How much is a postdoc worth?

An interesting excerpt from EMBO reports

"They are the perfect workforce—young, mobile and fully prepared to work the sort of hours that would immediately send labourers in any industrialized country out on strike. They are willing to move around the world from one assignment to the next and, last but not least, they come cheap. These are not poor, migrant, manual workers, desperate to earn money to send home to their families in less-developed countries. This perfect workforce is an army of highly skilled, well-educated young professionals, often with more than 10 years of rigorous training at top universities worldwide: they are postdoctoral fellows. These underpaid, hard-working labourers represent the most creative members of the academic research community and possibly the most valuable intellectual capital of today's knowledge-based societies.

There is also a striking discrepancy between their value and their rights. While politicians and economists continue to stress the immense value of research in the natural sciences and the knowledge gleaned from it, this seems to mean little when it comes to funding the people who do the bulk of the work. To Sydney Cambridge, an American postdoc working at the Max-Planck-Institute for neurological science in Munich, Germany, 'it is incomprehensible that you spend 10 years of your life educating yourself and then you are earning the same amount as a bus driver'. He feels that although his salary is adequate for his own personal needs, it does not reflect the level of training he received and is too low. Indeed, the meagre level of postdoc salaries has been a recurring theme over the past few decades, but it is only now that science is beginning to feel the squeeze. The number of students opting to study natural sciences is decreasing, and senior scientists and politicians fear that academic research will soon face a real labour shortage.



A quote from an interviewee
'It is incomprehensible that you spend 10 years of your life educating yourself and then you are earning the same amount as a bus driver'

Destined to be poor forever....