A group of lab technicians and manufacturing staff at Kestrel Biologics has begun quietly gathering signatures in support of a union election, according to three employees involved in the effort, a development that would make the Foundry Row biotech firm the first in Bellwater's growing biotech cluster to face an organizing campaign.
The organizing effort, which employees said began roughly four months ago among manufacturing technicians on Kestrel’s production floor, has since expanded to include some laboratory support staff, according to two technicians who spoke on condition their names not be used because they feared retaliation. Both said the effort was prompted less by pay, which they described as competitive with other regional biotech employers, and more by inconsistent shift scheduling and concerns about safety staffing levels as the company has rapidly expanded headcount.
Growing pains behind the hiring numbers
“Everybody outside the building hears that we’re hiring a hundred and fifty people and thinks that’s an unambiguously good thing, and it is, but it also means the floor has felt like it’s running to catch up with itself for over a year,” one of the technicians said. “We’ve had nights where a production run had two technicians on shift instead of the three the safety protocol calls for, because somebody called out and there wasn’t a backup.”
Kestrel Biologics Chief Executive Elena Marchetti, who announced the company’s $64 million funding round and plans to nearly double its Bellwater workforce, said she was aware of informal organizing conversations but disputed characterizations of chronic understaffing on safety-sensitive shifts. “We take any staffing shortfall on a production run seriously, and if there have been isolated nights where we fell short of protocol, I want to know about them specifically so we can fix them,” Marchetti said. “But I don’t think that reflects where we are as a company generally, especially given how fast we’ve been adding headcount.”
Our door is open to any employee who wants to talk about scheduling or staffing concerns directly. I’d rather solve this at the table than read about it in a union petition.
Elena Marchetti, CEO, Kestrel Biologics
A first test for the biotech cluster
No union has been formally named as the organizing effort’s sponsor, and the technicians involved said the campaign remains in an early, informal stage focused on gauging interest rather than filing for a formal election. Labor organizing has historically had a limited footprint in Bellwater’s newer biotech and startup economy, concentrated instead in the city’s legacy manufacturing sector, where workers at Bellwater Steel & Fastener Co. have pushed back publicly against recent layoffs.
Dr. Samuel Iyer, the Bellwater State University labor economist who has studied the region’s shifting employment base, said an organizing effort at a biotech firm like Kestrel would mark a notable turn for a sector that has largely operated without unionized labor. “The old manufacturing economy here had a strong union tradition. The new biotech economy mostly hasn’t, partly because it’s so new and partly because a lot of the workforce came out of university labs rather than union shops,” Iyer said. “If this goes anywhere formal, it would be a genuinely new chapter for how labor organizes in this city’s growth industries.”
One of the technicians involved in the effort said the group has not decided whether to pursue a formal election or instead press the company directly for scheduling and staffing changes without seeking outside union representation. “Some of us just want three people on the floor when the protocol says three people, and if the company fixes that tomorrow, a lot of us walk away from this conversation entirely,” the technician said. “Other people in the group want something more permanent than a promise.”
Marchetti said the company has scheduled a series of listening sessions with production-floor staff over the coming weeks and has asked its human resources team to review staffing levels on overnight and weekend shifts specifically. She said she does not believe a union is necessary to address the concerns being raised. “Our door is open to any employee who wants to talk about scheduling or staffing concerns directly,” Marchetti said. “I’d rather solve this at the table than read about it in a union petition.”
- Organizing effort began roughly four months ago among production technicians
- Concerns center on scheduling and safety staffing, not primarily pay
- No formal union has been named as a sponsor of the campaign
- Company has scheduled listening sessions with production staff
The technician who spoke about the safety staffing concerns said the group plans to keep gathering signatures while giving the company’s listening sessions a chance to produce concrete changes before deciding whether to escalate. “Nobody wants to blow up a company that’s given a lot of us our first real career job,” the technician said. “We just want it to be a place that runs the way it says it runs on the recruiting slides.”
Nakamura, whose chamber has convened quarterly meetings between Foundry Row biotech employers and workforce-training providers, said she had not previously heard organizing concerns raised at those sessions and was surprised by how quickly the effort had spread among Kestrel’s floor staff. She said she plans to raise the topic carefully at the chamber’s next meeting, given that other biotech employers in the room, including Ridgeline Therapeutics, will likely be watching how Kestrel’s situation resolves before deciding how to handle similar concerns in their own facilities.