A wave of union activity is engulfing higher education, as best exemplified by last year’s University of California strike, which was the largest academic strike in US history. The focus of media reports and analysis of this upsurge tends to be on graduate workers and adjunct faculty. Comparatively little attention is paid to another subgroup of workers riding this wave: postdoctoral scholars. Like other academic workers, we receive low pay and have little job security, and we’re organizing to change that.

Postdocs are early-career researchers in our post-PhD journeyman years. We’re expected to be able to move anywhere in the country on short notice to start jobs in labs where we know nobody and have little job security. In those labs, we drive yearslong research projects and often provide the mentorship that graduate students don’t get from their advisers. In return, without union protections, we typically receive low pay, high expectations, and supervisors who might even control whether we can stay in the country.

This is not a friendly environment for unionization. Nevertheless, in recent years postdoc organizing has taken off on a large scale all over the country, mostly under the aegis of the United Auto Workers (UAW). It’s about time.