Profile

Bonnie Halloran: LEO’s Pride

by Marjorie Lynn

With her casually-styled brown hair, wire- rimmed glasses and minimally made-up face, Bonnie Halloran appears to be a “plain brown wrapper.” But this middle-aged, down-to-earth dynamo has led the three-campus, 1,200 member Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO) at The University of Michigan (U of M) for the past four years. She is one of just a handful of part-time faculty who lead unified locals that include both full-time and part-time temporary faculty.

At the 2004 national AFT convention, Halloran was widely and publically praised for her accomplishments on behalf of LEO for the unusually quick and successful work that began with organizing in late-2001, and led to a signed contract by mid-2004. Craig Smith is the Associate Director of AFT Higher Education division. He says that, while universities in California and New have locals with more members, “Bonnie is leading an adjunct union that’s unique in the Midwest....”

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Shoptalk

Equal Rights Legislation for Adjunct Professors

by Keith Hoeller

Since the 1970s, America�s colleges and universities have been increasing their use of low-wage, low benefit adjunct professors who teach without any job security. Nearly 500,000 now serve as apprentices to nowhere, without any hope of ever becoming masters in the guild of tenured professors. Yet despite the recent push to organize and represent adjuncts, there is little evidence that collective bargaining has made significant gains for them in the United States. Equality for adjuncts remains elusive, and even unionized adjuncts have contracts that are entirely separate�but unequal�to their full-time counterparts. In Unionization in the Academy: Visions and Realities (2003), Clark University philosophy professor Judith Wagner DeCew summarizes the conclusions of a study conducted by Gary Rhoades (Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor, 1998) in the following way:

�Rhoades concluded from his analysis of 183 faculty union contracts that these documents do not often protect, but actually further marginalize, part-time faculty�.Rhoades concludes that while the professional strategy of unionized faculty appears to be to contain the use of part-time faculty, the strategy backfires because the contracts ultimately encourage more use of part-time faculty members rather than less. Consequently, the national unions may claim to be advocating for part-time faculty, but the contracts do not show that they have made much progress� (p. 85).

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Lesko Blog

Happy Holidays

Posted: December 24th, 2008

I want to take a moment and wish everyone Happy Holidays! I'm spending the school break with my family at home. We're enjoying over 14 inches of snow at the moment by cross-country skiing, sledding, snowboarding (the boys, not me!) and building snow forts. 

We've already had a Harry Potter-a-thon, during which we watched movies 1-3 in one sitting, and then movies 4-5 the next afternoon. My family has concluded that the Sorting Hat would, most likely, place me in Slytherin, unless of course, I asked to be put in another of the houses at Hogwarts. I'm still not sure I agree, but hey, I am ambitious, and it would be foolish to deny that.  

We've also been listening to the books Eragon and Eldest on CD. I believe the author, Christopher Paolini, was 17 when he wrote Eragon. I've enjoyed the pair of fantasy novels much more than I thought I would. It's been very interesting to find the many similarities between the Harry Potter series and the Eragon series.

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