The LEO News

From the AFT LeaderNet: 

Sometimes the loudest voice of all is the one that makes hardly a sound. Like the rustle of ballots piling up for the Henry Ford Community College Adjunct Faculty Organization (AFO) when the Michigan Employment Relations Commission counted them up May 7. The vote was 334 to 41 out of a unit of 580 faculty.

The AFO began organizing less than a year ago, dismayed by impossibly low pay scales that maxed out at $1,700 a course, lack of job security and health insurance, and no access to office space for preparation work or to meet with students. The adjuncts sought help from AFT Michigan, the state affiliate of the full-time faculty local at Henry Ford.

“The only way to get salaries that at least match other area colleges is through collective bargaining,” says AFT Michigan president David Hecker . . . .

AFT Michigan is holding its 70th Convention this weekend (May 2-3) at the Sheraton Hotel (formerly the Hotel Ponchatrain) in Detroit. Among those LEO members expected to attend as delegates are Jim Anderson, George Moss and Alta Parsons (Flint); Catherine Daligga and Ian Robinson (Ann Arbor); and Sheryl Edwards (Dearborn).

From Inside AFT:

Twenty-five years ago, the landmark A Nation at Risk report put school reform on the front burner and summoned a nation to action. On this important anniversary, AFT president Edward J. McElroy urges Americans to finish what we started. “Twenty-five years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released A Nation at Risk, an honest but bleak assessment of America’s education system,” McElroy writes. “The anniversary undoubtedly will inspire numerous reflections on the report—that it was ‘important,’ ‘bold’ and a ‘wake-up call.’ And then, if this commemoration is like many others since the report’s release, it will be back to business as usual—ignoring the commission’s recommendations, flirting with faddish education ‘reforms,’ and making shamefully inadequate progress toward addressing the very serious, and very solvable, problems afflicting American education. A Nation at Risk sparked a revolution, but that revolution has not been focused or sustained. A quarter century after its call to action, it is time to get back on course.”

From AFT News:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) have introduced legislation to amend the National Labor Relations Act to grant collective bargaining rights to teaching and research assistants at private universities and colleges. The bill would reverse a 2004 National Labor Relations Board decision that took away those rights.

Kennedy and Miller, who are the chairs of their respective education committees in the Senate and House, introduced the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act on April 17. The bill amends the definition of employee under the NLRA to explicitly include teaching and research assistants at private universities.

Read more . . .

Citing progress in talks between striking workers and American Axle, the UAW has called off tomorrow’s planned rally in Detroit.

UAW members and supporters will rally at 11:30 am on April 18 at Detroit’s Hart Plaza to support striking workers at American Axle. More than 3,500 UAW members from UAW Locals 235, 262 and 2093 in Michigan and UAW Locals 424 and 826 in New York have been on strike since Feb. 26 to protest unfair labor practices.

For more information on the rally, click here.

For more information on the strike, click here.