LEO Officers

2006-2008

www.leoUnion.org

Bonnie Halloran, President, has been active in the union for several years and is a driving force in its formation and development. Bonnie was the Chair of the Dearborn Organizing Committee during 2002-03’s successful membership drive, and then served as Interim President of LEO. She was elected to a two-year term as the first LEO President in 2004. Bonnie explains that she “became involved in LEO because I think our meager compensation is a joke, especially since the University depends on lecturers for teaching the core classes students are required to take.”

Bonnie, who calls herself a “classic example of a ‘Roads’ Scholar,” has carried a teaching schedule not unusual for many LEO members.  She regularly taught one or two classes each term at the Dearborn campus, where she is an Lecturer II in Anthropology, and  added three to five more classes to her teaching load each semester as she traveled  the “roads” to Henry Ford Community College, Schoolcraft College, and Central Michigan University.    “This heavy teaching and traveling schedule was the only way I could earn enough money to justify my academic career,” she explains.

Bonnie has dedicated her efforts with LEO to bringing balance to the current inequitable employment scene.  She says, “The University depends on part time lecturers, but pays them poverty level wages.  I am also concerned about the impact of this system on higher education in general, and the PhD job market in particular.”

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Kirsten Herold, Vice President (formerly Co-chair of the LEO Campus Council in Ann Arbor), has taught in the English Department in Ann Arbor since 1992. "I originally got involved in LEO because I was fed up with the secretive hiring practices in my department,” she says.  Kirsten became more involved with LEO as she talked to members of other departments and programs and realized “how much lecturers across campus have in common and also how much our circumstances differ.”  Kirsten says she felt challenged to participate when she learned that “lecturers in Dearborn and Flint make about 40% of the wages [earned by those on the Ann Arbor campus] for teaching the same courses.  That just seems shameful and embarrassing.” 

  Kirsten defines LEO’s struggle as a fight against “the increasing casualization of labor nation-wide.  In both the private and public sector, work is increasingly being done by contingent labor who typically work for low pay, receive poor or nonexistent benefits, and have no job security.” 

  She believes that “a strong nationwide labor movement is our best bet for reversing this trend” and vows to work her hardest to “ensure us a just contract that reflects the contribution we make to this university.  We want lecturers at other universities to say, ‘We want what they got at Michigan.’”

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Jim Anderson, Chair of the LEO Campus Council in Flint, and webmaster and editor of the LEO website, had no ambitions to leadership when he joined LEO.  “I was enthusiastic,” he says, “but I figured I’d be whistling ‘Solidarity Forever’ from the back of the room while other people did the leading.” As it turned out, Anderson has been active in the organization almost since the day he signed his membership card.“I believe in the cause, so I helped out. That’s how it started for me.”

Jim views “low wages and lack of job security for non tenure-track faculty as major issues” that need to be addressed and resolved at the bargaining table. Having worked for many years as an adjunct lecturer, he understands the “tenuous nature of adjunct employment and the stress that comes from trying to meld part-time jobs into a career.” Respect is another key issue for Jim: “The institution has systematically undervalued the contributions of lecturers to such an extent that it is insulting. That’s something I want to change.”

Jim currently is a full-time lecturer in the English Department on the Flint campus where he also manages the computerized writing classroom.

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Ian Robinson, Co-chair of the LEO Campus Council in Ann Arbor, initially became involved “out of solidarity with fellow lecturers in the Residential College who deserved much better treatment than they were getting.” 

  Awareness of the “dramatic growth of ‘contingent’ or ‘contract’ labor nationally” made Ian realize that “LEO is at the cutting edge of a struggle that will determine the character of higher education and the quality of undergrad education in public universities for the next generation.”  He wants the University to stand out as a “positive example of where we should be going, just as we were in the civil rights days and are [today] with affirmative action and our code of conduct on the rights of workers producing sports apparel that bear the UM logo.”

  Currently Ian teaches in the Residential College’s Social Science program and in the Sociology Department on the Ann Arbor campus.  He also is Co-Director of the Labor and Global Change program at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.  His teaching and research “center on the interaction effects among economic globalization, organized and unorganized labor, inequality and democracy.”  

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Sheryl Edwards is Chair of the LEO Campus Council in Dearborn.  Additionally, she serves on the Constitution Committee and is a staff member for LEO.  Active in LEO because of her concern for the University's students, Sheryl believes "a strong union with committed members will work to better the working conditions under which adjuncts operate, and therefore improve the quality of education of students."

   A Lecturer II in Political Science, Sheryl teaches Comparative Government/ Politics, American Government, and International Relations. A dedicated teacher, Sheryl notes that the current employment conditions for lecturers are difficult, not only for the teachers, but also for the students.  "My first duty is to my students; they deserve the most dedicated, enthusiastic, and informed instructors in the classroom.  When lecturers have to run from campus to campus, as many of our instructors do, when they have to piece together a living wage from different jobs, when they have no office in which to meet students, this has a negative impact on the institution and the students it is designed to serve." 

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