NIH postdocs, graduate students win union contract

From ScienceMag:

After more than 3 years of rallying and union organizing, early-career researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw a new contract go into effect this week. The agreement—the first to be negotiated by a union representing scientists at a federal research facility—includes provisions that limit work hours, guarantee paid parental leave, and provide protections against harassment for the roughly 5000 nonpermanent researchers, including graduate students, postdocs, and postbaccalaureates, who work at NIH facilities. The deal also promises to boost pay, which could set a precedent for other institutions—but raises will not be instated until 2026 at the earliest.

“We didn’t win everything we wanted,” says union bargaining team member Emilya Ventriglia, a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Brown University who is doing her research at the National Institute of Mental Health. “But I think we got somewhere that was really incredible and is going to really provide some transformative gains for not only fellows today, but fellows of the future.” In an email to Science, an NIH spokesperson wrote that the agency “looks forward to a positive labor-management relationship as we implement the contract.”

The union, called NIH Fellows United, struck the deal with NIH last month, almost a year to the day after the Federal Labor Relations Authority granted it approval to form in December 2023. The final 3-year contract, which was supported by 98% of union members in a vote last month and approved by the Department of Health and Human Services this week, will provide a range of protections and benefits, including the right to appeal to a neutral arbitrator in cases involving harassment, bullying, and other workplace disputes; paid leave for parents and others who need to care for a family member; up to $1500 in relocation benefits per union member; the right to adhere to a 40-hour workweek unless a project calls for a greater number of hours; a formal process for requesting remote work accommodations; dedicated time for professional development and training; and access to gender-neutral bathrooms.

The contract also increases pay. Graduate student stipends will increase from the current minimum of $46,100 to $50,400. Minimum pay for postbaccalaureate researchers—who work for NIH after receiving a bachelor’s or master’s degree—will go from $41,700 to $44,806. And postdocs, which make up roughly one-half of union members, will see their minimum pay rise to $68,544, a modest increase from the current $67,200.

William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, says the deal could be used as a reference point for early-career researchers who are negotiating contracts with their own universities. For instance, they could push for similar pay levels and benefits. They may also want to copy the contract provision that “makes a 40-hour workweek the baseline,” he says.

Pay was among the last contract details to be nailed down during the 8-month negotiation. At one point, NIH representatives told the union they could “not bargain over economics,” according to bargaining team member Marjorie Levinstein, a neuropharmacology postdoc at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. (NIH didn’t respond to questions about negotiations over pay.) Federal employees are legally prohibited from going on strike. But after union members held a rally in October 2024 to demand a fair contract, additional bargaining sessions were held to negotiate salary levels and other final details, such as health care benefits.

Still, union members won’t see changes to the paychecks until next year at the earliest; NIH told the bargaining team it will need to request new appropriations from Congress. The contract also includes language that allows NIH to “pause or reduce” the stipulated pay increases if there are “insufficient available appropriations.”

The delay and lack of a guarantee is frustrating, Levinstein acknowledges. “It was definitely something we were trying to push back on,” she says.

But the planned eventual pay boosts, which include annual increases, would be a welcome relief for NIH researchers in the future, Ventriglia says. “A large majority of us are in the [Washington,] D.C., … area, and it’s just, frankly, so expensive, and everything keeps getting more expensive.”

Having the overall contract in place also gives union members some peace of mind as change comes to the White House. “With any administration change, there’s always uncertainty,” Levinstein says. “Having our working conditions set in this contract before that happened was definitely an important thing to get done.”

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