Postdocs: Penn is preventing a vote that would protect the workers who help it succeed
Penn's postdoctoral workers and research associates want to unionize — like the grad student workers did. But the university is putting obstacles in their way, say Marshall Padilla and Emily Perkins.
While federal funding for scientific research is under attack, the University of Pennsylvania is choosing to fight its own researchers by denying us our right to unionize for better healthcare, job security, and international worker protections.
Postdoctoral scholars and research associates at the University of Pennsylvania drive many of the scientific breakthroughs that propel this world-class institution. As holders of doctoral degrees in disciplines spanning biomedical sciences to engineering to the humanities, our job is to advance Penn’s mission and our academic fields.
We need our institution to stand with us — not against us.
While Penn often refers to us as “trainees,” postdoctoral scholars and research associates typically begin their positions with many years of experience. We work long hours for modest pay, minimal benefits, and no job security as we navigate constantly shifting career prospects — which are increasingly tenuous in the current national political climate.
Recently more than 1,000 of the 1,500 postdocs and research associates at Penn signed union authorization cards with the intent to hold a democratic election about forming a union in order to improve our working conditions. But the university that profits from our research and retains our intellectual property has chosen to challenge our right to collective bargaining. The administration has hired a law firm that works with employers to avoid unionization, and is raising a long list of objections typically used to delay unionization votes. It’s union busting — and it is not the first time Penn has done this.
Penn claims that we are “temporary employees” and therefore ineligible for union representation. Meanwhile, across the country, more than 15,000 postdocs and research staff at universities like Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California have successfully formed unions.
Even here at Penn, graduate student workers, medical residents, and other term-limited employees are unionized.
Why is Penn fighting so hard against us? Administrators are aware that the vast majority of us want a union, and, following a standard management playbook, they seem to believe that stalling will diminish support for that. Research shows that delaying elections is a strategy regularly used by anti-union employers.
If that’s Penn’s plan, it’s a cynical strategy that exploits the very job instability we’re organizing to address. Penn’s delay tactics do not change the evidence that made us want to form a union in the first place: Through unionizing, our peers at other institutions have won greater job security, better benefits, and higher wages.
Meanwhile, all of this is happening while the scientific community faces serious challenges. Federal funding is under threat. Attacks on public research and higher education continue. At Penn, postdocs and research associates are being fired due to these funding cuts.
International researchers, who make up more than half of Penn’s postdoc and research associate workforce, are especially vulnerable. This context makes the security of a union contract and the added protections for visa holders negotiated by unions at peer institutions particularly important for international researchers.
We need our institution to stand with us — not against us. But Penn has chosen instead to spend significant resources disenfranchising and intimidating us, rather than supporting the people whose research helps define its global reputation, and despite local city and state officials supporting our cause.
We are asking for the same basic and legally protected right as workers across this country — a democratic vote to decide whether or not we want to collectively bargain. The University of Pennsylvania shouldn’t stand in the way off that vote.
Marshall Padilla is a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioengineering department and at Penn Dental Medicine, as well as the postdoctoral representative for the University Council of the University of Pennsylvania. Emily Perkins is a postdoctoral fellow in clinical psychology in the psychology department and at the Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (MindCORE) at the University of Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed here are theirs and do not represent those of the organizations with which they are affiliated.