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

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

#141

Post by data_acquired »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #107
data_acquired wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, naturally, the solution here is that folks continue being underpaid? I'm yet to see a case here that research-based institutes will have a worse union or one that cannot take action because of a bizarre self-interest argument about being scooped by someone in another institute (or country, as I was expecting someone to bring up eventually)? I'm still awaiting the non-union solution here, which is what exactly?

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

The frequent acts of collaboration despite people having witnessed other fights (virtually no paper is authored by a single lab any more), the lending and replacing of reagents, the frequent informal discussions around a project between peers without an expectation of significant co-authorship, informal mentorship ,etc., argue that people continue to work as a community because it lends greater success to grants and publications. The individualistic argument really does not hold water, sorry.

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

#142

Post by data_acquired »

natechols wrote: post #134
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The frequent (incredibly petty) fights I've seen over publication authorship order demonstrate otherwise. Likewise, and this is one of the many reasons I left academia. I feel like everyone who criticized your original comment is forgetting (or just ignorant) that biomedical science is an international field. What incentive do EU or Chinese or Japanese science have to honor the strike of US scientists? There's no w…

No incentive for other countries to join a strike in the US. Odd to expect them to. And the solution for dealing with poor working conditions in the now is...what? Post-docs write their congressman to better pay postdocs at the NIH? Postdocs taking time out of work for social media campaigns or other such campaigns that do not have the same legal fiat as a union?

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

#143

Post by 8note »

ant6n wrote: post #121
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…

Does this explain why Hollywood writing feels so factory-produced these days? The writers guild has turned script writing into a collective, dispassionate activity?

One potential explanation is that writers have become commodified, and can nolonger go see and take part in other parts of the industry

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

#144

Post by Snacktivist »

We looked into unionizing at our company in the US and hit some big concerns:

1. Managers cannot be part of a union - only individual contributors.

There's a lot to unpack here. This can really set up an "us vs them" mindset which when takes hole has things go sideways. It makes switching from IC to manager or manager to IC potentially more complicated (and even contentious). There's are other issues in that managers typically focus on roadmap and where the company is going while many ICs I know want to just focus on getting their work done.

2. Union members are not part of the board.

This was something that we felt was unbalanced and relegates unions to not actually having the right level of influence.

When we did some research we found that there are better models for unions out there to reference: Japan and Germany. As part of this research we found that unions in the US have been watered down and regulation/legislation has been passed to weaken in. So you get stuff like "right to work" states or what sorts of things you are allowed to strike over.

With that said, things absolutely need to shift in a lot of sectors but I'm not sure if unions are the solution that everyone thinks (hopes?) it is.

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

#145

Post by BubblesnBrains »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59
data_acquired wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Researcher here. I agree with your assessment of the way credit is given to authors, and there's a possibility of being scooped because folks are on strike. I think you're forgetting that there's work-related conditions arising from not having a union that can cause you to get scooped. What about being scooped because you have terrible insurance that requires you to spend time away from a lab or because you have terr…

I agree that all of the working conditions you mention are deplorable, and must be addressed. But again, I'm not sure a union is the right way to go about it. Unions only have power to bargain for things like insurance, childcare, or strong anti-harassment policies because of their ability to strike, and strikes are only consequential if almost everyone is on board. For every researcher whose career is set back due t…

For the record, I'm an NIH fellow and my understanding is that as part of the government we're not even allowed to strike. Not entirely sure where the power of the union comes from at that point, but at the very least it gives a voice. And the point of the union isn't just pay increases (stipends at NIH are honestly considerably generous), but to have a voice.

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

#146

Post by gammarator »

chimeracoder wrote: post #123
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #16

It's not going to work. The NIH has no equivalent private sector competitor. For every single researcher, there are 10 other graduates and staff who would be willing to do their job for a fraction of the cost. This is a supply and demand problem, a funding problem. Strip congress and the medical board of their ability to control the number of residency spots and you will see the free market correct itself. Most biolo…

> Strip congress and the medical board of their ability to control the number of residency spots and you will see the free market correct itself. This is nonsensical. Residency spots are not controlled by the government. Government funding for residency spots is controlled by Congress, because Congress is responsible for all government spending. The only way to have Congress less involved in residency spots would be…

Wrong. Congress passed a law that exempts residency programs from antitrust consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_America...

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

#147

Post by 2unionthrowaway »

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…

Every time there's a discussion of unionization on HN, I see a particular strain of comment which seems to argue against an almost Saturday-morning-cartoon version of unions. It's as if every union consists entirely of brutes, and every union meeting has the standing agenda of "Let's ask for big raises, and if the boss says no, we'll go on strike!" What is your experience with unions, which lets you make such wild claims and predictions?

As a card-carrying member of two unions, I can assure you that most of what you've stated here is simply false. Union members are not (IME) "dispassionate" workers with no stake in our work (nor are the scientists I know especially passionate about their publication schedule). Union power in practice does not primarily come from strikes (which are exceedingly rare, and nobody on either side of the negotiating table ever wants to see one). Union work is often time-sensitive (unless you think you can live for long without trash pickup, or nurses, or truck drivers, or electricity, or ...). Most movie stars and pro athletes are a union members, and those positions are just as "individualistic" as scientist.

Union jobsites frequently have "no-strike" clauses, e.g., government construction projects which must continue according to schedule regardless of a general strike. (I've worked through one myself. The union required it.) That's not merely a hypothetical: the linked article specifically notes that the NIH, as a government agency, is not allowed to strike. So I'm not sure why you spend four paragraphs discussing alleged problems with NIH strikes.

Even if it were allowed, in your imaginary scenario, apparently nobody in the union wants to strike, yet somehow the union "decides to strike". How exactly is it you think this would come to happen?

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

#148

Post by data_acquired »

2unionthrowaway wrote: post #147
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…

Every time there's a discussion of unionization on HN, I see a particular strain of comment which seems to argue against an almost Saturday-morning-cartoon version of unions. It's as if every union consists entirely of brutes, and every union meeting has the standing agenda of "Let's ask for big raises, and if the boss says no, we'll go on strike!" What is your experience with unions, which lets you make such wild cl…

+1 on the point about movie-star and athlete unions. And as you said, the descriptions of unions are pretty cartoonish and portrayed as universally undemocratically accountable to their members.

What I find even more remarkable about the "too much self-interest to form an effective union" based argument is that highly competitive companies in every sector routinely find common cause and form lobbies to influence policy to benefit all competing members within the lobby. Somehow, this phenomenon does not seem as mysterious to the public as scientific labor finding common cause to form a collective of any sort. So even the idea that self-interest in general precludes solidarity is untrue. As for points of specific tactics, different unions have tactics other than strikes. I mistakenly assumed this point is self-evident to folks but perhaps it is not. And the assumption that HN commenters are unaware that scientific work also goes on in other countries independent of any union intervention in the US is...incredible.

The point raised about being scooped while on strike (or that one's career will suffer while others continue to work) is identical to one of the explicit anti-union campaign talking points raised by U Penn a couple of years ago. I was pretty surprised to see such an identical point show up on here.

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

#149

Post by alistairSH »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63
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…

Sigh... It's sad to see a $600K townhouse in Reston termed "reasonable." I know a lot of folks on this site are from the Bay Area, where something like that would probably be twice that, but it's actually more expensive than around here, which is considered one of the more expensive areas to live. It's astounding to see kids out of college, starting at more than I ever made, in my career, and yet, they can't afford t…

I meant the house is reasonable (good condition, nice neighborhood, workable size).

$600k is still a lot of money, but under the county average home price of $700k (which includes condos, THs, and SFHs).

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

#150

Post by CatWChainsaw »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #43
matthewowen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is poorly informed. 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…

Outside of the overfunded Ivies, Stanford and MIT, most other state schools and academic institutions do not have the ability to absorb the sheer quantity of researchers employed by NIH. > It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers You should try talking to some actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs. I am willing to…

> actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs

That's me, graduate of a life science department at MD, microbiology not medical biology. Guess what, I always wanted to do research. Definitely didn't want to be a doctor, especially if a someone like, well, you, ended up being my patient.

That makes three anecdotes to counter your assertion. You gonna pay up or move the goalposts a little more?

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