[data_acquired]

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.

[MontyCarloHall]

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.

[natechols]

> 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.

[data_acquired]

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?

[data_acquired]

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.

[travisporter]

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