Group items tagged

The following appeared on Bostonglobe.com, Apr 12, 2014 Adjunct faculty members are the working stiffs of academia. They can hold their own with tenured faculty on subjects ranging from analytic geometry to literary criticism. But they work for short money, often in the $3,000-$6,000 range per course. This is red meat for the Service Employees International Union, which has mounted successful efforts to unionize adjunct faculty at private universities, including American University and George Washington University. The current "Adjunct Action'' is focused on Northeastern University, with Boston University up next.

"As lecturers in the UK prepare for the UCU's marking boycott, US campuses are experiencing a surge of unionisation According to census figures, union membership in the US has fallen from 28 per cent to a record low of 11 per cent in less than 50 years. And if struggling unions can't even find new members in the automotive industry, on which they once famously had an iron grip, where can they. In universities, apparently. As American unions face embarrassing setbacks elsewhere, union activity at US universities is raging among full-time faculty in Illinois, part-time faculty in Washington DC and Boston, graduate research assistants in Michigan and even student athletes"