WE’RE VOTING YES FOR A UNION AT ROCKEFELLER
Election Information:
- When: Wednesday, 9/18 and Thursday, 9/19, between 9am-1pm and 3pm-7pm both days
- Where: Welch Hall – Great Hall
- Who: Eligible voters are postdoctoral researchers employed by Rockefeller University in the following classifications: Postdoctoral Associate, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Research Associate who were employed by the Employer during the payroll period ending August 15, 2024.
How: Bring your Rockefeller ID, or another form of government-issued identification.
WE HAVE A CLEAR CHOICE IN THIS ELECTION
Voting “YES” means Rockefeller administrators would have a legal obligation to bargain with our elected postdoc representatives over our pay, benefits and workplace rights, and secure any agreements on improvements or existing benefits in a legally binding and enforceable contract. Voting “YES” means joining nearly 120,000 UAW academic employees across the country working together to make higher education workplaces more just, fair, and equitable.
Over the course of hundreds of conversations, we’ve seen that postdoctoral researchers at Rockefeller share many of the same challenges. These include bureaucratic hurdles and insecurity for international workers, unpredictable salary increases that don’t match the high cost of living in New York City, insufficient support for parents, and the lack of enforceable procedures address sexual harassment, discrimination, and bullying. These challenges add unnecessary stress to the postdoc experience and make it more difficult to focus on doing quality research.
Right now, Rockefeller administrators decide unilaterally if, how, and when to address problems affecting postdocs. With collective bargaining, we will gain the right to meet at the bargaining table as equals. With strong participation and support in our vote, we can negotiate a contract that not only improves our pay, benefits, and workplace rights, but also ensures the security and stability that enables us to do quality research.
In hundreds of conversations, postdoctoral researchers have identified common priorities for our first contract. We are ready to hit the ground running and negotiate the contract that we deserve. Vote for a Stronger Rockefeller — vote “union yes” on September 18th and 19th.
Organizing by researchers across the country has helped improve the postdoc experience, including our own pay and benefits.
Salaries at Rockefeller have recently improved partly in response to the nation-wide movement of postdocs unionizing and increasing standards for compensation at many institutions. This is true across NYC, where conditions have improved dramatically across institutions since postdocs at Columbia won their first contract in 2020, and most recently at Sinai in 2023.
These reflect important progress–progress that is needed not only to keep up with NYC cost of living, but to help us perform the cutting edge research we bring to Rockefeller, without the burden of financial stress.
With a union, we can maintain and improve our current pay and benefits here at Rockefeller.
Without a union, Rockefeller can alter our benefits unilaterally. We saw this recently with the CFC, when the administration made changes without notice that disrupted relationships between staff and parents and our children. Where current benefits are adequate, unionizing would allow us to protect them, because Rockefeller would have to negotiate any changes with us. We decide what to prioritize in bargaining, and our contract only goes into effect once we vote to approve it.
Our research is stronger when everyone can contribute.
Pregnancy, childbirth and adoption should be occasions for celebration – without unnecessary stress caused by having to return to work too soon after giving birth, or concerns about unstable benefits, housing, or visa status. Unfortunately, this kind of stress is all too prevalent for postdoc parents. Women postdocs with families in particular face discrimination and unequal pressures, making them far more likely than men to leave academia before obtaining tenure at a college or university.
Under-representation of women in senior roles has been a longstanding problem within academia, and that’s why winning significant improvements in this area is so important.
Read more about why parents at Rockefeller are fighting for a union→
Read how other postdocs have unionized and made their employers more family-friendly.
- Why Sinai postdoc parents voted “YES” for a more family-friendly research community
- Columbia graduate workers win fully-paid dependent health insurance
- Columbia Postdocs Win Emergency Child Care Subsidy During Pandemic
- UW postdocs won the creation of a new caregiver fund
- Columbia postdocs protected and improved a childcare benefit upt o $5,000 per year
- UC Postdocs won a dedicated childcare subsidy after years of opposition from the UC administration
- Sinai postdocs won an emergency support fund that can be used for childcare expenses
Together we can make Rockefeller more equitable and inclusive.
If you think we deserve better in areas like family benefits, support for international workers, equity for fellows, or protection against unfair termination, harassment, and bullying, unionizing would allow us to bargain for those goals. Like other unionized postdocs, we could also negotiate for a neutral grievance procedure to enforce our rights, with clear timelines and the ability to take issues to a third-party arbitrator, outside Rockefeller, for a final decision. Check out how other academic workers have used the grievance process to address workplace discrimination.
Inequalities based on gender, race, sexual orientation and immigration status continue to create barriers for many of the most talented to enter the academic and scientific workforce. Existing systems of recourse for problems like discrimination, harassment, and bullying too often fail and can take years. Though much work remains to be done, postdocs, graduate students and adjunct faculty in the UAW have helped make progress on many of these issues, both at the bargaining table and in policy advocacy through the UAW. At the University of Connecticut, for example, a graduate assistant worked with her union to successfully resolve a major sexual assault and harassment complaint in three months.
Read more:
UConn Graduate Student Union Helps Handle Sexual Harassment →
“Workplace Bullying in Higher Education is Rampant. We’re Fighting Back”→
UC International Postdoc Takes on Pregnancy Discrimination and Wins →
We are voting YES for our union, United Postdoctoral Researchers of Rockefeller-UAW (UPROR-UAW)!
On September 18 and 19th, we will have the opportunity to vote “yes” for a union at Rockefeller. In doing so, we would join tens of thousands of unionized academic workers across the US, including thousands of postdoctoral researchers who have already come together to improve the postdoc experience and create a more equitable, inclusive, and fair scientific community.
As postdocs, we play a critical role in driving the world-class research conducted at Rockefeller. However, without collective bargaining, Rockefeller postdocs have faced a lack of transparency in decisions affecting our salaries, benefits and working conditions, uneven and unenforceable raises that do not track our experience and keep many researchers close to the university-set minimum, a lack of clear recourse in cases of mistreatment, and insufficient support for international researchers and parents, including unpredictable changes in access to quality childcare services without advance notice to parents, among other challenges. This uncertainty unnecessarily hinders our ability to focus on quality research.
If a majority of us vote “yes” for UPROR-UAW as our union, the Rockefeller administration would be legally obliged to bargain with postdocs as equals. over salaries, benefits, workplace rights, and protection from harassment or inappropriate behavior and to commit any agreements into a binding contract. Having a union will also allow us to protect our current benefits, because Rockefeller will no longer be able to change them unilaterally, but would instead have to negotiate with us.
We therefore urge our colleagues to vote ‘yes’ for UPROR-UAW as our union, so that we have the strongest possible mandate to bargain a fair union contract with the Rockefeller administration that improves our working conditions and our lives.
Signed,
Deniz Abdusselamoglu
Amol Aher
Hessameddin Akhlaghpour
Jorge Almagro Santiago
Paige Arnold
Naama Aviram
Alain Bonny
Philipp Brand
Mohamed El Tanbouly
Anita Gola
Raphael Hofmann
Yixin Hu
Mariko Kanai
Timothy Kenny
Mascha Koenen
Joanna Krzyspiak
Manoj Kumar
UnJin Lee
Ran Lin
Shanshan Liu
Yue Liu
Hengrui Liu
Fuhui Meng
Ryan Morrill
Kartik Nagendra
Kevin Ng
Martina Parigi
Nick Prescott
Felipe Silva Rodrigues
Kailey Slavik
Wenzhi Song
Katie Stewart
Tomoki Suzuki
Han Tan
Michael Tartell
Stephen Thornquist
Lucas Tian
Matt Tierney
Yao Wang
Ian Windham
Charles Xu
King Yambire
Chao Yang
Ethan Yeh
Le Zhang
Sicong Zhang
Zhaoyue Zhang