Thousands of early-career NIH researchers forming union for first time • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by data_acquired » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #73

data_acquired wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption is that the movement has built enough support for everyone to strike together. But a strike walk-out is one of all kinds of bizarre reasons one ends up getting scooped. Mice get sick, chemical stocks go bad, collaborators leave for personal reasons, etc. etc. Yes, there's a marginal increase in the odds that one gets scooped during a strike. Truth is, when it comes to transitioning to a faculty positio…

>Fellows on strikes are acutely aware of the risk of getting scooped every minute that is spent away from the bench, but in the balance, its really not foremost on many folks' minds beyond a point. FWIW, most researchers I know who were involved in academic strikes did not put their research on hold, but all of them with teaching duties did walk out of that. This was sufficient to pressure the university to acquiesce…

People’s careers are being involuntarily set back already for reasons more physical and real than the risk of being scooped.

I’ve been scooped. It sucks. The scooped paper doesn’t land in a big journal. It certainly knocked down the impact factor of the publication and my profile. The fraction of cases where a lack of a high impact paper held back a faculty applicant is likely low (see https://elifesciences.org/articles/54097 and similar surveys). I’ve absolutely seen folks land faculty positions without a crazy impact factor publication. And as you say, it’s really hard to tell if the lack of a high impact factor paper holds a particular applicant back (see other factors I listed) in a particular case. So the link between high impact publication and faculty position is tenuous, and thus the link between being scooped leading to no faculty position is questionable, which means the risk of being scooped isn’t as much of an issue compared to work conditions.

The point you raise about practically and effectiveness of a strike presupposes that a union exists. And it seems that your claim that a research institute cannot generate as much solidarity as a university is a matter of belief rather than evidence seen elsewhere that research institutes have less successful unions than universities. Unless you know of many examples of this kind.

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

#102

Post by maxbond » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #46

matthewowen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is nearing the end of her postdoc (cell biology). I’ve known her since she was 18 years old. She never wanted to be an MD. Neither did the colleagues of hers I talked to.

Try a bigger sample size. I have seen countless life science graduates switch into software engineering precisely because of medical school admissions and the rest of the industry and academia being a career dead end.

You told them they should talk to some life sciences graduates. They relayed that they knew several such people. And now you're telling them the experiment you proposed is anecdotal and not meaningful, seemingly because it didn't produce the result you wanted.

Another approach would have been to say, "interesting, my experience differs," and then to compare notes.

For instance, is it the case that you're a software engineer who occasionally meets people who've pivoted into software engineering from life sciences? That could be a very different sample than someone who's spouse has successfully gained traction in the field (with neither being representative, as they're subject to complementary survivorship biases). Seems likely to me that there's something to be learned from both perspectives here.

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

#103

Post by Retric » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

tomjakubowski wrote: post #88

Retric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Los Alamos got kickstarted in WWII when the government literally got to tell physicists where to go and it became a major hub of such research. That might work if the NIH wanted to spend 50% of it’s budget in one location, but their proposal was to spread across not just one second tier city but dozens of such locations.

Were Manhattan project scientists really ordered around like that? Was anyone working at Los Alamos against their will?

I don’t know.

The scientists apparently had some wiggle room: An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos.”

But the subtext was there was a draft going on and most of them would be eligible unless they were working on such a critical project.

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

#104

Post by debacle » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #99

photochemsyn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions in Germany get seats on the corporate board, about the same number as the shareholders do. Public universities receiving NIH grants are a bit different in structure, but there are administrative government boards of one sort or the other at all such institutions, and having union representatives on those boards makes a lot of sense. This would mean researchers have more say over things like how much overhead i…

If only unions in the US worked like their European counterparts! :(

How many of the top 25 tech startups were founded in Europe?

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

#105

Post by swixmix » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35

I think academic scientists are criminally underpaid (especially at the NIH), and really hope something can be done to rectify this. However, I don’t think unionization is the way. 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…

> Ultimately, unions' power comes from the threat of striking.

The power comes from the NLRA, a federal law, which is enforced by the NLRB, a federal agency. It’s about agreeing to and enforcing a contract between the workers and the employer.

Whether or not to strike then becomes a part of contract negotiation.

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

#106

Post by data_acquired » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:41 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35

I think academic scientists are criminally underpaid (especially at the NIH), and really hope something can be done to rectify this. However, I don’t think unionization is the way. 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…

Scabs in a scientific union strike? I’ve routinely see it take months for a new joinee to get up to speed on someone else’s project. And hiring is strictly controlled, and no one has a budget to suddenly hire new workers out of the blue to break a strike. This is a fanciful view of scientific labor. Even if not hiring new labor, asking another existing worker to take over an existing project runs into the same issues.

See my other replies to your comments. The risk of being scooped pales in contrast to actual working condition issues. If being scooped was the only concern of every postdoc, there would be no need for a union.

Finally, you deeply underestimate the amount of community involvement within an institute in any scientific paper. “Science is individualistic” in a very limited intellectual sense but not in a meaningful day to day basis.

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

#107

Post by MontyCarloHall » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

data_acquired wrote: post #106

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35

I think academic scientists are criminally underpaid (especially at the NIH), and really hope something can be done to rectify this. However, I don’t think unionization is the way. 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…

Scabs in a scientific union strike? I’ve routinely see it take months for a new joinee to get up to speed on someone else’s project. And hiring is strictly controlled, and no one has a budget to suddenly hire new workers out of the blue to break a strike. This is a fanciful view of scientific labor. Even if not hiring new labor, asking another existing worker to take over an existing project runs into the same issues…

By "scabs," I mean union members continuing to work on their research despite a strike. People I've spoken with at Columbia and Harvard, which both recently had graduate student strikes, told me that graduate research was mostly business as usual during the strike, even though graduate TA instruction was essentially completely suspended (the latter is what caused the administration to acquiesce to union demands). For better or for worse, researchers' dedication to their projects is simply greater than their dedication to collective labor activism.

>“Science is individualistic” in a very limited intellectual sense but not in a meaningful day to day basis.

The frequent (incredibly petty) fights I've seen over publication authorship order demonstrate otherwise.

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

#108

Post by MontyCarloHall » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #104

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only unions in the US worked like their European counterparts! :(

How many of the top 25 tech startups were founded in Europe?

Few-to-none, but what does that have to do with labor unions? Most European tech workers aren't unionized.

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

#109

Post by alistairSH » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

metaphor wrote: post #81

alistairSH wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so people have to live in the boondocks Homes are pricey, no question. But, DC is one of the more affordable top-tier cities in the US. Especially if your work is in the suburbs. For software people, you can buy a reasonable[1] TH in Reston for around $600k and have a reasonable commute to most of the NoVA tech corridor. Or Metro downtown. Or ride your bike to many employment centers. Or, if you're really lucky, you…

> But, DC is one of the more affordable top-tier cities in the US. Is it? This 2023 study[1] featured on Bloomberg[2] ranked DC at #7 of 76 most expensive large cities in the nation, requiring $245k gross pay to feel like $100k after normalizing taxes and cost of living. [1] https://smartasset.com/data-studies/new-100k-how-taxes-costs... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-15/making-30...

I'll see if I can dig out the source, but the study I saw had COL vs incomes.

IE, DC is expensive, but also pays extremely well.

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

#110

Post by dekhn » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #36

alistairSH wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIH isn't in NoVA. It's across the river in Bethesda, MD. 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.

And it's an even bigger issue once professional specialists have partners and families. Even elite schools in relatively remote from major population center areas have long had some trouble attracting faculty whose partners may well be inevitably underemployed if they move to the small town/city where the school is.

this is called "the two body problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem_(career) in reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem