Purely Anecdotal

admin November 10th, 2008

True, even in the hard sciences and engineering. This article is copied from Science Magazine online Career section.

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Issues & Perspectives
Taken for Granted: Joe the Plumber and the Postdocs

By Beryl Lieff Benderly

November 07, 2008

Supervisors have largely abandoned any pretence of promising a career, except to the handful of star students usually designated early by mega-prestigious awards and publications.

Joe the Plumber, John McCain’s favorite working man, might not have turned out to be the perfect symbol of Americans’ struggle to get ahead in hard times that the Republican presidential candidate originally imagined. But McCain was on to something, nonetheless. Even if the real-life Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher is not in fact a licensed plumber , the plumbing trade still has something important to teach us about how opportunity works in America. It’s a lesson, surprisingly enough, that is particularly relevant to a seemingly quite different group of workers who have been facing tough times not just for weeks–but for decades: the nation’s postdocs.

Over the past 35 years or so, the labor market that postdocs work in has undergone drastic, painful, long-term change. Among the high-profile indications of that transformation are the recent decisions by postdocs across the University of California system, and at McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario in Canada, to follow the earlier example of their counterparts at the University of Connecticut Health Center and form labor unions.

Of course, the idea of belonging to a union is nothing new on America’s campuses. Back in the days before the big change happened–say, during the middle Pleistocene when I was in graduate school–people used to jocularly call the Ph.D. a “union card.” No one says that much anymore, even as thousands of scientists who hold such degrees have decided to carry an entirely different kind of union card.

To understand what this means and what it has to do with plumbing, think back to high school American history and recall that historically there have been two quite different types of labor unions, each designed to serve workers in a particular kind of labor market. One type is the so-called trade or craft union still prevalent among skilled workers in the building trades, such as carpenters, electricians, and, of course, those wrench-wielding mavens of drains.
Crafting protections
Beryl Lieff Benderly

The craft union model descends from the medieval craft guilds that once protected the prerogatives and incomes of high-level artisans by controlling who could legally practice particular trades. Like those guildsmen of yore, skilled members of today’s building trades often hire themselves out as contractors on a variety of temporary jobs and thus need protection from competition. Therefore, the major functions of their unions, apart from working to establish the going rate for their labor, are guarding the standards for practicing the craft and maintaining firm boundaries to keep outsiders from competing with union members.

Craft unions do this in part by overseeing the training and credentialing of aspirants to the trade and, through union-run hiring halls open only to members, by controlling who gets the union jobs that, of course, pay the best wages. These privileges, naturally, accrue only to holders of hard-to-get and therefore often highly coveted union cards.

In former times, the Ph.D. functioned in precisely this manner. It admitted newcomers to the privileged ranks of a professorial guild and protected full-fledged faculty members against interlopers trying to snag tenure-worthy posts with lesser degrees. Philosophiae doctor literally means “teacher of philosophy,” and teaching–or, at least, joining a university faculty–was what people who earned the degree overwhelmingly wanted and expected to do.

Of course, the basic goal of any self-respecting craft union (and of similar professional groups such as physicians) is limiting the number of apprentices who can enter the trade and eventually compete with the established members. If a union can enforce those boundaries, it can also provide another truly major benefit: sufficient work at attractive wages. Apprentice plumbers and electricians (and medical residents) agree to accept a trainee’s income while working hard and passing required exams. But once they progress to the status of journeyman or master craftsman (or board-certified specialist), they are pretty much assured a chance at earning a decent (and for master craftsmen and specialist doctors, a good-to-amazingly excellent) living practicing their craft.
A broken agreement

The same used to be true also in academe (except, of course, for the stratospheric earnings, which academics gladly traded for their exceptional lifestyles). In decades gone by, what labor economists Paula Stephan and Sharon Levin have called an “implicit contract” existed between professors and their graduate students (and the tiny handful of postdocs). It was the very same agreement that craft unions still make with their apprentices. A young person works at puny trainee wages for a time while meeting or exceeding the standards for entry into the trade. A mentor or guild then arranges opportunities for the successful novice to launch a career.

In the old days, professors considered finding jobs for their students a moral responsibility. And, as French management professor Vincent Mangematin has pointed out , the arrangement just happened to also help senior academics advance their own careers; the eminence of their students’ positions and accomplishments redounded to the mentors’ reputations. Not coincidentally, the system also encouraged professors to recruit only the number of grad students they could reasonably expect to place in suitable posts, thereby maintaining those reputations.

By the 1970s, however, the old compact was breaking down, and observers of the scientific establishment were beginning to worry aloud about training more Ph.D.s than could find appropriate faculty jobs. But the elders of the professorial trade, unlike the plumbers and the doctors, ultimately let down their side of the bargain. There grew up within the funding research system what Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation calls “perverse” incentives that instead encourage principal investigators (PIs) to take on as many grad students and postdocs as they possibly can.

Unlike the master artisans who diligently guard the value of their union membership, the professors who run federally funded labs gave up limiting their students and trainees to the number they could successfully launch. Instead, they came to view students not as future guild members but rather mostly as cheap labor useful for doing the work needed to get and keep grants. Instead of the old contract between master and apprentice, graduate training these days, in Stephan’s stinging words, “resembles a pyramid scheme.”

But most professors no longer worry because they know that the majority of those aspirants will never become competitors. Professors’ own reputations among their peers now depend much less on the fate of their students and trainees than on their ability to win grants. The professoriate’s de facto union card is no longer the Ph.D. but the first tenure-track appointment–the launching pad for the grants competition–or perhaps even the first competitive federal grant.
Grave new world

Few among the mass of grad students and postdocs, however, will ever enter that ultra-elite guild no matter how many hours they toil at their PI’s bench, because there simply are too few academic jobs. Supervisors have largely abandoned any pretence of promising a career, except to the handful of star students usually designated early by mega-prestigious awards and publications. Few professors, in fact, even have the contacts or knowledge to steer young people toward the jobs that do exist, in quite substantial numbers, outside the academy.

As Mangematin has shown, the criterion that marks success in academe and that professors urge students to attain–publications in leading journals–carries far less weight on the outside, where most grad students and postdocs ultimately spend their careers. And though a study by Harvard University economist Richard Freeman and colleagues found grad students and postdocs very dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, many of their professors agree with one who stated, “I don’t find a whole lot wrong with the system. … It’s not broken.”

That leaves grad students and postdocs not as promising aspirants to a prestigious trade but rather as employees of large organizations, namely, the research universities that pay their wages out of PI grants. As such, these young scientists are exactly the sort of worker for whom the second type of labor union, the so-called industrial union, was devised. This type serves the interests not of accomplished artisans selling their skills in competitive markets but rather of workers drawing their pay from a given large company or organization. Rather than defending the prerogatives of a particular craft against the threat of interlopers, industrial unions strive to recruit all the workers at a particular workplace and defend them against the power of their employer.

The unmistakable transformation of aspiring scientists from apprentices to hired hands has finally persuaded at least some postdocs to move explicitly from the now-outdated trade union model of academe, with a “union card” that no longer opens the way to a desired career, toward an industrial union model designed for large numbers of employees who need to negotiate job conditions with their single, even larger, employer. The old “union card” no longer provides Joe and Joan the Ph.D. scientist decent employment in academe. Perhaps their new union cards can.

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