Over 700 UW postdoctoral employees overwhelmingly voted to unionize during a two-week period ending last Friday, becoming only the sixth postdoc-specific union in the nation. Their campaign, Postdocs United, spent the last 15 months fighting legal challenges from the UW administration to disqualify certain job titles from the 1,100-strong bargaining unit.
“It’s hard to contain our excitement, and we surely cannot type out the true number of exclamation points we are feeling when we say, after incredible participation in our union election, our Postdoc Union is official!” organizers wrote in an email announcement to postdocs.
The group held its first official meeting last night to discuss the formation of its bargaining committee and to prioritize the members’ initial demands for the upcoming contract negotiations with the UW administration. Hundreds of postdocs have already filled out a survey indicating which issues are most important to them, with stronger job security policies, pay increases to keep up with living costs, and better protections for international researchers emerging as clear front-runners.
Also on the bargaining table is the fate of roughly 170 postdocs the UW challenges are technically faculty and fall outside the four core postdoc job titles. Postdocs United is determined to fight for these individuals, which include researchers with dual job titles, niche job titles, and fellows paid outside the UW’s payroll system. The UW correctly notes that some of these job titles are indisputably faculty positions, but the state labor authority, the Public Employment Relations Commission, defines postdocs by their job responsibilities, not their title.
“I feel like it’s really easy to get lost in the weeds on this, where the technicalities of it are kind of interesting and so it’s kind of like a moth to the flame,” biochemistry postdoc and campaign organizer Brian Weitzner said. “The challenge is just bullshit, unfortunately I don’t have a nicer way of putting it.”
Postdocs United is closely watching the contentious ongoing union negotiations between the graduate student union, UAW 4121 which represents Academic Student Employees (ASEs), and the UW administration, in which ASEs just completed a one-day warning strike in the hope that it put pressure on the university.
Reach Science Editor Timothy Kenney at news@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @timothyfkenney
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