+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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fair point about how the funding actually works. The UC strike did allow for a good increase to the post-doctoral stipend, and the institutes likely had to move money around in order to make the increases possible.
What's also interesting to me in the concerns raised in the article about how budgets (either from grants or universities) will cover pay increases is that this concern never comes up when research consumable costs increase. I had a friend at a major embedded systems supplier for researchers who spoke of the 90% mark-up they charged labs. This gets into a messy issue of course about pricing power and monopoly in scientific supplies, but its telling that as much of a concern is not raised in the public domain about these sorts of cost increases?
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.
>Although NIH wages aren’t inherently tied to those training grants, if wages increased significantly for NIH fellows, universities might “raise holy hell”, Wiest says, because it could incentivize researchers to apply for NIH positions instead of those at universities.
This is a pretty weak point. There's hundreds of research areas and problems not worked on at the NIH that are explored in the hundreds of universities in the US. I don't see anyone switching research areas for better pay --- your skill sets are often tied to a certain class of problems. Sure, yes, there may be such effects in certain research areas. But what fraction of university budgets even go towards post-doctoral fellow stipends (when weighed against every other expenditure in a university budget)?
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.
I'm fascinated by the discussions around creativity and remote work both on this forum and elsewhere.
What is the fraction of open source code [by which I mean community-maintained and built rather than through a company] that ends up being collaborated on remotely? Aren't projects like Linux and others largely managed through remote means (although there are conferences and such from time to time)? Do we really have a strong case that these projects suffer due to the lack of a single office for people to gather everyday? I'm sure my questions can be split into sub-cases and exceptions.
> due to mutations during your lifespan, genetic diversity within your body increases, which increases the prevalence of genes that cause individual cells and tissues to compete with one another rather than cooperating; in the extreme, we call this 'cancer'
This is a good summary. Only thing to keep in mind is that an increase in genetic diversity need not imply a unidirectional march towards cancer, but an increase in risk. One of the most interesting paradoxes of cancer initiation research currently is the presence of "cancer-causing" mutations in phenotypically normal cells for decades prior to the appearance of the first cancer cell (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27059373/ for instance).
What's remarkable to me about this aging study and others like it is that they are able to reverse some aspect of aging despite the accumulation of genetic diversity with age as you point out. Perhaps what they're reversing was never really dependent on mutation accumulation with age, or that the presence of mutations does not fully explain the age-related degeneration they're interested in reversing.
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.