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

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

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 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 is by far their top priority. A strike simply won't accomplish anything if only a fraction of workers actually walk out.

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.

>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.

FWIW, most researchers I know who were involved in academic strikes did not put their research on hold, but all of them with teaching duties did walk out of that. This was sufficient to pressure the university to acquiesce to a decent portion of their demands, since total loss of graduate TAs/instructors is hugely consequential to the university. But the NIH is not a teaching institution, so this particular bargaining threat is moot.

>The assumption is that the movement has built enough support for everyone to strike together.

Perhaps we should agree to disagree on this, but per above, I maintain that this is an unlikely assumption at a pure research (i.e. non-teaching) institute.

>Mice get sick, chemical stocks go bad, collaborators leave for personal reasons, etc. etc.

These are all factors outside of an individual researcher's control. Few people would voluntarily decide to set back their career.

>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

The point of a postdoc is to publish a handful (~1-3) of very high impact studies to bolster a faculty application. Getting scooped on even one of them can be a huge deal if it causes the publication to lose its impactfulness. I know several people in that boat, unfortunately—the scooping publication went to an absolute top-tier impact factory journal (e.g. Nature/Science), while the scooped paper went to a much lower impact factor speciality journal. Sadly, faculty applications are often evaluated based on the perceived prestige of the candidate's publications, not their actual contents.

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.

>People’s careers are being involuntarily set back already for reasons more physical and real than the risk of being scooped.

This bears repeating. I know of a fairly large number of people who left their public-sector research positions because of poor working conditions. I wonder if they measure that as better than having their careers hobbled by a strike-born scoop?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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_b...

A union's power is not solely in the ability to threaten to strike. Collective bargaining, for one. Right now, there is zero bargaining for postdocs over salary or benefits. You start work and you get the salary on the chart for your years of experience. How were those numbers decided? I don't know, but actual current postdocs had zero input. Simply forcing the NIH to have to sit down at a table and justify their (unjustifiable) numbers with the union would be a win.

> 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

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.

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!

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).

I mean, the article explicitly states that as federal employees they may not strike. So I presume there are other things they will plan, such as public demonstrations.

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.).

If only unions in the US worked like their European counterparts! :(

How many of the top 25 tech startups were founded in Europe?

Few-to-none, but what does that have to do with labor unions? Most European tech workers aren't unionized.

I don't really see why that's logical. Should aluminum suppliers get board seats on Mercedes Benz if labor suppliers do?

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.."

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.

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

What’s the solution though? If not collective bargaining it’s status quo

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.

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!

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

This is, of course, sarcasm:

SAG/AFTRA

AEA (Actors' Equity)

MLBPA

NFLPA

NBPA

NHLPA

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

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.)

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

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.

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?

+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.

I suspect a notable overlap between the people here characterizing unions as such that are also temporarily embarrassed unicorns.