NIH reneges on recognizing union for early career researchers

From ScienceMag:

A union representing thousands of early-career scientists who work in labs run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) received notice this week that the agency would no longer recognize the group “in its entirety.” It isn’t yet clear how the move, which union members say is illegal, will affect the contract agreed to by NIH that the union ratified in December 2024.

“Management’s refusal to follow the contract would jeopardize the raises, guaranteed health insurance, guaranteed leave time, and the protections for our professional development and safe workplaces that we won,” union leaders wrote in a 3 March email to members.

The union, called NIH Fellows United, represents roughly 5000 graduate students, postdocs, postbaccalaureate researchers, and others who work on a nonpermanent basis at NIH’s in-house research facilities in its main Bethesda, Maryland, campus and other locations. Many were brought into the agency through training programs designed to give early-career researchers a chance to develop their scientific and professional skills—a fact that NIH officials flagged in their email repudiating the union that was sent to its leadership on 2 March.

The notice, which has been reviewed by Science, states that trainees in these programs are not “employees” and that the union should never have been certified in the first place by the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), the agency that oversees unions made up of federal employees.

The employee argument has long been used by opponents of graduate student unionization efforts at universities, who say the work students perform is part of their education and that therefore they are not employees with a right to unionize. The main federal entity that has wrestled with the issue is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees unionization at private universities. For the past decade, NLRB has allowed graduate students to form unions. But the issue resurfaced in 2019, when—during President Donald Trump’s first administration—the board proposed a rule stating students aren’t employees. The rule never went into effect.

NIH itself had initially signaled in 2023 it would oppose the formation of NIH Fellows United on the grounds that its trainees weren’t employees. But it later backed away from that argument and allowed nonpermanent researchers to vote on whether to unionize. The union was officially certified by FLRA in December 2023 after NIH fellows voted 98% in favor of forming a union. It marked the first time scientific trainees won the right to unionize within the federal government.

When contacted by Science, an NIH spokesperson declined to comment on why the biomedical research agency, which also disburses billions of dollars in grants to universities, is changing its stance on the union now. “NIH cannot comment on active labor relations matters,” they wrote. The 2 March email to union leaders states that NIH plans to file a petition with FLRA, presumably seeking to decertify the union.

The leaders of the NIH union also declined to comment. In an email to their members, they wrote that they were “working closely with our legal counsel to understand the full implications of this notice and develop a comprehensive response. … We will fight this with the full strength of our membership, our national union, and our allies.”

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