Labor educator Lynn Feekin to retire

Labor educator Lynn Feekin will retire April 1 after 21 years at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon.

Feekin, 64, helped train a generation of union staff and leaders in Oregon. She worked with unions to prepare for collective bargaining and develop strategic plans, and she organized LERC’s Collective Bargaining Institute, an annual week-long training at the Menucha Retreat Center in Corbett. She also did research for Change to Win labor federation, Communications Workers of America, and the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, and was part of a strategic planning effort with the 325,000-member California Teachers Association.

“I feel really privileged that I’ve been in a department that really focuses on trying to build a strong labor movement,” Feekin said.

Feekin grew up in Iowa. Her father was a railroad worker and her mother worked for a department store. She was the first in her family to go to college, and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from University of Northern Iowa in 1972.

She became involved with organized labor when — as a worker at a factory making prefabricated houses for hogs — she helped a campaign to unionize with Machinists Local 1728. She then served on the union bargaining committee. Through her union, she learned about a graduate assistantship at University of Iowa Labor Center that was sponsored by the Iowa Federation of Labor. She applied, was accepted, and studied industrial relations at the University of Iowa. From 1976 to 1984, she worked at University of Iowa Labor Center as an instructor and later director. Then for 10 years, she taught labor studies at Indiana University. She also served as executive director at the Calumet Project for Industrial Jobs, a non-profit in East Chicago, Indiana, that was formed to contend with thousands of layoffs from factory and steel mill closures.

She moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1993 to accept a temporary position at LERC, and was hired to a permanent position in 1994. There she also served as co-chair of the Eugene-Springfield chapter of Jobs with Justice, and was a member of the Eugene Mayor’s Sustainable Business Initiative Task Force in 2005 and 2006.