After months of tense negotiations and a barely averted strike, this week postdocs and associate researchers at Columbia University agreed to a contract that will boost their minimum salary by $10,000, to $70,000, and provide other benefits, including a $5000 child care allowance. Credit goes to their labor union, which formed in 2018, says Elsy El Khoury, a chemistry postdoc and a union organizing committee member. “We got to where we got because we were ready to strike.”
It’s one of the latest developments in a rising tide of campus labor organizing efforts across the country—a tide that’s forcing the academic community to reckon with how it compensates early-career researchers and what the future of academic science will look like. Many graduate students, postdocs, and established scientists see the rise in union formation and strike-related activity as essential for forcing universities—which have historically opposed organizing efforts—to enact long-overdue improvements in pay and working conditions. But questions linger about where the money will come from and how universities and principal investigators (PIs) will adapt to the added labor costs. “The cost of doing business is escalating because … unions have been very successful,” says Nicholas DiGiovanni, a labor and employment lawyer at the firm Morgan, Brown & Joy who represents institutions in their dealings with graduate student unions.
The surge in unionization activity has been especially pronounced among graduate students. Since January 2022, the number of students represented by graduate student unions on U.S. campuses has grown by more than 33,000, according to data compiled by National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College. (In the same time frame, unionized postdocs increased by roughly 2000.) Support for unionization has increased as well: During unionization votes in 2022 and the first half of this year, 91% of students were in favor of forming a union—up from 67% from 2017 to 2019.
William Herbert, executive director of the center, attributes the shift to a combination of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which drove people to rethink how they want to be treated in the workplace. He also sees a generational shift away from individualism and toward collective action, citing polling data showing an “extraordinary degree of support [for labor] among people under 30.”
Long-standing issues around pay and working conditions continue to play a major role as well. “Grad workers everywhere are realizing we face a lot of crises; … cost of living has gone through the roof,” says Michael Mueller, a math Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan (UM), where graduate students ended a 5-month strike in August. “And our employers are not going to give us what we need unless we stand up and win it for ourselves.”
The success of a high-profile strike at the University of California (UC) system added fuel to the to the movement. Last winter, UC graduate students and postdocs won contracts that raised their base pay by thousands of dollars, among other benefits. Such gains create a “snowball effect,” inspiring early-career researchers elsewhere to form unions and push for similar agreements, says Acacia Patterson, a materials science and engineering Ph.D. student at Washington State University, where graduate students are currently negotiating a new contract. Mueller adds, “Every time we see that another union won a new victory, it sets the bar higher.”
Many university administrators agree higher wages are necessary. But they also face very real budgetary constraints. Mary Sue Coleman, past president of the Association of American Universities, notes, “Administrators must balance salaries and benefits across the employee spectrum, not simply for one group.” Eric Nestler, dean for academic and scientific affairs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where a union representing postdocs is currently negotiating a new contract, adds: “For people to think that … somehow there’s this magic pot of money that we are all sitting on and not using, it’s just not true.”
Raises are easier to budget for if the yearly jumps are modest, in the “single digit percentages,” says Michael Solomon, dean of UM’s Rackham Graduate School. In August, his university signed a contract with the union representing graduate student instructors and teaching assistants that provides an 8% raise during the first year of the contract, and 6% annually after that. “The way that we are accommodating it is by continuing to pay really careful attention to the size of cohorts, so that we really are sure that we have the resources available.”
Individual faculty members, who support grad student researchers and postdocs out of their own grants, are having to take a careful look at their budgets as well. “Every lab is in many ways its own little microbusiness,” says Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate division at UC Berkeley. In her view, the raises granted in the new UC contracts were necessary given the high cost of living in California, but their size and suddenness created challenges—especially for “faculty who reasonably didn’t expect to have that additional cost placed on their grants,” she says. “When the increases are 10%, 20%, that’s just a challenge for anyone’s budget to absorb.”
García Bedolla says UC Berkeley gave faculty members some additional support to pay for salary increases this year. But, “We don’t have a lot of new sources of funds to put towards those growing expenses,” she emphasizes. In the future, she expects PIs will have to look at their funding and “decide how best to staff their labs, given their many competing needs.” The senior scientists and administrators Science spoke with expect this will be the case at many institutions. “I think the size of the average lab will have to decrease,” Nestler says.
Many union representatives acknowledge that federal research grants haven’t kept up with inflation and say they worry about the extra burden on lab leaders. During contract negotiations, some unions have pushed for universities to allocate funds to pay for wages and benefits. “We said it explicitly at the bargaining table that we want central money mobilized, not to have all this—all these raises, and all this weight—carried by PIs only,” El Khoury says.
At Rutgers University, where 9000 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty engaged in a weeklong strike earlier this year, the university did agree to fund raises that weren’t budgeted into grants. But Columbia’s union wasn’t able to secure a similar deal. El Khoury says the union has been in contact with professors to say that “if they want to pressure the university and ask for help as PIs, we are going to be as a union supporting that.”
Some academics say federal funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation need to boost grants to cover the higher pay. “The universities and those of us who work in them need to demand federal funding agencies do more,” says Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers and the general vice president of the union that represents academic workers at her institution.
Regardless, given rising salaries and inflation, “less research is going to be produced per dollar of [grant] money,” Nestler says. Still, the need to pay graduate students and postdocs better is clear: “We have to do this. This is the way the … research enterprise will have to change.”
