Science Needs Allies. New York’s Researchers Are Finding Them.

Paola Bianchimano is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

UAW Local 4100

Andrew Little is president of Columbia Postdoctoral Workers, United Auto Workers Local 4100, which represents nearly 3,000 postdoctoral researchers across Columbia University, Mount Sinai and Weill Cornell Medicine. 

UAW Local 4100

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AUTHOR BIO:

Paola Bianchimano is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Andrew Little is president of Columbia Postdoctoral Workers, United Auto Workers Local 4100, which represents nearly 3,000 postdoctoral researchers across Columbia University, Mount Sinai and Weill Cornell Medicine. 

For scientists in the United States, the past two years have been bleak. Federal attacks on research funding have destabilized laboratories, threatened careers and cast uncertainty over the future of American science.

But in New York, there is finally reason for optimism.

This year's primary elections ushered in a new generation of labor-backed candidates who have made working people central to their campaigns. For those of us who are postdoctoral researchers and research scientists, that political shift feels especially significant.

For years, many of us have volunteered for candidates who understand what it means to work for a living, care for families, and rely on a stable job to build a future. Now, those candidates are winning — and they are standing with us.

That became tangible at a recent rally outside Columbia University, where newly victorious primary candidates Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier joined us in calling for a fair union contract.

Television cameras arrived. Reporters asked questions.

For many of us, it was the first time our fight was treated not as an internal workplace dispute but as part of a broader conversation about the future of work in New York.

That attention matters because the challenges facing research workers extend far beyond federal funding cuts.

Since the Trump administration began targeting research funding, higher education and immigrant communities, researchers across New York have worked tirelessly to defend science itself. Hundreds of federal research grants in New York have been disrupted, threatening work on cancer, Alzheimer's disease, HIV, heart disease, diabetes and many other conditions.

Researchers have organized rallies, met with lawmakers, and advocated for sustained public investment because we believe our institutions—and the discoveries they make possible—are worth protecting.

Yet while researchers have been fighting to defend science, many of New York's leading research institutions have been fighting us.

Instead of strengthening support for the workers who sustain their research missions during a period of extraordinary uncertainty, institutions have resisted improvements in wages, workplace protections and job security.

At Columbia, researchers have faced proposals that would reduce annual raises while key workplace protections remain unresolved. Across institutions, workers continue pushing for stronger safeguards against harassment and discrimination, better protections for international researchers whose immigration status has become increasingly precarious and more adequate paid parental leave.

At Mount Sinai, researchers promoted into senior positions often lose the union protections they previously had, creating the perverse reality that career advancement can mean less stability, not more.

These are not isolated disputes. They reflect a broader contradiction in American research.

Universities rightly celebrate scientific excellence and their role as engines of innovation. But scientific excellence depends on people.

Postdoctoral researchers and research scientists design experiments, train students, write grant applications, publish discoveries and transform public investment into new medicines, technologies and economic growth. When those workers face unnecessary instability, science suffers alongside them.

Fair labor standards are not separate from scientific success; they are one of its foundations. Institutions that provide stable careers are better able to recruit and retain talented scientists, foster collaboration and build the long-term research programs that produce breakthroughs.

When researchers leave because they cannot afford the insecurity of academic careers, everyone loses.

Over the past several years, researchers across New York have begun organizing to change that reality. Since Columbia's postdoctoral researchers formed the city's first postdoctoral union in 2018, unionization has spread to Mount Sinai, Rockefeller University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine.

Thousands of researchers have chosen collective bargaining not only to improve our pay, benefits and rights, but as a way to invest in the future of science.

Now that movement has a growing number of political allies.

The newly-elected leaders who have chosen to stand publicly with research workers understand something that too many university administrators have overlooked: defending science means defending scientists. It means recognizing that discoveries do not emerge from institutions alone.

They emerge from people who deserve fair pay, parental leave, protection from discrimination and harassment and security regardless of where they were born.

The attacks on American science are not only coming from Washington. If New York's research institutions truly want to protect their scientific missions, they should stop treating their workers as costs to be managed, and start treating us as powerful allies in the fight to defend science itself.

But in order for that to happen, they need to treat their workers fairly. The future of science depends not only on preserving research grants, but on ensuring that the people doing the research have the support to keep doing it.