How has the UAW has fought for the rights of international workers and on behalf of other science funding and social justice issues?
Through the Union we have won important workplace rights and protections in the post 9/11 climate. The UAW has also advocated for international workers to be able to freely choose their employment and opposes employer control over the H1B visa.
The UAW has also advocated for increased federal funding for research at Universities.
UAW is an endorser of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders working to create a clean energy economy, and a strong supporter of the historic Energy Independence and Security Act passed by Congress in 2007.
Stay informed about issues related to U.S. congressional research funding:
This fiscal year the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget sets a new record with its fifth consecutive flat or below-inflation budget. When national science funding decreases this extensively, this can have a major impact on the funding of scientific research at major universities like the University of California, which employs more postdocs than any other university system in the country. University workers with a Union will have a real say over how changes in funding affect them; workers without a Union will not.
A recent report talks about challenges facing new investigators and research universities as a whole given the current funding context:
Given this funding context, many postdocs find themselves having to make the difficult choice of pursuing the academic careers they truly want versus taking a job outside of academia which may provide better economic and professional opportunities. Dr. Joshua Boger talks about these difficulties and the implications for research universities in a new report entitled “Broken Pipeline:” “You can lose a generation of researchers pretty fast—in five or ten years. You create such a discouraging atmosphere they just go somewhere else instead of academic research. We don't have to lose 50,000 researchers, just 50 really good ones. Once it happens, we won't get those people back” (http://brokenpipeline.org).
