Because the Stakes Are So Small

President Obama just announced new rules in the US regarding overtime pay. The threshold for requiring overtime to be paid will be raised, from around $20000 to around $50000. It’s a big change, one I’ve mostly heard about with regards to academia, perhaps because those are the people whose job involves professing.

An unrelated internet controversy sheds some light on this: An article in Science recommending that new scientists work 17 hours a day and find a compliant wife who will put in all the unpaid labour to make it work. There’s too much wrong with that for me to do much more than point and laugh, but it’s a sign of the kind of hours that can be expected.

So the big kerfuffle concerns postdoc positions, because these are not students but are generally paid about the same as the janitorial staff… which, when you consider the unpaid overtime, works out to below minimum wage. When the new rules were announced some postdocs assumed that this meant they’d either be eligible for paid overtime or their base pay would be increased to the new minimum. Assumed, of course, because that’s what the law requires.

Dr. Isis rains on that parade a little:

“Bargaining and other such labor tomfoolery only works when you can hold the man by the balls and twist. Postdocs aren’t in such a position.”

Rules or not, there is still a glut of people who both want to be professors and are highly qualified, so naturally some form of hazing is instituted to whittle the numbers down. In academia, this takes the form of starvation pay, a sleep schedule that will kill the unprepared, and generally a decade delay in the onset of adulthood.

It reminds me of the Firefighting jobs that require applicants to disable all their social media accounts. Sure, it might be illegal, but there are a hundred other applicants and at least one of them won’t complain…

Dr. Isis uses a different analogy, medical residents. They too get terrible pay and terrible hours in exchange for a chance at a prize at the end. But there are some crucial differences between medical residencies and postdoc positions. Namely, the size of the prize at the end. Except for a few elite private schools, professor pay is nothing to write home about. My semi-skilled blue collar job is not only better paid than postdocs, it’s better than adjuncts, than tenure-track professors, and even a little better than tenured professors.

It was a sobering realization a few years ago when I first figured that out. At the time I assumed it was just because of the overtime. But if academics are working those kind of hours, maybe the real difference is that my overtime is paid.

I don’t know if there are any good solutions here. Intentionally distorting the labour market is the sort of thing that doesn’t succeed often. Just about the only thing I can think of is harsh punishment for any schools that try to fudge the overtime requirement… but any postdocs reporting would have pyrrhic victories as they would likely find themselves unemployable in academia.

They might be better off that way.