Request for Neutrality

August 5, 2024

Dear President Lifton and Dean Stearns,

We write on behalf of United Postdoctoral Researchers of Rockefeller – United Auto Workers (UPROR-UAW), the union supported by an overwhelming majority of postdoctoral researchers at Rockefeller University. We are proud to work at Rockefeller and play a critical role driving its mission of conducting science for the benefit of humanity. Through collective bargaining, we aim to negotiate our living and working conditions so that we can produce the highest quality research at Rockefeller.

More than 80% of all postdoctoral researchers at Rockefeller have now signed cards authorizing UPROR-UAW to represent Rockefeller University postdocs in collective bargaining. We are excited to join a growing movement of academic workers forming unions and to become a part of the UAW, which represents 100,000 academic workers across the US.

Based on this clear mandate for collective bargaining, we intend to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to initiate the process of establishing UPROR-UAW as our union. We sincerely hope this process can proceed constructively and without delays. We strongly believe that a collaborative relationship between the administration and UPROR-UAW will benefit the overall quality and competitiveness of research at Rockefeller.

To that end, we request that the Rockefeller University administration remains neutral and does not attempt to influence postdocs against unionizing. We would like to meet as soon as possible to discuss and agree on how best to ensure a fair and efficient process to verify majority support for UPROR-UAW as our union.

Please let us know your availability by Monday August 12, 2024. We can be reached at info@rockefellerpostdocunion.org.

Sincerely,

Merve Deniz Abdusselamoglu
Amol Aher
Hessameddin Akhlaghpour
Jorge Almagro Santiago
Rodrigo Alonso
Paige Arnold
Mariana Batista
Matthew Biegler
Sarah Cai
Yohann Chemtob
Ningyan Cheng
Francesco Gianoli
Anita Gola
Jingkun Guo
Thomas Hagglof
Keith Hamilton
Keiichi Ito
Laurent Jutras-Dube
Mariko Kanai
Timothy Kenny
Philip Kidd
Manoj Kumar
Danyel Lee
UnJin Lee
Calvin Jon Leonen
Shanshan Liu
Yue Liu
Sihao Lu
Fuhui Meng
Ryan Morrill
Yoshitaka Nakayama
Kevin Ng
Virender Pal
Martina Parigi
Nicholas Prescott
Hamed Rahimi Nasrabadi
Kailey Slavik
Jianfeng Sun
Tomoki Suzuki
Han Tan
Stephen Thornquist
Lucas Tian
Bingjun Wang
Jialing Wang
Yao Wang
Marie Wiatr
Qiushuang Wu
King Faisal Yambire
Ahmad Yatim
Ethan Yeh
Le Zhang
Sicong Zhang
Zhaoyue Zhang