LEO represents non-tenure track
Lecs and LACs at the University of Michigan.
Bargaining Updates
Current Lecturer CBA
Current LAC (LEO-GLAM) CBA
Who we are
LEO stands for Lecturers’ Employee Organization (AFT Local 6244) and represents non-tenure track faculty on all three campuses of the University of Michigan across two bargaining units with two separate contracts. One unit is for Lecturers (Lecs), and the other represents GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums, which includes Librarians, Archivists, and Curators (LACs)).
We are a democratic organization run by members, mostly volunteers. Our leadership consists of Lecs and LACs elected by their colleagues. The right to collective bargaining empowers us to fight for the respect we deserve as teaching professionals and as researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs.
We fight alongside our sibling unions at the University of Michigan for better working conditions for all.
Our mission
By standing together through collective bargaining and political action, we build the economic, professional, social, and political power we need to ensure that we are delivering the highest quality of education at the University of Michigan. We remain committed to fighting for equity across all three campuses of this University, and for a future where there is no disparity between treatment of faculty or students in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, or Flint. Our contract victories affirm our community’s respect for the teaching profession, and for education as the primary goal of this University. We aim to strengthen public and government support for universal access to high-quality public education at all levels.
Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.
As a union, we seek to be part of a dynamic and democratic national labor movement, promoting local, national, and international labor solidarity. We believe in a movement that promotes democracy, equality, and justice in society at large, and that actively opposes discrimination.
Our history
U-M lecturers first voted to unionize in 2003 and won their first contract in 2004. We did this in response to the incredibly poor job security, inconsistent health coverage, and exploitative salaries that were the norm for lecturers at the time. LACs (Librarians, Archivists and Curators) organized a second bargaining unit (LEO-GLAM) in 2021 and ratified their first contract in 2022. What we do today rests on years of work by many brave union members—from the first conversations and membership cards in 2001, to the 2004 vote to unionize, to the many hard-fought contract campaigns we’ve engaged in. We’ve gone on strike once (2004) and voted to authorize strikes three times (2004, 2008, and 2018).
