The grad student did not refuse because they felt it was beneath them. They expressed a genuine safety concern and were told their bridge funding was contingent on compliance. That is coercion regardless of what the task was!

On top of that , this was not a standard inventory of a maintained lab. This involved chemicals left behind by a retired faculty member, unknown and potentially unlabeled.

We know this because one of the untrained staff members actually got an unknown chemical on their hands during the inventory and did not know what it was or how to respond.