On 1 May 1886, the city of Chicago ground to a halt. 30,000 workers withdrew their labour and took part in peaceful demonstrations as part of a nationwide strike, demanding an eight-hour workday. Although 1 May was quickly adopted as International Workers’ Day to commemorate the strike and advocate for workers’ rights worldwide, it took decades for the eight-hour day to become the norm. Today, many physicists — particularly early career researchers — still work longer hours than that. But they have started to unionize.

Over the past generation, global trade union membership has seen a steady decline1, but academia bucks this trend, particularly for graduate students. In the USA, the number of unionized graduate students increased by 133% between 2012 and 20242. This can be partly attributed to a change in law that enabled students at private universities to join unions; indeed, whether graduate researchers are considered students or employees varies widely between institutions and countries. But the number of unionized faculty has also grown, pointing at wider dissatisfaction with working conditions in the university sector.

When workers took to the streets in the 19th and early 20th centuries, most scientists were comfortably ensconced in their laboratories and libraries. Scientific research was the pursuit of the elite: a vocation rather than work. Since then, scientific research has become more professionalized but the ideal of science as not ‘just a job’ persists in many parts of academia, which has led to a culture of working long hours, for little pay. According to a 2022 Nature survey, over 60% of PhD students reported difficulties in maintaining work–life balance, financial worries after graduation and uncertainty about future employment and career prospects3. Nearly half said that they worked over 50 hours a week.

Many young researchers are willing to accept these conditions in the hope of securing a permanent position at the end of it. But a PhD or a postdoc (or indeed, several) do not guarantee this. In China, the number of faculty positions are less than half of what they were 20 years ago while the number of domestic PhD graduates has seen a 4-fold increase4. Include the international graduates who are returning with foreign degrees and hoping to get faculty jobs, and the numbers don’t add up. Similar trends can be seen globally, and although many PhD graduates take on jobs in industry or other sectors, a substantial number end up hopping between temporary postdoc contracts, fighting for a handful of permanent jobs; in the UK, these precarious contracts make up 66% of research staff5.

In this landscape, it is unsurprising that the union movement in academia has been growing. In recent years, the Universities and Colleges Union in the UK has been fighting cuts to pensions, cuts to funding, and against zero-hours contracts (where the worker is not guaranteed minimum hours of work) for teaching. In the Netherlands, the AOb education union has negotiated a collective agreement with universities over working hours, pay structure and pensions6. Issues such as the gender pay gap, racial justice and harassment at work have been taken up by the American Association of University Professors.

These union movements are by nature confined to specific countries, all of which have their own labour laws and work cultures. Yet most physics communities are international. In addition to local union work, there is a need to holistically consider the academic system within which universities are embedded and think of ways to address the concerns of researchers at a community level. For example, some communities, such as high-energy physics, have coordinated to have common decision dates for postdoc job applications, simplifying the job hunting process for applicants7.

On this International Workers’ Day, we invite our readers to consider how their research community could collaborate more to improve the working conditions of their scientists.