Frequently asked questions

No. 'Union' refers to a professional community and marketplace. The CRA Union is not a labor union and does not provide collective bargaining.

No. CRAs are independent contractors. The CRA Union facilitates matching, communication, and payment. It is not the CRA's employer.

Nothing to join, post, search, match, or message — for either CRAs or sponsors, with no subscriptions or per-seat fees. A fee applies only when work is contracted through the platform: the sponsor pays the CRA's rate plus a 10% CRA Union fee, and the CRA receives their full quoted rate. Example: on an $85/hr rate, the sponsor pays $93.50/hr and the CRA still receives $85/hr — the fee is added on top, never taken out of the CRA's rate.

Each CRA–opportunity pair is scored across professional qualifications, logistics, and stated preferences (geography, availability, experience, therapeutic area, phases, visit types, systems, certifications, languages, travel, engagement, rate, and verification). Every recommendation shows a clear 'Why this is a match' breakdown. Sensitive personal attributes are never used.

For planning value and savings estimates, each monitoring visit is modeled as 10 hours of non-travel effort — 8h onsite, 1h prep, 1h trip-report writing — plus round-trip travel based on how far the CRA is from the site: ~2h for a CRA Union Local CRA (under 50 mi) for a 12-hour visit, 4h under 100 mi (14h), 8h under 300 mi (18h), 14h under 1,000 mi (24h), and ~20h cross-country over 1,000 mi (30h). These are estimates only — CRAs bill their actual hours, and travel is logged as its own timesheet line. Sourcing local CRAs is what drives the sponsor savings: a local CRA (~12h/visit) instead of an out-of-region one (~24h/visit) saves ~12 billable hours per visit.

Two ways. First, a flat 10% platform fee instead of the much larger markup a traditional CRO or staffing agency adds to contracted CRA labor. Second, by sourcing CRAs local to each site, you minimize billable travel versus staffing sites with out-of-region CRAs — often the larger saving on multi-site studies. Your dashboard and each project show both, realized (from payments) and projected (across contracted engagements).

No. Your precise address is stored privately and is never shown in public browse or sponsor search results. You control your overall profile visibility.

We collect the minimum necessary, separate public, network, organization-private, and admin-only data, and keep an audit trail of sensitive changes. Do not upload PHI or confidential sponsor documents.

Yes. Set visibility to Public, Network (verified sponsors only), or Private in your profile editor.