I rarely write directly about work on this blarg, but some of this year’s big adventures got a nice write-up from Beryl Benderly at Science Magazine. Relevant excerpts follows:
On 20 July, the postdocs at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, received official recognition for their new union. It’s the nation’s third postdoc union, but the first to be part of the same union as their lab chiefs.
After a swift and successful signature-collecting campaign, the 350 postdocs on the university’s three campuses became a bargaining unit of the Rutgers Council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)-American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Chapters. Affiliated with both AAUP, the professional society for college and university teachers, and AFT, a national labor union within AFL/CIO, this hybrid group represents all of Rutgers’s faculty members, research associates, and graduate student employees. A sister union under the all-university AFT umbrella represents the administrative staff.
[snip]
It was, in fact, a drive several years ago to solidify the position of campus administrators by bringing them into the union that first sparked interest in organizing the postdocs. As organizers spoke with “administrators, some of whom were in the laboratories, we would encounter postdocs very frequently,” recalls Shaun Richman, an AFT national representative. “We had all these anecdotes of postdocs sort of sauntering up to us and saying, ‘Hey, can we get into this whole union thing?’ “
Then, “earlier this year, Rutgers AFT representatives [began] asking around to postdocs about their particular conditions and their interest in unionizing,” says postdoc Alan Wan, who was “heavily involved” in the drive. “Obviously, since the faculty and the graduate students–the members of the community that we interact with on a daily basis–are in the union,” many postdocs also became interested, he continues.
A major part of the union’s organizing strategy was having a group of postdocs committed to the cause talk to other postdocs “to hear their stories [and] make the case,” Wan says. “If we had a conversation with someone and they were really positive, we tried to get them involved,” Richman adds. A second strategic step was talking with PIs, because “the postdocs are essentially the employees of the faculty, who are our union members,” Richman continues. “We knew we had to have conversations with some leaders of that community. … There [were] fears. For a principal investigator, I think the gut reaction is … ‘This is going to break the grant. We can’t afford it. We’re not going to get renewed.’ “
But [AAUP-AFT past President Lisa] Klein, who discussed the union with fellow PIs, reports encountering no serious opposition. “Some jokingly said, ‘So I can’t abuse them anymore?’ ” she recalls. “There was no reluctance on the part of these PIs. They did want to see that the postdocs were treated as member of the community.”
The talking campaign was done quietly, “one-on-one, usually colleague-to-colleague,” Richman says. “There was no Web site, … no leaflets.” Once the organizers “knew we were in a position that we could get a majority of the postdocs to agree,” Wan continues, “we officially started the card campaign” right after Memorial Day. The talking took several months, but the official campaign to collect signatures took under 2 weeks. State law makes unionization automatic if more than half of a work group give their signed consent, just as in California. “Two-thirds of all the postdocs signed,” Wan says.