More than 100 researchers gathered at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 1 to celebrate their application to form a union. The vast majority of early-stage researchers at the NIH voted overwhelmingly to form a union, having fully completed the formal process for doing so. They plan to advocate for improved wages, working conditions, and enhanced policies and procedures at the institute regarding harassment and excessive workloads.
Formation of the Researchers Union at the NIH for the First Time
About 98% of research fellows who participated in the election on December 6 voted to form the union, with 1,601 voting in favor and 36 against. Absent any objections, the results will be certified by the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) within five business days, making the union the first to represent fellows at a government research agency in the United States and the largest union formed in the U.S. government in approximately 12 years.
The election’s outcome could have implications for early-stage researchers at other institutions as well, as universities look to the NIH for research standards and wage benchmarks, according to Rosa Leifer-Souza, a postdoctoral fellow and neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the NIH’s units in Bethesda, Maryland. “Any victories we achieve will improve working conditions for researchers across the country,” she says.
Part of a Trend
The movements of the fellows at the NIH come amidst a wave of union formation at universities across the United States, where undergraduate students and academic workers point to wages that have not kept pace with rising living costs and poor working conditions. “This is part of a larger trend of highly educated professionals, especially younger individuals, turning to union organization to address their workplace concerns,” according to Ruth Milkman, a labor sociologist at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. She notes that this trend is likely to continue as competition in academia increases and salaries do not keep pace.
The union, called NIH Fellows United, includes more than 5,000 research fellows, such as undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who hold non-permanent positions within the agency’s 27 research facilities and affiliated centers. This constitutes about 10% of the NIH’s full-time workforce, according to agency calculations that do not consider some fellows as employees but rather as contractors. The fellows began their efforts to form the union on June 1, when more than 100 researchers gathered at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, to celebrate their application to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
End of the Historic U.S. Research Strike – But it Energizes the Movement
Unlike researchers working in the University of California system, who organized the largest strike in higher education history in the United States in late 2022, federal union members are not allowed to walk off the job in the same manner to demand better benefits. They also do not have direct authority in negotiations over wages set by the U.S. Congress, but they can push for legislation to increase wages, according to Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, New York.
Once the union is official, research fellows will elect a bargaining committee and present their preferences on what the body should focus on in its discussions with the NIH management. Leifer-Souza hopes the union prioritizes long-term appointments for international researchers, who must return to their home countries once a year to apply for visa renewals, causing delays in their research.
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