Illustrative: Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

Experts told the US Congress on Tuesday that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their compulsory membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.

Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) union.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), which was represented among the expert witnesses, has spoken publicly before about a litany of alleged injustices to which UE officials subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University.

At MIT, the group said in August, “union officers” aided a riotous mob which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”

During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for NRTW, said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he says quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell University PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who testified before the subcommittee on Tuesday about his own tribulations and a climate of hatred which evades being redressed because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.

“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”

He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”

Rubinstein told The Algemeiner that he is a Democrat who supports many of the causes for which unions advocate but that what he described as UE’s support for Hamas leaves him no choice but to seek every avenue for disassociating with it.

“As a Jew, I cannot support an organization which spends its time not advocating for wages and health care but rather for ‘intifada revolution,'” he said. “The union antisemitism is empowered by the Cornell administration’s persistent weakness and consistent reneging on its promises to defend the rights of Jewish students.”

Rubinstein added that Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff came close to exempting students from paying UE dues but abandoned the policy change after its members threatened to strike and thereby disrupt university operations.

“The threat of being terminated, the demands for money, and the constant harassment that others and I have experienced from UE would have never been possible had it not been for the weakness of Cornell leadership,” he added.

Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.

In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.

That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.

“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.

Kyle Koeppel Mann, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, and Joseph McCartin, professor and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, also testified at Tuesday’s hearing.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.