The Lecturers' Employee Organization/AFT (LEO) at the University of Michigan is back on the picket line. After staging a walkout a year ago before its first contract was ratified in June, these nontenure-track faculty carried signs through the snow on a cold day in February and again in March, proclaiming, "A Deal's a Deal" and insisting on contract compliance from a university that has been sluggish at best and defiant at worst.

The university has failed to honor a number of contract provisions: It has not established criteria for performance review, as agreed; will not reclassify workers whose responsibilities qualify them for an advanced title (and more pay); has threatened to pull back year-round health insurance to part-time professors; has tried to reclassify nearly 100 people out of the unit; and has been slow about addressing legitimate grievances.

"We're very, very discouraged," says Bonnie Halloran, LEO president. "It feels like we're in contract negotiations all over again."

Although some colleges in the university system have posted drafts of performance review criteria, the deadline for providing final criteria was last fall. The evaluations are necessary for career advancement and raises.

Job reclassification is another point of contention. Four job classifications differentiate among Lecturers I and II, whose primary responsibility is teaching, and Lecturers III and IV, who have additional responsibilities. Faculty whose work clearly puts them in the upper ranges have been refused reclassification.

For part-time lecturers, the biggest issue may be income-averaging, the current practice of spreading pay for two semesters throughout the calendar year--and being provided health insurance for the entire year as well. If income-averaging is abandoned, as the university has threatened, part-time workers could lose their insurance and be ineligible for Lecturer III or IV titles and their corresponding salaries and job security.

Finally, the university wants to reclassify about 100 people as clinical instructors, thereby barring them from union membership; LEO has agreed to table the issue until summer so that other points of the contract can be addressed.

"To some degree, all these problems are representative of how much change we were able to negotiate in our contract," says Halloran. Among dramatic differences: the new job classification system, uniform deadlines to notify faculty of what classes they'll teach each semester, required job posting, a new seniority system and a better system for instituting layoffs.

Union members already have put "tremendous effort" into implementing dues collection, and some controversial grievances have been resolved through compromise. But these baby steps are not enough to resolve a raft of unmet obligations. Informational picketing--juxtaposed with the Graduate Employees Organization walkout in March--and weekly meetings with administrators have failed to move matters quickly enough. "It's clearly foot-dragging," says Halloran. "If there was a sincere desire to take care of this, I think it could be handled." At press time, members were considering a job action if their contract is not honored. [Barbara McKenna]

April 20, 2005