A Hire Education I am writing regarding the working conditions available to postdoctoral fellows, teaching assistants, readers and tutors. The primary difficulty in the working conditions of postdoctoral fellows, teaching assistants, readers and tutors is the tenuousness of the positions and the lack of guidelines for faculty employers. The lack of employer guidelines makes it easy for a employer to make unreasonable demands on employees. Further, the employees are usually in temporary positions, which can be terminated at the discretion of the employer. This gives the postdoctoral or student employee little protection from an abusive employer, a situation that is exacerbated by the postdoctoral fellow's and student's frequent reliance on the good opinion of their faculty employer for a successful career. Unfortunately, the academic world is rife with examples of abusive employment situations. Surely the academic community wishes to foster postdoctoral and student employment that mutually benefits the student and the faculty employer. Unfortunately, the power in this employer/employee relationship lies entirely with the employer, and without university support or collective bargaining rights the employee has little recourse in the face of abusive employment practices. It is all very well for UC President Atkinson to say that collective bargaining interferes with the educational objectives of T.A. appointments and disrupts collegial relationships between faculty members and graduate students, but unless those faculty members who desire collegial relationships with their student and postdoctoral employees are willing to abide by a set of guidelines for faculty employers that provide their employees with more job security and a method of redress from abusive employers, such a relationship will be tenuous at best. Lynn Nielsen-Bohlman, Ph.D. '94 Assistant Professor of Psychiatry Vanderbilt University