A Healthy Regard for Workers' Rights: Fellows at the NIH Launch a Union Drive

[Omaha Steve]

Faced with an organizing campaign by the United Auto Workers, the Biden administration is claiming that fellows at the National Institutes of Health—the people who do most of the actual research—aren’t actually federal employees.

By Peter Lucas


NIH Fellows United rally on the NIH main campus celebrating their union election filing with the FLRA on June 1. (via NIH Fellows United)

Matt Manion recalls the countless “closed-door meetings” conducted with the door wide open so the whole lab could hear their boss berate her workers, tell them that they’re not good enough, that her word alone can dictate their entire career.

“Always looming was the not-so-thinly veiled threat that you need to cooperate or else,” said Manion about his time as a predoctoral fellow with the National Institutes of Health. “Our future was entirely dependent on her giving us positive recommendations.”

He was able to change labs and work under a different principal investigator, or PI, to conclude his studies on cellular and molecular neurodevelopment. But only after months of conflict and resolution meetings, which Manion said took a toll on his mental health.

Now, Manion is a postdoc at the NIH, where nearly 5,000 fellows are unionizing with the United Auto Workers for better compensation and stronger benefits, protection from workplace harassment, support for international workers, and increased funding. If successful, this would be the largest federal union drive in 12 years—in a sector that saw a 20 percent membership increase from 2021 to 2022.

FULL story here: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/nih-fellows-union-uaw/