and it's a bit rude to be on your phone blocking the line" absolutely blew up at me, kept blocking the line for five more minutes, and then CAME BACK LATER after the line had been dealt with to tell me how horrifically rude she thought it was that i said that to her and demanded an apology

[wrenhavenriver]

boss sent out anonymous surveys asking for feedback on her proposed employee performance evaluation rubric and i had to be like. hey. if you have "frequently attends optional events/workshops and participates in optional challenges" as a requirement for getting a good evaluation. then they're not actually optional??