Thousands of early-career NIH researchers forming union for first time

The problem with opening remote locations is attracting people. Montgomery County, MD (where Bethesda is located) and the broader DC metro region has lots of biotech, medical, and software opportunities.

People geting paid more is inflationary. People producing more output is deflationary. We need lots of both.

Company profits come from things being produced and then bought. So when profits are paid out to owners and employees as salaries, dividends, and other mechanisms, it gets filed under "people getting paid".

Now my main point is that if S, T and M have been underpaid vs their true output, they should get more.

Ultimately, unions' power comes from the threat of striking. Unions' demands only have teeth because of their ability to completely suspend economic output for an entire company or industry. This is possible because economic output of most unionized industries is collective: a factory worker has no personal stake in the individual widgets that s/he makes, and thus can dispassionately suspend widget production along with everyone else in the union.

By contrast, science is extremely individualistic. Each "widget" is a scientific publication, which is directly attributed to a few specific contributors, and crucial for advancing an individual's scientific career. Thus, scientists are extremely passionate about their individual labor. Furthermore, science is often very time-sensitive — there is a huge premium on being the first to publish. Time sensitivity is especially high in the life sciences, since experiments with living things often cannot be easily scheduled around a strike.

Passionate, individually invested scientists are therefore much less likely to voluntarily suspend their work than dispassionate laborers in collective industries. This makes striking much less impactful (there will be a lot of scabs in a scientific union strike), thereby negating much of a scientific union's power.

(Imagine — you are an NIH postdoc working on a major publication in a hot field that will make or break your candidacy for a tenure-track faculty position. You are aware of several other labs working on the same project. Whoever publishes first gets most of the scientific accolades, and thus career advancement. The NIH union decides to strike. If you join the strike, it will set back your project, increasing the probability that one of the competing groups will scoop you, potentially greatly setting back your career. Are you going to let this happen?)

There are many viable alternatives for these researchers. For starters, all the other academic institutions! Which have their own problems, but have been increasing salaries for graduate students and post docs in response to organization (eg Penn just raised biomedical postdoc salaries in large part because of the threat of unionization, and in large part because of the competitive threat of other institutions who’ve increased salaries).

But beyond that, private sector is absolutely a viable alternative. People don’t make their choices in a vacuum, they choose the academia path because it fits their long term goal and it’s worth the short term costs.

It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers: of the people I know in research at prestigious institutions, it is a mix of MD-PhDs and people who only ever wanted to do research. There’s absolutely not some huge population of thwarted doctors getting prestigious postdoc positions.