The University of Massachusetts (UMass) will soon become the fourth public institution in the country to have a union protecting its postgraduate researchers, if the university's postdoctoral fellows succeed in their unionization endeavor in the coming weeks.
The unionization effort, which began last spring, is a product of what fellows claim is the inadequacy of benefits usually awarded to public university employees.
The fellows at UMass have teamed up with the United Auto Workers (UAW) to organize a union through the state's certification process, which sources say will be legally recognized in the next few weeks.
Caleb Rounds, a UMass postdoctoral research associate, said that his primary reason for joining the effort was to procure better health care benefits for his fellow workers, who currently are required by law to purchase prohibitively expensive insurance packages.
"I want to be clear: Most of us are offered some form of health insurance, and health insurance is required by law, but it's just that it is financially impossible," Rounds told the Daily.
According to Rounds, postdoctoral researchers with families are required by state law to purchase insurance packages at rates of $1,400 a month, which is equivalent to about half of the average fellow's annual salary.
Rounds noted that before becoming postgraduate fellows, graduate students could obtain health care insurance for just $400 a year.
While Rounds himself is fortunate enough to be able to rely on his spouse's health care insurance plan, he said this difference in insurance costs is significant for some of his colleagues.
"That's quite a jump," he said. "Health care is a big issue. I think that for the most part a lot of us are in [the unionization effort] for that."
The postgraduate researchers are also looking to improve their working conditions in general, according to Rounds, who said that researchers' principal investigators can currently make an arbitrary decision to fire them "at the drop of a hat."
Protection from this sort of capricious dismissal, provisions for regular promotions and some sort of retirement plan will all be part of the new union's goals if all goes according to plan, Rounds said.
Researchers should be able to realize their plans, considering both the lack of resistance from the UMass administration and the painless union certification process — which requires a simple majority of written authorization cards — according to Nick Velluzzi, an international representative of the UAW.
Velluzzi said that the process has been quite smooth thus far and should continue that way, barring any unexpected objections from the university.
"We hope they don't do that," Velluzzi told the Daily. "Pending no objections, we anticipate the union to be certified probably within a few weeks."
UMass Executive Director of News and Media Relations Edward Blaguszewski also expects the process to be expeditious.
"The state is reviewing the documentation provided to them and we'll certainly work with the state to do whatever is required," Blaguszewski told the Daily. "[Postdoctoral fellows] do important work here at the university and they are valued."
Blaguszewski could not detail what sort of health care benefits would be afforded the newly unionized fellows, except to say that such speculation may be premature.
"We really don't discuss the details of potential contracts in public with them either," he said. "We work with the unions to reach good agreements."
At Tufts, current federal law prohibits faculty and graduate employees from organizing into unions, according to Blaguszewski.
Regardless of this, movements toward unionization at private institutions have been rare and are not expected at Tufts, according to Vice Provost Peggy Newell.
Newell said in an e-mail that whereas the state is the employer of the fellows at UMass, private university postdoctoral workers would be incapable of petitioning the state to form a union, even though there is no law prohibiting organization.
"For postdoctoral fellows, the university follows guidelines from the National Institutes of Health in setting a minimum salary," Newell said. "In our surveys of other institutions, the salary and benefits available to Tufts post-docs are comparable to that offered by other universities."
Newell added that unionization movements would not be in the best interests of the university or the postdoctoral workers.
