At least in experimental physics a significant chunk of your time is taken up by menial duties. This might be babysitting the gas-detector or anything from server maintenance, PCB-design, ASIC development. Some of it can turn into your PhD thesis, a lot of it is just uninspired grunt-work you are expected to do. Of course you are also typically only paid ~65% of a full salary, so a significant chunk of your work is unpaid, because of course people expect you to work full-time.
An alternative way of stating this is that you are expected to do your PhD research in the 35% of the unpaid time.
This is in principle illegal, but because the institutes don't have any automatic time-tracking, you are instead expected to lie on your time-sheets and to underreport the time you've worked.
What field do you work in? Modern science is team science. I think the paper I have under review right now has... six authors? That's pretty average for the particular interdisciplinary collaboration I happen to work in right now.
It would just be silly to claim that every other junior author on the paper is working for me, as the first author, rather than admit that I work for my adviser (who I haven't complained about here because I lucked out and got a very good one).
>Give us what we want or... we'll quit our degrees and throw away years of our lives?
Give us what we want or you have no teachers and your research output drops to near-zero. Most of the actual work of scientific research is done by what we politely euphemize as "early career researchers" or "junior authors": grad-students and postdocs. Tenured and tenure-track professors don't do the bulk of the bench-work, even when they really enjoy it.
I'm just reading the page and maybe you know more than me, but it seems like this is really a union of instructors and assistants, rather than students. If you aren't instructing, you probably don't need this union.
