• CAREER FEATURE

US postdocs on strike: how will demands for higher wages be met?

Cost-of-living pressures, a dismal job market and stagnant US federal budgets are leaving lab leaders scrambling to balance the books.
By
  1. Amanda Heidt

    1. Amanda Heidt is a science writer in Moab, Utah.

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Sharona Gordon can still recall her time as a postdoctoral biophysicist 30 years ago. She was pregnant with her second child, a son, and so it was a fulfilling and exciting chapter in her life. The laboratory she was working in at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle was well funded, and her starting salary was above what was then the average, at US$18,600. Gordon’s husband was a full-time student who also tutored, and they were able to buy a house for their growing family for $130,500, with a mortgage payment of just $600 a month. “Today, my son is a postdoc in the same lab that I was [in], and the average house in Seattle is now 14 times his pay,” she says — his salary started at $53,760. “So obviously things have taken a turn.”

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Nature 621, 431-433 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02848-3

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