News & Views item - May 2010

 

 

Impasse Between the University of California and its Postdocs (May 4, 2010)


Rep George Miller

November 2008 and group of University of California postdoctoral researchers who were affiliated with the United Auto Workers were certified as the official bargaining agent for postdocs at the system's 10 campuses.

 

Size matters and the more than 6,000 postdocs at UC's campuses, i.e. about 10% of all U.S. postdocs, after 18 months of trying to negotiate their first-ever labour agreement, have come to the notice of the US House of Representatives, and the Education and Labor Committee headed by Representative George Miller (Californian Democrat), whose district adjoins the Berkeley campus heard testimony from the postdocs and UC administration.

 

ScienceNow's Greg Miller reports: "Among other concessions, the union is seeking raises modelled on federal guidelines for each year of experience, plus an annual 4% increase across the pay scale. The university has offered a one-time, 1.5% across-the-board raise in 2010.

"Despite 56 all-day negotiating sessions, the union and the university have yet to agree on a contract."

 

UC Vice President for Human Resources Dwaine Duckett, told the committee that there were serious difficulties in calculating the cost of any salary increases because postdoc salaries are drawn from various combinations of university funds, grants from federal agencies, and other sources.

 

Committee Chairman Miller was unimpressed and pressed Mr Duckett regarding the university's progress on determining the costings, but didn't get what he considered to be a satisfactory response: "That information has now been requested by the UAW, it has been requested by the Congress of the United States, and we haven't seen it in a year. That raises some serious credibility problems about these negotiations."

 

Following the hearings Representative Miller told ScienceNow: "he had serious doubts about the university's allegations that the union's offer would pose a serious financial risk and was 'very disturbed' by Duckett's testimony. 'What we learned today in this hearing is that so far there's no evidence that that's the case,' Miller said."

 

An account from one postdoc given to the committee will sound a familiar note for Australian postdoctoral researchers:

 

A fourth-year postdoc in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, Ludmila Tyler earns US$37,400 a year, an amount she said barely covers even basic expenses because of the high cost of living in the San Francisco area. It's also well below the US$44,304 recommended for fourth-year postdocs by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Tyler said her husband, who like her earned a Ph.D. from Duke University in 2006 and works in the same field, now earns US$10,000 more than she does as a postdoc at nearby Stanford University.


Salary wasn't Tyler's only concern. She also talked about a lack of job security, describing a series of short-term appointments ranging from 2 to 12 months that she has held since coming to Berkeley. "I can never predict if I'm going to have a job in a few months or not," she said.