Postdoctoral fellows at Rutgers University have voted to unionize and will affiliate with the joint AAUP-American Federation of Teachers chapter that represents faculty members and graduate students at Rutgers. Almost 350 postdocs will be added to the chapter.
“Organizing the post-docs at Rutgers is important because it means that virtually all academic employees at Rutgers have union representation. With post-docs taking on longer and longer assignments, it has become crucial to close that last gap,” says Karen Thompson, a member of the AAUP’s governing council and a long-time contingent faculty member at Rutgers.
Only two other groups of postdocs in the country are unionized.
“Postdocs are crucial members of a contingent academic workforce that has been overlooked and increasingly exploited, in positions that have become less a step to an academic career and more a place in what has been called postdoc purgatory,” says Gary Rhoades, AAUP general secretary. “It is time we organized more of this segment of the contingent academic workforce, to improve their working conditions. And it is time nationally that we invested more in expanding tenure track positions that postdocs can move into.” (7/21)