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darth_avocado

I read the pattern and what is being described, is not exclusive to academia. It is a typical workplace.

A few lost jobs and horrible bosses later I can summarize the experience as follows:

1. Bullying is legal. Unless it’s provable that it is based on one of the protected classes.

2. Because it is legal, companies side with the aggressor to deny everything and absolve themselves from liabilities.

3. Bystanders rarely help you. They may show solidarity, but will not step in on official channels.

4. Lawyers are expensive and it’s very hard to pursue any claims.

5. Documentation is very hard because modern workforce is trained on how to not get sued (unless someone is really stupid)

6. Some laws like “two party consent” for recording that is meant to protect privacy, has the unintended consequences of enabling abuse.

TLDR; harassment is legal and okay. Workers have limited protections.

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It may be significantly worse in research:

1. PIs are under incredible pressure themselves

2. PIs are as a rule not formally trained in management, nor have they tended to "apprentice" in middle-management positions

3. Research is heavily reputation-based, which creates huge power disparities between employers and employees: lab employees need references from their employers, who can withhold them for capricious reasons

4. All of these factors also applied to the PI themselves, when they were starting their career, so it's normed; PIs may see it as a form of "dues-paying"

These dynamics are not in fact present in most ordinary market jobs. The jobs where the dynamics are at play --- say, as an assistant to a producer at a media company --- are notorious for it.

Indeed, while I don't want to diminish the cost and disruption of walking out of a job, it's much less likely to have long repercussions in industry than academia. In all of the industry jobs that I've never held, nobody has ever asked me for a letter of recommendation, and I don't think any of my employers have even checked my references. Also, changing jobs in industry without the blessing of your current employer, even after a brief tenure, raises no eyebrows.

The situation is even worse for grad students, who leave empty-handed if they walk out. I had a great advisor, but I also heard horror stories from friends.

I'd say for postdocs it's subtly different, if not necessarily better, than you suggest. With the kind of move we're talking about here, people will often (have to) move out of academia altogether. It's just too rare to find a position that you can transition into smoothly at short notice, and the young academic lifestyle doesn't allow for building up a lot of savings. The burnt bridges to your previous lab won't matter much in industry or government and your experience will typically be valued, but the price is that you are walking away from a career path that might have been your first choice.

What really worries me is that everybody who ends up a PI has been through this harrowing process, so it perpetuates itself; just broken people breaking people. A dramatic way to put it, I guess, but I don't know what else you can say about a PI demanding someone come into a lab on the same day as their appendectomy.

As a once broken PhD student and now early PI, je refuse to perpetuate the shattering. I'm still figuring it out, but i can it is very much at the core of my work.

From what I'm aware, two party consent laws usually have exceptions for when a person feels like they are threatened or in danger in some way

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