Caleb Rounds spends much of his working day alone in a windowless cell of a room, conducting scientific plant research in near-total darkness. It’s just as he’d like it. Even the light switches in the UMass lab where he works have all been installed upside down in an effort to maintain the darkness and prevent forgetful colleagues from ruining hours of work.
Not that he gets many visitors—or wants them. In 2007, Rounds earned his Ph.D. in plant biology at UMass-Amherst, and soon after, he took a postdoctorate research position with the lab in which he’d completed his studies. While he’s an affable fellow in his down time, at work he is devoted to his experiments. Until he was recently lured out into the public realm, he barely knew the other postdoctoral researchers on the floor he worked on, much less those in the rest of his building.
For weeks prior to the day the Advocate visited him, Rounds had been injecting a dye into pollen cells. When successful, he’d watch the results on his computer monitor, which was connected to his high-strength microscope. Pollen grows very quickly, and the dye helps Rounds watch and measure this growth using different light spectrums. Injecting the dye requires a micro-fine needle controlled with a pair of knobs that allow Rounds to delicately pierce the cell’s membrane cleanly, without rupturing it or letting in any of the fluid in which the cell is swimming.
Or, at least, this is the hope.
Pollen cells don’t sit still and even a micro-fine needle seems large and clumsy when magnified. For Rounds to complete his project, he needs, in part, to find a repeatable process by which other scientist can replicate his procedures. He confides that on bad days, there’s a lot of bad language. Good days require a lot of trial and error—not to mention funding, equipment and facilities to do the research.
Research like this is vital to big universities with science programs, like UMass. Not only do busy, successful labs attract the best students and teachers, but they are a financial resource. As the title of a March 19 Daily Hampshire Gazette cover story read, “Revenue Stream—UMass hedges its bets, hoping research can be its cash cow.”
Rounds and his postdoc colleagues have a hand in writing the grants they work on; often they apply for and execute those grants themselves. As much as they rely on the school to keep them employed, the school relies on their work to win the funds that pay for their salaries and much of their overhead. Until recently, though, job security for postdoc researchers was entirely at the discretion of the professor for whom they worked. Also until recently, the idea of someone having a career as a postdoc was absurd. UMass, in fact, has a policy of laying off postdocs who have worked more than eight years, regardless of performance. It’s a fate to which Rounds has seen colleagues succumb.
“It used to be that when you got your Ph.D. and you published, you’d get a postdoc position somewhere. Work there for a year or two doing research and publish another paper, and you’d get a professorship,” said Rounds. “That’s just not true anymore.”
Increasingly, as universities cut positions and struggle in the tight economy, professorships have become a rarer commodity—musical chairs with fewer chairs and more players. A colleague ofRounds’ had only recently gotten a professorship after five years of searching, though he’d published over 16 papers. As the need, opportunity and funding for research grows, some scientists with their Ph.D.s find themselves less interested in teaching and more interested in focusing fulltime on lab work. It’s created a class of scientist that’s essential to the American scientific industry, but for whom there is no formal recognition or job protection. In Europe, these life-long professional university researchers are recognized and have professions seen as part of the institutions they work for and for which researchers vie. Here the cutthroat competition for professorships is seen by some as a Darwinian contest that provides universities with only the fittest professors.
Some think postdocs who don’t become professors should just move on.
Last summer, representatives from the United Auto Workers (UAW) managed to pry Caleb Rounds away from his dark lab, thinking that maybe with his help they could find unity and job protection for UMass postdoctoral researchers.
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Earlier this year, a large majority of postdoctoral researchers from three of the five University of Massachusetts campuses (Boston, Dartmouth and Amherst) agreed to have UMass PRO/UAW (UMass Postdoctoral Researchers Organize/United Auto Workers) represent them as a collective bargaining unit. Lowell postdocs are already part of a bargaining unit that covers grant-paid employees, and UMass-Worcester resisted initial attempts to form one. Nationally, the PRO/UAW union is the fourth such union to form in order to protect the rights of postdoctoral researchers. Negotiations with the university will soon begin over wages, health insurance, job security, grievance procedures and other issues these employees face in the workplace.
As a graduate student at UMass, Rounds had been part of a union, and he said he’d missed it: “[Being part of a union] changes everything; you have a different dynamic with your employer.”
Currently, Rounds has a good working relationship with his supervisor, whom he describes as “an exceptional person.” Though he himself doesn’t feel he’s been treated unfairly, Rounds felt belonging to a union as a postdoc would give him more security, clearer recourse if he ever had a grievance, and better leverage in negotiating issues such as the eight-year job limit and health care. He became a member of PRO/UAW and took part in getting the word out at the other campuses. Once he got to talking to his postdoc colleagues, he found they had a lot of common concerns.
“For most of us it wasn’t about pay. We get paid something close to a first-year teacher: around $30-$40,000 a year,” Rounds explained. “Some fields may pay more. It’s not too terrible, though it’s not commensurate with our training. Health care was the biggest issue. For family, it’s $1,400 a month, which was out of the question at my salary.” Rounds and his two sons are able to get coverage through his wife’s job, and he considers himself lucky. “A lot of others,” he remarked, “aren’t so lucky.”
Using the card check method to identify potential union members (a controversial method only approved in one state other than Massachusetts as proponents struggle for its adoption nationally), the PRO/UAW members found supporters quickly. Though he’s uncertain of the specifics, Rounds remembers getting near to the 50 percent necessary across the campuses in about a month’s time. There was stiff resistance from Worcester, but eventually on the Amherst campus, approximately 85 percent of the cards they had handed out were returned marked positively for the union.
“When the union folks met with the university, shortly after getting the cards back,” Rounds said, “the university said they were prepared to just recognize the union without any further formalities.”
The news came as a bit of a shock to many, including Rounds, who had thought it likely the University might challenge the card check and ask for a secret ballot election. The quick recognition meant that Rounds had fulfilled the duties he’d committed to, and he was happy to let others take seats on the contract negotiation committee so he could return to his workplace in the dark.
