UNION WIN OF THE CENTURY?
For years now, there have been about 4,000 employees at the National Institute of Health (NIH) just outside Washington, DC who have been eager to organize a union. Their colleagues at the Food and Drug Administration did years decades ago as did almost every other piece of Health and Human Services. So, the NIH folks knew what they had to do. They needed a union that understood how to represent professional federal employees because virtually all of those 4,000 NIH employees are advance degree scientists. They needed a union that knew its way around the federal sector labor relations maze, which is very different from the private sector. And they needed a union known for giving members a very large democratic role in deciding things important to them, not just to the national leaders. Having worked at a university for years, I know how absolutely abhorrent “top-down” control is to scientists and academics. The NIH employees chose the United Auto Workers (UAW), which best we can tell has no federal sector experience nor other federal units. But they are known for letting members self-determine their fate and they represent grad students at several universities around the country. This is an organizing coup for the UAW and we wish them only the best.