Thousands of early-career NIH researchers forming union for first time | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of early-career NIH researchers forming union for first time

nature.com

268 pointsgeox144 comments

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?)

> 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.

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 will always be 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, and while I can't say for sure that the scooped faculty candidates I know didn't get their ideal positions because they were scooped, I'd bet it was a nontrivial factor.

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.

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?

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

+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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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.).

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.."

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

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

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.

> 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)

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.

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.

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

I hope something, anything is done to help fix the living circumstances of researchers in the United States. Our best and brightest should be well funded, with little fear of harassment.

NIH should build more institutes in cheaper areas (eg not NoVa). It’s a win win since it will help revitalize poorer areas of America and save on costs.

It will also tilt more senators/congresspeople to vote for NIH funding, similar to military base funding

I work for a national lab and in my experience it will take a lot for someone to give up a place like the Eastbay for East Tennessee. If the national lab were near Nashville that might be different. Los Alamos has to give software developers a sizeable bonus each year just to keep them from flying to greener pasteurs in a less remote location. I know I left partly because my wife had such a hard time finding work and the remoteness made the area too expensive for what we were getting out of it socially and careerwise.

I've thought about this a lot, so thanks for getting the neurons firing again. In my case, I worked for some agencies and had an absolute blast. In this phase of my life, I'm living somewhere else & would fight tooth and nail to stay here.

I wonder if it would be worth it from a talent perspective to create more, larger, and strategically placed SCIFs (Sensitive compartmented information facility) around the country so that there was less of a physical requirement for information workers to commute every day.

Some of the jobs I worked were a blast with really great and interesting people. I do miss it, but would never move back to the physical locations required.

ORNL region is gorgeous and there are plenty of jobs and relatively inexpensive housing.

Its gorgeous for some. My own experiences in the Ozarks made it a non-starter for me. Its hard to calculate the exact impact it had on me, but I do wonder if I would've worked harder in grad school if I wasn't actively dreading actually getting the most prestigious research positions in my field (I was studying material science of optical and electronic materials at the time).

Granted, a lot of academia is repeating "just keep going, the end is in sight" until you die, but it is frustrating that it has to be that way.

Military personnel move where you tell them, manufacturing jobs can train people up just about anywhere, but research isn’t so simple.

It’s a real chicken and egg problem around local talent. Bethesda/Rockville/Baltimore has several different organizations doing medical research which makes the attractive locations for researchers to live. Locate in say Boise Idaho and positions are open for longer and you will need to compromise more in terms of talent.

On top of this there’s a huge pool of government contractors which again provides significant advantages.

Los Alamos National Lab is a 12,700 person [1] government research facility in a town of 13,200 population [2]. Median household income $98k, highest millionaire concentration of any US city, highest percentage of people with doctorate degrees in the nation. Nearest IKEA store? 500 miles away.

A government lab can get scientists to relocate their families to the middle of nowhere. All it takes is a budget of $3.92 billion or $300k per job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos,_New_Mexico

By all accounts it's very hard for grad students and postdocs at LANL (much less locals) to find affordable short-term housing near LANL due to (1) the very small amount of housing available and (2) enough people leaving the lab but continuing to live there while taking up remote work in tech. This is despite LANL paying relatively well (as you noted) to try to keep talent from moving into other industries (tech, finance).

Not to say that government investment can't make people move, but it creates problems too, not least for locals.

Source: mainly anecdotal, from talking to people at LANL at various career stages on a recent visit.

Seems like this would be addressable by the government making affordable living facilities.

That sounds like an issue with local zoning, otherwise the market would fix that issue.

I haven't been there in a while, but last I recall, they sort of ran out of land. It's very hilly, the airport basically ends at a cliff. A lot of the land is government controlled and fenced off to provide buffer for secure areas.

A lot of land around that is national park/BLM land, and not accessible. So you've got like, white rock, espanola or Santa Fe to commute in from. I did know a guy who had a light plane and would commute from the east side of Albuquerque to Los alamos by plane.

So, sort of like local zoning, but more like DC. an act of congress to free up some of that land, not as straightforward as visiting some city council meetings.

Taking a look at some randomly selected roads in Google Street View [1], it looks like it's been built at extremely low density, by most standards.

I mean, if you've building a single-storey home, then putting a double garage on the side, then a gap between properties two cars wide, plus a driveway with parking for two cars, then on-road parking for 3 more cars? Of course you're going to run out of land fast.

I've no idea whether it's a zoning issue, though.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZCtDFNsaoe5ePsp16 https://goo.gl/maps/tTRb7vzw5mVHskHHA etc

why not increase density? it looks like single family home zoning. A denser core would surely be possible

Los Alamos is on a mesa, with cliffs on one side and Jemez mountains on the other.

There were some local controversies related to zoning when I was there (namely, commercial real estate), but the issue is much broader and long-standing.

I used to work for a PI who, during his internship days in the ~1980s, lived in a tent in the mountains the whole summer (he was a delightfully quirky person though).

Los Alamos got kickstarted in WWII when the government literally got to tell physicists where to go and it became a major hub of such research.

That might work if the NIH wanted to spend 50% of it’s budget in one location, but their proposal was to spread across not just one second tier city but dozens of such locations.

Were Manhattan project scientists really ordered around like that? Was anyone working at Los Alamos against their will?

I don’t know.

The scientists apparently had some wiggle room: An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos.”

But the subtext was there was a draft going on and most of them would be eligible unless they were working on such a critical project.

Is that budget salary-only? They have some mighty expensive material requirements for some of their projects.

No, that's the budget for everything - salaries, equipment, grants given to outside bodies, and so on.

I mention it merely because, although LANL demonstrates the state can create pockets of prosperity in poorer places by moving science jobs, we should not imagine that it's particularly cheap.

The LANL example also doesn't show economic success spreading out from the lab, in the way Silicon Valley is sometimes seen as spreading out from defence research and Stanford University. Of course, LANL is deliberately geographically isolated, and you wouldn't expect startup spin-outs from a top secret nuclear research lab.

I think the biomedical academic job market is tight enough that you could fairly easily attract a strong class of researchers to nearly any second tier city. Maybe not the best of the best of the best (at first), but there’s enough bright people doing 6+ year post docs that you’ll recruit junior faculty in a flash.

Credentials: did my PhD and postdoc at R1 institutions, before going to greener pastures in industry.

There is no best-of-the-best at this stage. Only those who seem hyper bright. Success in biomedical research is much more about other factors—persistence and inquisitiveness being two that are crucial.

That’s interesting, because Tulane seems to be having a lot of trouble with this.

Boise (and elsewhere in Idaho) is thriving when it comes to materials research and agricultural research, because of the combined influence of Micron and Simplot. So its ultimately a question of what kind of industry you want to talk about.

But the issue still remains: if your industry relies on your workforce moving every 5 years or so, and does not itself involve travel, then you have a structural problem.

Disagree. We have FedEx and Zoom now. My own intimate research community is now 8+ time zones—16 hours if you count where our RNA samples are sequenced.

How often are you grabbing a coffee or lunch (over Zoom) with randomish subsets of that community?

Bravo for this start at unionizing. Important step forward—-finally.

I made $13,500 as a postdoc at Yale (New Haven CT) from 1983 to 1985. $75/month went back to Yale for family health. Even the rent was $525/month.

That scales to roughly $38,070 per year today. And my pay as a grad student at UC Davis was $325/month for my last three years. No taxes—whoopee. Talk about delayed gratification.

Agreed: NIEHS is in North Carolina. NIA is in Baltimore. More of this please. And yes, this does engender strong local and state support. ORNL in Tennessee is a case in point.

East Tennessee has Oak Ridge National Labs and the region around Knoxville is gorgeous. So why not move the National Eye Institute (NEI) and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) there ;-) in this Zoom day-and-age.

NIH isn't in NoVA. It's across the river in Bethesda, MD.

The problem with opening remote locations is attracting people. Montgomery County, MD (where Bethesda is located) and the broader DC metro region has lots of biotech, medical, and software opportunities.

And it's an even bigger issue once professional specialists have partners and families. Even elite schools in relatively remote from major population center areas have long had some trouble attracting faculty whose partners may well be inevitably underemployed if they move to the small town/city where the school is.

this is called "the two body problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem_(career) in reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem

I didn't know it had a name. But having been associated with both Dartmouth and Cornell, I've definitely heard complaints about the issue.

Disagree again. Here are some towns and smaller cities that more than rival DC.

Ann Arbor, Davis, Durham, Urbana, Princeton, New Haven, Memphis, Madison, Portland, Eugene, Nashville, Kansas City…

The data for much of this list of cities has changed substantially in the past two to three years. Many of these are now unaffordable for someone on $45k/year, and they do not have the employment robustness of the larger metros.

But the traffic is a nightmare (I-270 is the Tenth Circle of Hell).

Like most high-density commute areas, homes close to work are pricey, so people have to live in the boondocks, and commute.

I know people that live in Frederick, and commute to DC.

Of course, Frederick has Ft. Detrick. That's a fun place. I think it was the model for the biolab in The Stand.

so people have to live in the boondocks

Homes are pricey, no question. But, DC is one of the more affordable top-tier cities in the US. Especially if your work is in the suburbs.

For software people, you can buy a reasonable[1] TH in Reston for around $600k and have a reasonable commute to most of the NoVA tech corridor. Or Metro downtown. Or ride your bike to many employment centers. Or, if you're really lucky, you can walk to quite a few employers in Reston (Google, MS, Ellucian, Walmart Labs, various three-letter agency IT offices, etc).

1 - mid-70s build, 3-bed, 2.5 bath, 1500-1800sqft, in a good school district and with walk/bike access to schools, grocery/pharmacy, many doctors, and Metro.

Sigh... It's sad to see a $600K townhouse in Reston termed "reasonable."

I know a lot of folks on this site are from the Bay Area, where something like that would probably be twice that, but it's actually more expensive than around here, which is considered one of the more expensive areas to live.

It's astounding to see kids out of college, starting at more than I ever made, in my career, and yet, they can't afford to buy a house.

But I'm not one to talk. My father never made more than $40K, and had a house in Potomac, two cars, and a stay-at-home wife.

I meant the house is reasonable (good condition, nice neighborhood, workable size).

$600k is still a lot of money, but under the county average home price of $700k (which includes condos, THs, and SFHs).

> But, DC is one of the more affordable top-tier cities in the US.

Is it?

This 2023 study[1] featured on Bloomberg[2] ranked DC at #7 of 76 most expensive large cities in the nation, requiring $245k gross pay to feel like $100k after normalizing taxes and cost of living.

[1] https://smartasset.com/data-studies/new-100k-how-taxes-costs...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-15/making-30...

I'll see if I can dig out the source, but the study I saw had COL vs incomes.

IE, DC is expensive, but also pays extremely well.

People could just live in PG.

Not relevant at all. Many locations are stronger than the DC area. Just an example of NIH inertia. There are many.

Until we normalize working for a company until we’re ready to retire, I don’t even see that as an option. What am I gonna do 3-4 years later? That’s why I won’t leave the city, because I know when it’s time to look again there are plenty of jobs close by and I won’t have to uproot the whole family.

It's not going to work. The NIH has no equivalent private sector competitor. For every single researcher, there are 10 other graduates and staff who would be willing to do their job for a fraction of the cost. This is a supply and demand problem, a funding problem. Strip congress and the medical board of their ability to control the number of residency spots and you will see the free market correct itself. Most biology people's first career choice is medicine, not working in research.

The only protection they have is the fact that it is hard to get fired from a government job.

This is poorly informed.

There are many viable alternatives for these researchers. For starters, all the other academic institutions! Which have their own problems, but have been increasing salaries for graduate students and post docs in response to organization (eg Penn just raised biomedical postdoc salaries in large part because of the threat of unionization, and in large part because of the competitive threat of other institutions who’ve increased salaries).

But beyond that, private sector is absolutely a viable alternative. People don’t make their choices in a vacuum, they choose the academia path because it fits their long term goal and it’s worth the short term costs.

It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers: of the people I know in research at prestigious institutions, it is a mix of MD-PhDs and people who only ever wanted to do research. There’s absolutely not some huge population of thwarted doctors getting prestigious postdoc positions.

I agree with your last point. I suspect MD is a popular option because it has job stability and good pay (which is likely related to the scarcity of MDs in the US).

In my field (another type of research) a lot of people "want" to be professors, but when I talk to them there's no interest in teaching or doing administrative work, they just want job stability. If research jobs were stable they would happily spend the rest of their lives doing research.

Outside of the overfunded Ivies, Stanford and MIT, most other state schools and academic institutions do not have the ability to absorb the sheer quantity of researchers employed by NIH.

> It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers

You should try talking to some actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs. I am willing to bet money that the number of non-medical biology researchers whose number one choice is medicine outnumbers wannabe researchers.

My wife is nearing the end of her postdoc (cell biology). I’ve known her since she was 18 years old. She never wanted to be an MD. Neither did the colleagues of hers I talked to.

Try a bigger sample size. I have seen countless life science graduates switch into software engineering precisely because of medical school admissions and the rest of the industry and academia being a career dead end.

You told them they should talk to some life sciences graduates. They relayed that they knew several such people. And now you're telling them the experiment you proposed is anecdotal and not meaningful, seemingly because it didn't produce the result you wanted.

Another approach would have been to say, "interesting, my experience differs," and then to compare notes.

For instance, is it the case that you're a software engineer who occasionally meets people who've pivoted into software engineering from life sciences? That could be a very different sample than someone who's spouse has successfully gained traction in the field (with neither being representative, as they're subject to complementary survivorship biases). Seems likely to me that there's something to be learned from both perspectives here.

> You should try talking to some actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs. I am willing to bet money that the number of non-medical biology researchers whose number one choice is medicine outnumbers wannabe researchers.

As a biochem PhD holder, you're really gonna have to back this up.

I want to credit your point and believe what you're saying, but the burden of proof is on you to give evidence that most Biology researchers want to be in medicine.

> actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs

That's me, graduate of a life science department at MD, microbiology not medical biology. Guess what, I always wanted to do research. Definitely didn't want to be a doctor, especially if a someone like, well, you, ended up being my patient.

That makes three anecdotes to counter your assertion. You gonna pay up or move the goalposts a little more?

It is common knowledge in the local community that many of the post docs at Tulane medical school qualify for food stamps.

From the article, they may not be staff. Many research agencies have "fellow" or "associate" positions that aren't full time staff. Similar to a contractor but used for postdoc, graduate students, etc. Sometimes on the path to FTE status, but not always. Could also be non-citizens on a visa for their term.

Pay (think stipend, not salary) for these positions are more than what a grad student would get from their university, but not much more. At least from what I've seen (don't know details of NIH). For postdocs/grads/etc without families this can work, but cost of living in the DC area is high.

That's one of the struggles for the union to conduct. Part-time, junior, temporary staff - are staff, and should be recognized as staff, with the full set of rights and benefits befitting their position and their needs as people and as professionals.

And the same goes for junior research staff at universities (assistants, fellows, post-docs etc).

Sounds like the sweet spot for a union. Having bargain power would be a quantum leap for all those workers. As a european, where unions are commonplace and a main driving force behind minimum wages, I find it odd for any worker not to join a union if there is the chance.

The union is actually for the 10 other people who will fill this staff position.

> The union, called NIH Fellows United, would include about 4,800 research fellows, such as graduate students and postdocs, who hold non-permanent staff positions at the agency’s 27 institutes and centres.

> Strip congress and the medical board of their ability to control the number of residency spots and you will see the free market correct itself.

This is nonsensical. Residency spots are not controlled by the government. Government funding for residency spots is controlled by Congress, because Congress is responsible for all government spending.

The only way to have Congress less involved in residency spots would be to eliminate all government funding for residency programs, but that would have the opposite effect of what you likely want, because residency programs by and large lose money (that's why Congress provides the subsidy in the first place).

Wrong. Congress passed a law that exempts residency programs from antitrust consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_America...

>For every single researcher, there are 10 other graduates and staff who would be willing to do their job for a fraction of the cost.

This is what unions are supposed to fix. If the researcher and 10 graduates are under a union the company has to literally pick the best one, not the cheapest one because the union guarantees reasonable pay.

>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)?

Not disagreeing with your larger point, but a nitpick: at these levels (postdocs, research scientists) the relevant university positions will be funded by grants, in fact largely from the NIH. University budgeting doesn't have all that much to do with it.

Now, postdoc salaries are set by a combination of university policy + whatever the grant budget says, but grant proposals are also assessed based on how much they ask, and postdoc salaries will be set by whatever NIH actually awards the PI. In the end, for NIH to pay their early career scientists more without creating problems for itself (by competing with groups it funds), it will likely have to increase postdoc pay across the board. This will likely add some upward pressure to postdoc pay across fields, since many universities do look at entry-level NIH postdoc pay as a reference.

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?

If private companies did this, it would be a huge lawsuit: we mustn't raise wages, we have a tacit agreement with the other big employers to keep them low!

We looked into unionizing at our company in the US and hit some big concerns:

1. Managers cannot be part of a union - only individual contributors.

There's a lot to unpack here. This can really set up an "us vs them" mindset which when takes hole has things go sideways. It makes switching from IC to manager or manager to IC potentially more complicated (and even contentious). There's are other issues in that managers typically focus on roadmap and where the company is going while many ICs I know want to just focus on getting their work done.

2. Union members are not part of the board.

This was something that we felt was unbalanced and relegates unions to not actually having the right level of influence.

When we did some research we found that there are better models for unions out there to reference: Japan and Germany. As part of this research we found that unions in the US have been watered down and regulation/legislation has been passed to weaken in. So you get stuff like "right to work" states or what sorts of things you are allowed to strike over.

With that said, things absolutely need to shift in a lot of sectors but I'm not sure if unions are the solution that everyone thinks (hopes?) it is.

Software engineers should do this. We got complacent with the high pay but we were never really in control. Recent layoffs would be less likely to happen were it not for unions.

> were it not for unions

I think you mean literally the opposite of what this idiom signifies.

fully agree - I've been mulling this over a lot recently, actually. It seems like the writing is on the wall in a couple ways (recent layoffs being a big one)

Institutions stand to lose enormous amounts of money if NIH researchers go on strike. The reason: delayed clinical trials.

Even more important, in particular this case the individual researcher stand little to loose, since those trials are mostly multi center, multi stakeholders and the individual research drone does not get much credit for its contribution.

oh great. As if the scientific community wasn't corrupt and perversely incentivized enough.

We need more labor unions in general - hell yea!

What is there possibly for a bunch of employees who have lived with status quo for so many years all of a sudden want to change? It is typically new employees who come in (from elsewhere?) that feel like changing everything around them. And then either they get those changes, or get comfortable with the things that exist, or leave.

Edit: Reasons for unions historically have been better working conditions and better wages, but those were for labor unions. Desk jockeys had different motivations for workplace changes, like better treatment of their work efforts, or more meaningful work hours. Better Wages are not it.

> but those were for labor unions. Desk jockeys had different motivations...

Desk labor is labor. And us desk jockeys most definitely need to unionize to improve and/or prevent deterioration of our working conditions and wages (and when I say "our wages" I don't mean just the star developers, I mean everyone). Similarly, all laborers, at the desk and at the assembly line, strive for better treatment of our work efforts, the ability to perform meaningful and less alienated work, etc.

Are you sure you read the article closely enough? These are early career researchers: grad students and postdocs. These are generally roles someone holds for no more than 6 years, often less. They _are_ all new employees.

Yes they are all new employees. Funny either I read it wrong or the headline changed. I thought it said NIH employees who had been with the firm for long time.

Sure, they may have lived with the status quo, but the external environment, dominated by housing costs has in now way been status quo. I imagine that the delta is what is motivating action.

Or you know, instead of crying about change like you are. Existing employees finally cracked. The STM part of STEM has been seriously underpaid and meager living for years. All of that is coming home to roost with inflation and cost of living spiraling out of control.

The E part of STEM is typically the commercial application of STM, so why would that be a surprise? This is the nature of research: most efforts will be pretty useless, and even the useful ones will need significant additional focus, effort, investment, and labor to create a viable commercial product.

The assumption that only commercialization efforts are deserving of rewards, and the labour to discover and make viable the things that are being sold are not deserving of rewards, is one that needs reflection.

"The STM part of STEM has been seriously underpaid and meager living for years."

Based on what?

Underpayment would lead to less inflation if anything.

[citation needed]

Inflation might not be driven by wages but by company profits: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/24/an-economic...

You know your own logic can beat that of others right? Citations are just links to places where other people wrote down their logic and aren't magic fairy dust that'll make an argument true.

People geting paid more is inflationary. People producing more output is deflationary. We need lots of both.

Company profits come from things being produced and then bought. So when profits are paid out to owners and employees as salaries, dividends, and other mechanisms, it gets filed under "people getting paid".

Now my main point is that if S, T and M have been underpaid vs their true output, they should get more.

Where do you think company profits come from if not from customers?

Some central banks take measures in order to reduce the spending of consumers in order to calm down inflation. Which means less money for customers. So maybe it makes sense?

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