. In this way, fossil fuel research funding has become an issue of labor. When researchers agree to produce outputs for the university, that is who they are promising to work for, not the funders. Researchers should not be forced or even allowed to produce biased data because of their funders. Student and faculty unions should consider fossil-free research and funding transparency as labor conditions.
Funding transparency is necessary for researchers to understand who they are really working for. Student researchers are commonly brought onto faculty projects or dissertation research to simply collect data and never interact with the project funder, causing them to unknowingly contribute to biased or unethical research. However, funding transparency is
. Banning fossil fuel funding is the only way to prevent the exploitation of university laborers for the work of the fossil fuel industry, because, knowingly or not, any dealing with the industry isfor them. It is also important to note that researchers are often grad students and university faculty, whose livelihoods depend on producing research — they should not have to put their livelihoods at risk if they refuse to produce biased or interest-conflicting research.
It is time for students to self-identify as the laborers that they are. Cooper says that “it goes beyond the union as a vehicle when you start building a class consciousness and a direct-action culture in a university.
, organized at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1960s, advocated against the Vietnam War alongside increased wages and representation. Similarly, there is historical precedent for organizing against industry funding of university research. Though not a union, Students for a Democratic Society behaved as one, defending students as workers on college campuses and