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Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti, Michigan issued layoff notices to ten of its eleven full-time non-tenured faculty in the College of Education. Some have been with the university for decades. The layoffs are effective for the fall semester of 2014. No part-time faculty were laid off, reflecting the administration's alignment with a national trend toward less experienced, lower-salaried faculty. Those faculty who did not receive the layoff notice reported seeing the writing on the wall in terms of increased class sizes, increased work loads, and worsening conditions. .... Last month Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the two-tier system by Keith Hoeller was published. In it Hoeller, longtime adjunct professor of philosophy at Green River Community College in Washington, states, "one million professors now teach off the tenure track and make up 75 percent of all college professors. "Throughout the country, college administrators, often with the collaboration of academic unions, have gone to great lengths to keep their increasing numbers of adjunct faculty secret from students, parents, legislators, accreditors, foundations, and the public." Hoeller chronicles a "new academic labor system under which the explosion of graduate students and the abuse and overuse of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty is the most prominent characteristic of a new employment strategy sometimes referred to as the two- or multi-tiered labor system.

"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"