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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 unio

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 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?)

bjornsing 3y ago
I’m surprised this is being downvoted. It’s a good point.
- soperj 3y ago
  Why are they in a better place to judge? It's not like they're offering an alternative here.
data_acquired 3y ago
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 terrible pay and can't afford a decent day-care for your child? Or if, as a post-doc, you have a great idea but your professor is a harasser and a bully who faces little consequences for their actions? Remember, this isn't industry where you can walk over to a different job with better work conditions. Re-starting a project from scratch is months if not years. And scooping is a physically survivable event. Poor insurance can some times literally not be a survivable event, and poor working conditions are a mental and physical health disaster.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  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 to crappy insurance or an abusive PI, and for whom striking to advocate for better working conditions would be their top priority during a labor dispute, there are far more researchers who are unaffected (or indifferent) to these problems, and for whom finishing their project will always be their top priority. A strike simply won't accomplish anything if only a fraction of workers actually walk out.
  - data_acquired 3y ago
    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 position (which is the point of a post-doc position), being scooped is really not that much of a deal. Having the big-ass discovery to one's name can help, yes, but what determines one's chances on the faculty market are a panoply of other factors too --- is the university looking for someone with your research profile? Did they have a funding cut? Is your advisor a famous person known to the hiring committee? etc. 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. So, worst case, people get scooped in the short run. In the longer run, better pay + insurance means far more talent even considering a post-doc position and academia at all. As for whether unions are the way to do it, one-time mobilizations or strikes or nebulous pressure from the public are not reliable and repeatable interventions as and when new issues arise over time. Like, imagine a scenario where a one-time strike gets media attention, gets people more pay but only for a different administration later to roll things back later when the issue is gone. Unions in the US have legal fiat for ensuring lasting changes to labor contracts and can be a pretty effective intervention for these issues.
ProjectArcturis 3y ago
The pressure that a union can place on the NIH is not cutting off production. If basic bioscience research stopped, it would be years before the effects trickled out publicly. The pressure instead is social and political. Union-friendly politicians would haul the NIH administrators in to grill them about why they're blocking cures and cheating scientists. Thus, if some of the scientists in the union continue to work surreptitiously, it would have little impact on the effectiveness of the strike.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  Activists can apply social and political pressure without being in a union. The distinguishing aspect of union activism is the union's ability to collectively bargain, backed by its ability to collectively strike, with grave consequences to the employer. As you say, even "if basic bioscience research stopped [in its entirety], it would be years before the effects trickled out publicly." If the consequences of a strike are not grave to the employer (even if you could get everyone on board), then the power backing the union is greatly diminished. Edit: as I wrote in another post, academic union strikes can be quite effective at universities, where many academics teach in addition to performing research. A instructor strike can have extremely grave consequences to the university. But the NIH is purely a research institute, so this does not apply.
  - jancsika 3y ago
    Everything you claim here applies to the careers of members of the writers guild. It takes years to release movies/shows. Yet somehow the power backing their union has historically not been "greatly diminished," at least not compared to other unions.
    - MontyCarloHall 3y ago
      There are many key differences: * A movie/show being delayed mostly has extreme financial consequences for the studio employer, not for the individual writer employees. By contrast, a scientific publication being delayed mostly has extreme career consequences for the individual scientist employees, not for their employer institution. * The NIH's funding comes from the US government. A studio's revenue comes from the audience. NIH funding is unlikely to decrease as the result of a researcher strike, whereas a studio's revenue will unequivocally decrease as the result of a writer strike. * Few people outside of the scientific community will directly perceive the consequences of NIH research being postponed for a few months. On the other hand, many people who enjoy watching movies/TV will directly feel the impact of favorite shows being postponed or cancelled. * As demonstrated in [0], the effects of the strike are already glaringly evident after just a month, and will be even more evident after a few more months. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_productions_impacted_by_the_2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_productions_impacted_b...
culi 3y ago
> Passionate, individually invested scientists are therefore much less likely to voluntarily suspend their work than dispassionate laborers in collective industries. Most of the actual work is done by grad school students and Phd workers. The same demographic that recently set a record for most agreement to go on strike (96+% voting in favor) I don't know where you draw your conclusions from but from my experience with Academia, I'd wager that you'll see much more solidarity than usual
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  As I wrote in another post, those graduate students were at universities and thus also had teaching duties in addition to their research positions. While the vast majority of those grad students vacated their teaching positions during the strike, many continued with their research. Academic strikes work well at teaching institutions, where the loss of instructor labor is hugely consequential to the university employer (and has no impact on the striking instructors' careers), but not at pure research institutes like the NIH.
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    Isn't this something trivially resolved by the fact that the union members will be the researchers who can decide how to organize themselves? If they feel that their individual research priorities are more important than organizing for greater protections against sexual harassment or whatever-- that's something that can be voted on!
    - nickff 3y ago
      No, this is not a trivial problem, it is more like a prisoner's dilemma. A great majority of union members can agree that there should be a strike in favor of greater protections, remuneration, or benefits, but it is still in each of their individual interests to continue to work for their own benefits. Put differently, they each want the collective to strike, while continuing their own work. I suspect that a 'strike' would involve most/all of the members delaying submission of findings, but continuing any work that was 'low visibility' (i.e. didn't require outside resources).
photochemsyn 3y ago
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 ius taken from individual NIH grants and how that overhead is spent (for things like building maintenance, etc.).
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  If only unions in the US worked like their European counterparts! :(
  - debacle 3y ago
    How many of the top 25 tech startups were founded in Europe?
    - MontyCarloHall 3y ago
      Few-to-none, but what does that have to do with labor unions? Most European tech workers aren't unionized.
  - missedthecue 3y ago
    I don't really see why that's logical. Should aluminum suppliers get board seats on Mercedes Benz if labor suppliers do?
- zackmorris 3y ago
  I agree, and the fallacy in the parent's argument is that they're only looking at one aspect of the leverage side of unions: strikes. But the thing is, all organizations should be unionized. Meaning that all employees should always have group voting power to prevent malfeasance against any single employee. Critiques of this common decency mainly come in the form of whataboutism, fear and othering (our wealthy investors might find different non-union suckers, mob-union rule could take away some of our obscene power, what if the workers who make us our money get even lazier?) The extent of union power is debatable, so maybe it makes sense for workers at a car company to go on strike because stopping production is unthinkable by the owners (capitalists), or maybe teachers should walk off the job because students should stay in school. But researchers walking out would have delayed consequences that might not be seen for half a decade. So the union power for researchers is not in strikes, but that it moves individual responsibility to the group, which has actual power to effect change. If congress isn't funding the NIH properly, then the union can advocate for its members like a lobbyist and say "hey, if you don't raise our funding, we'll put ads on TV criticizing the committee and individuals cutting our funding. We won't endorse work coming our of the private corporations trying to defund us. We'll challenge pork barrel funding that's been diverted from us in court. We'll.. quiet quit.."
janeway 3y ago
All good points but here are three facts that I think are valid: 1. Even if salary comes from individual branches it falls under the institutional tree. Science is not individual. 2. Institution leaders understand that the workers are critical; unionised and enlightened workers will leave to industry for better pay. Both the hot shots and the lower scale. 3. While anecdotal, I had one of the best academic unions worldwide and probably the best academic salary worldwide. I do not think it is a spurious correlation.
swixmix 3y ago
> 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.
- moate 3y ago
  No, it comes from the strike. Clean water doesn't come from the EPA, despite it regulating that water should be clean. Unions have one power in their neutered, current state: collectivism. That's it. It's that simple. Absent the NLRA, unions could still strike (and did, prior to it's passage) as well as any other actions their members were legally allowed to commit that may help. The NLRA is what corporations and unions agreed to stop literal violence and executions around the time of its passage. Frankly I think it fucking sucks and think labor could use a little more wild west, but I'm a firebrand so take that with salt. (This conversation ultimately boils down to "where do you believe power comes from: liberty granted from government/institutions, or the freedom of the individual to behave as he sees fit in a situation" and hat's a whole other philosophical can of worms)
data_acquired 3y ago
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.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  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.
  - natechols 3y ago
    > 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 way China's government would even allow such a union, and they're certainly not going to slow down just because NIH grant recipients feel they're being unfairly treated.
Melatonic 3y ago
This is not completely true at all - unions also usually have an army of lawyers that will act on behalf of the members if needed and can be used as a pooled source of capital to lobby (or anti lobby against corporations). They can also provide other resources like training, pensions, mental health support, etc etc. Lots of benefits!
aidenn0 3y ago
This is why sports players, actors, and other individually credited people in other industries don't have a union...
- dsr_ 3y ago
  This is, of course, sarcasm: SAG/AFTRA AEA (Actors' Equity) MLBPA NFLPA NBPA NHLPA
ant6n 3y ago
Does this explain why Hollywood writing feels so factory-produced these days? The writers guild has turned script writing into a collective, dispassionate activity?
- dsr_ 3y ago
  No, it's a product of the economics of the system. In 2022, 449 "major" movies were released. Total gross: $7.4 billion. The top ten movies took 3.8 billion of that. Numbers 11 through 20 took another 1.2 billion. You will probably have heard of most of the top 100. No movie ranked better than 161 took in a million dollars. The bottom 80, all together, took in about a million. Nobody wants to pay for any of the movies not in the top 100. How do they back a winner? In terms of story: sequels/prequels, licensed content and shared universes. All of the top ten fit into 2 or 3 of those three categories. 26 of the top 50. (If you want something original and available, horror is your best bet. Of the top 20 horror movies in 2022, only 5 were sequels/prequels, licensed or shared.)
- 8note 3y ago
  One potential explanation is that writers have become commodified, and can nolonger go see and take part in other parts of the industry
George83728 3y ago
Most early-career researchers are not working on their own individual "widget". Rather, they're working under another more senior researcher on a widget they have relatively little personal stake in.
2unionthrowaway 3y ago
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?
- data_acquired 3y ago
  +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.

bjornsing 3y ago

I’m surprised this is being downvoted. It’s a good point.

soperj 3y ago
Why are they in a better place to judge? It's not like they're offering an alternative here.

data_acquired 3y ago

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 terrible pay and can't afford a decent day-care for your child? Or if, as a post-doc, you have a great idea but your professor is a harasser and a bully who faces little consequences for their actions? Remember, this isn't industry where you can walk over to a different job with better work conditions. Re-starting a project from scratch is months if not years. And scooping is a physically survivable event. Poor insurance can some times literally not be a survivable event, and poor working conditions are a mental and physical health disaster.

MontyCarloHall 3y ago
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 to crappy insurance or an abusive PI, and for whom striking to advocate for better working conditions would be their top priority during a labor dispute, there are far more researchers who are unaffected (or indifferent) to these problems, and for whom finishing their project will always be their top priority. A strike simply won't accomplish anything if only a fraction of workers actually walk out.
- data_acquired 3y ago
  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 position (which is the point of a post-doc position), being scooped is really not that much of a deal. Having the big-ass discovery to one's name can help, yes, but what determines one's chances on the faculty market are a panoply of other factors too --- is the university looking for someone with your research profile? Did they have a funding cut? Is your advisor a famous person known to the hiring committee? etc. 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. So, worst case, people get scooped in the short run. In the longer run, better pay + insurance means far more talent even considering a post-doc position and academia at all. As for whether unions are the way to do it, one-time mobilizations or strikes or nebulous pressure from the public are not reliable and repeatable interventions as and when new issues arise over time. Like, imagine a scenario where a one-time strike gets media attention, gets people more pay but only for a different administration later to roll things back later when the issue is gone. Unions in the US have legal fiat for ensuring lasting changes to labor contracts and can be a pretty effective intervention for these issues.

ProjectArcturis 3y ago

The pressure that a union can place on the NIH is not cutting off production. If basic bioscience research stopped, it would be years before the effects trickled out publicly. The pressure instead is social and political. Union-friendly politicians would haul the NIH administrators in to grill them about why they're blocking cures and cheating scientists. Thus, if some of the scientists in the union continue to work surreptitiously, it would have little impact on the effectiveness of the strike.

MontyCarloHall 3y ago
Activists can apply social and political pressure without being in a union. The distinguishing aspect of union activism is the union's ability to collectively bargain, backed by its ability to collectively strike, with grave consequences to the employer. As you say, even "if basic bioscience research stopped [in its entirety], it would be years before the effects trickled out publicly." If the consequences of a strike are not grave to the employer (even if you could get everyone on board), then the power backing the union is greatly diminished. Edit: as I wrote in another post, academic union strikes can be quite effective at universities, where many academics teach in addition to performing research. A instructor strike can have extremely grave consequences to the university. But the NIH is purely a research institute, so this does not apply.
- jancsika 3y ago
  Everything you claim here applies to the careers of members of the writers guild. It takes years to release movies/shows. Yet somehow the power backing their union has historically not been "greatly diminished," at least not compared to other unions.
  - MontyCarloHall 3y ago
    There are many key differences: * A movie/show being delayed mostly has extreme financial consequences for the studio employer, not for the individual writer employees. By contrast, a scientific publication being delayed mostly has extreme career consequences for the individual scientist employees, not for their employer institution. * The NIH's funding comes from the US government. A studio's revenue comes from the audience. NIH funding is unlikely to decrease as the result of a researcher strike, whereas a studio's revenue will unequivocally decrease as the result of a writer strike. * Few people outside of the scientific community will directly perceive the consequences of NIH research being postponed for a few months. On the other hand, many people who enjoy watching movies/TV will directly feel the impact of favorite shows being postponed or cancelled. * As demonstrated in [0], the effects of the strike are already glaringly evident after just a month, and will be even more evident after a few more months. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_productions_impacted_by_the_2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_productions_impacted_b...

culi 3y ago

> Passionate, individually invested scientists are therefore much less likely to voluntarily suspend their work than dispassionate laborers in collective industries. Most of the actual work is done by grad school students and Phd workers. The same demographic that recently set a record for most agreement to go on strike (96+% voting in favor) I don't know where you draw your conclusions from but from my experience with Academia, I'd wager that you'll see much more solidarity than usual

MontyCarloHall 3y ago
As I wrote in another post, those graduate students were at universities and thus also had teaching duties in addition to their research positions. While the vast majority of those grad students vacated their teaching positions during the strike, many continued with their research. Academic strikes work well at teaching institutions, where the loss of instructor labor is hugely consequential to the university employer (and has no impact on the striking instructors' careers), but not at pure research institutes like the NIH.
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  Isn't this something trivially resolved by the fact that the union members will be the researchers who can decide how to organize themselves? If they feel that their individual research priorities are more important than organizing for greater protections against sexual harassment or whatever-- that's something that can be voted on!
  - nickff 3y ago
    No, this is not a trivial problem, it is more like a prisoner's dilemma. A great majority of union members can agree that there should be a strike in favor of greater protections, remuneration, or benefits, but it is still in each of their individual interests to continue to work for their own benefits. Put differently, they each want the collective to strike, while continuing their own work. I suspect that a 'strike' would involve most/all of the members delaying submission of findings, but continuing any work that was 'low visibility' (i.e. didn't require outside resources).

photochemsyn 3y ago

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 ius taken from individual NIH grants and how that overhead is spent (for things like building maintenance, etc.).

MontyCarloHall 3y ago
If only unions in the US worked like their European counterparts! :(
- debacle 3y ago
  How many of the top 25 tech startups were founded in Europe?
  - MontyCarloHall 3y ago
    Few-to-none, but what does that have to do with labor unions? Most European tech workers aren't unionized.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  I don't really see why that's logical. Should aluminum suppliers get board seats on Mercedes Benz if labor suppliers do?
zackmorris 3y ago
I agree, and the fallacy in the parent's argument is that they're only looking at one aspect of the leverage side of unions: strikes. But the thing is, all organizations should be unionized. Meaning that all employees should always have group voting power to prevent malfeasance against any single employee. Critiques of this common decency mainly come in the form of whataboutism, fear and othering (our wealthy investors might find different non-union suckers, mob-union rule could take away some of our obscene power, what if the workers who make us our money get even lazier?) The extent of union power is debatable, so maybe it makes sense for workers at a car company to go on strike because stopping production is unthinkable by the owners (capitalists), or maybe teachers should walk off the job because students should stay in school. But researchers walking out would have delayed consequences that might not be seen for half a decade. So the union power for researchers is not in strikes, but that it moves individual responsibility to the group, which has actual power to effect change. If congress isn't funding the NIH properly, then the union can advocate for its members like a lobbyist and say "hey, if you don't raise our funding, we'll put ads on TV criticizing the committee and individuals cutting our funding. We won't endorse work coming our of the private corporations trying to defund us. We'll challenge pork barrel funding that's been diverted from us in court. We'll.. quiet quit.."

janeway 3y ago

All good points but here are three facts that I think are valid: 1. Even if salary comes from individual branches it falls under the institutional tree. Science is not individual. 2. Institution leaders understand that the workers are critical; unionised and enlightened workers will leave to industry for better pay. Both the hot shots and the lower scale. 3. While anecdotal, I had one of the best academic unions worldwide and probably the best academic salary worldwide. I do not think it is a spurious correlation.

swixmix 3y ago

> 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.

moate 3y ago
No, it comes from the strike. Clean water doesn't come from the EPA, despite it regulating that water should be clean. Unions have one power in their neutered, current state: collectivism. That's it. It's that simple. Absent the NLRA, unions could still strike (and did, prior to it's passage) as well as any other actions their members were legally allowed to commit that may help. The NLRA is what corporations and unions agreed to stop literal violence and executions around the time of its passage. Frankly I think it fucking sucks and think labor could use a little more wild west, but I'm a firebrand so take that with salt. (This conversation ultimately boils down to "where do you believe power comes from: liberty granted from government/institutions, or the freedom of the individual to behave as he sees fit in a situation" and hat's a whole other philosophical can of worms)

data_acquired 3y ago

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.

MontyCarloHall 3y ago
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.
- natechols 3y ago
  > 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 way China's government would even allow such a union, and they're certainly not going to slow down just because NIH grant recipients feel they're being unfairly treated.

Melatonic 3y ago

This is not completely true at all - unions also usually have an army of lawyers that will act on behalf of the members if needed and can be used as a pooled source of capital to lobby (or anti lobby against corporations). They can also provide other resources like training, pensions, mental health support, etc etc. Lots of benefits!

aidenn0 3y ago

This is why sports players, actors, and other individually credited people in other industries don't have a union...

dsr_ 3y ago
This is, of course, sarcasm: SAG/AFTRA AEA (Actors' Equity) MLBPA NFLPA NBPA NHLPA

ant6n 3y ago

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

dsr_ 3y ago
No, it's a product of the economics of the system. In 2022, 449 "major" movies were released. Total gross: $7.4 billion. The top ten movies took 3.8 billion of that. Numbers 11 through 20 took another 1.2 billion. You will probably have heard of most of the top 100. No movie ranked better than 161 took in a million dollars. The bottom 80, all together, took in about a million. Nobody wants to pay for any of the movies not in the top 100. How do they back a winner? In terms of story: sequels/prequels, licensed content and shared universes. All of the top ten fit into 2 or 3 of those three categories. 26 of the top 50. (If you want something original and available, horror is your best bet. Of the top 20 horror movies in 2022, only 5 were sequels/prequels, licensed or shared.)
8note 3y ago
One potential explanation is that writers have become commodified, and can nolonger go see and take part in other parts of the industry

George83728 3y ago

Most early-career researchers are not working on their own individual "widget". Rather, they're working under another more senior researcher on a widget they have relatively little personal stake in.

2unionthrowaway 3y ago

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?

data_acquired 3y ago
+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.