2 Wins for Academic Labor
Wisconsin's budget bill, signed into law on Monday, gives collective bargaining rights to academic employees in the University of Wisconsin system, including tenured and tenure-track faculty members, part-time and full-time lecturers, adjuncts and others. The Wisconsin branch of the American Federation of Teachers lobbied for the law and is expected to now move ahead with organizing campaigns. Those drives would be campus-by-campus, and an AFT spokesman declined to say which institutions might be first. Also on Monday, the AFT announced that instructors and adjuncts at Western Michigan University voted, 207-29, to unionize with an AFT affiliate called the Professional Instructors Organization.
