graduate student / post-doctoral fellow labor unions
I read a very interesting article (click here to go to the article) in today’s issue of Science magazine that highlights the changing nature of research training and mentorship in academia producing a place for academic unions.
Here is an excerpt from Taken for Granted: Joe the Plumber and the Postdocs by Beryl Lieff Benderly:
“Supervisors have largely abandoned any pretence of promising a career, except to the handful of star students usually designated early by mega-prestigious awards and publications…
In the old days, professors considered finding jobs for their students a moral responsibility… the system also encouraged professors to recruit only the number of grad students they could reasonably expect to place in suitable posts… There grew up within the funding research system what Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation calls “perverse” incentives that instead encourage principal investigators (PIs) to take on as many grad students and postdocs as they possibly can… they came to view students not as future guild members but rather mostly as cheap labor useful for doing the work needed to get and keep grants. Instead of the old contract between master and apprentice, graduate training these days… ‘resembles a pyramid scheme.’ But most professors no longer worry because they know that the majority of those aspirants will never become competitors. Professors’ own reputations among their peers now depend much less on the fate of their students and trainees than on their ability to win grants… That leaves grad students and postdocs not as promising aspirants to a prestigious trade but rather as employees of large organizations, namely, the research universities that pay their wages out of PI grants. As such, these young scientists are exactly the sort of worker for whom the… industrial union… was devised, [which] serves the interests of workers drawing their pay from a given large company or organization.”
keywords: graduate students, post-docs, training, mentoring, unions
