Approximately 2,400 postdocs and research scientists/engineers at the University of Washington have on been on strike since Wednesday. Similar to UW librarians who were poised to go on strike in January, postdocs and researchers are fighting for higher wages and benefits, as well as cost of living adjustments in Seattle, a city that has one of the highest costs of living in the United States.
The strike was called by United Auto Workers Local 4121, which was formed after a campaign among the postdocs and researchers by the UAW in 2019. This section of university workers are salaried staff, generally all with graduate level education, and who provide vital services to the university including performing research alongside professors and students, as well as maintaining and operating laboratories, machine shops and numerous other facilities at the institution.
At the same time, they are not able to afford to live in the city. A postdoc’s starting salary is just under $54,000 a year, and only exceeds $60,000 after five years of work, about $30 an hour. In contrast, a living wage in Seattle is somewhere between $40 and $60 an hour, depending on the neighborhood. Moreover, these workers often have a great deal of student loan debt; a master’s degree on average costs $80,000.
One of the key triggers for the strike is that as of the beginning of this year, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries mandated that salaried employees who are overtime-exempt make at...
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