Jewish MIT graduate student forced to pay dues to anti-Israel GSU union will testify alongside National Right to Work Foundation staff attorney

Washington, DC (July 9, 2024) – Today, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Ph.D. student Will Sussman, who is receiving free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation in filing federal anti-discrimination charges against union bosses on campus, is testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Sussman is testifying alongside veteran Foundation staff attorney Glenn Taubman, who is providing free legal representation to Sussman and other MIT graduate students challenging forced-dues demands from the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU-UE, an affiliate of the United Electrical Workers union).

The hearing, being held by Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) in the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), was called to focus on how union bosses have used their government-granted powers to force Jewish and other employees to associate with and fund unions – even as union officials are propping up increasingly radical protests and other objectionable activities on college campuses and workplaces across the country.

Jewish MIT Graduate Student: BDS-Linked Union Refused to Grant Religious Accommodation

Sussman, who is Jewish, objects to the anti-Israel advocacy of the GSU union, including the union’s endorsement of the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement. He and four other Jewish graduate students sent letters to GSU union officials earlier this year requesting religious accommodations to union dues payment.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires union officials to accommodate those that have religious objections to subsidizing union activities; in practice this usually entails letting the student pay an amount equivalent to dues to a charity. However, GSU union officials’ initial response was to brush aside students’ requests, claiming they didn’t understand their own faith and that their objections were actually political and not religious in nature.

“The union denied my request, telling me in a letter that ‘no principles, teachings or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees to a labor union,’ that one of UE’s founders was Jewish, and that opposition to BDS isn’t a position I hold for religious reasons. In other words, UE thinks it understands my faith better than I do,” Sussman’s testimony reads.

Sussman is one of six MIT graduate students that Foundation attorneys are representing in federal proceedings against the GSU union.

Biden NLRB Policy Lets Union Officials Seize Control Over Graduate Students

As Foundation attorney Glenn Taubman’s testimony describes, partisan rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have bypassed Congress and given union bosses the ability to seize control over graduate students: “The current travesty of herding graduate students into anti-semitic unions finds its source with the Obama-Biden National Labor Relations Boards, which have by fiat turned graduate students into graduate employees – subject to unionization under the NLRA and, of course, the payment of forced union dues as a condition of their academic careers,” Taubman’s testimony reads.

Giving unions such monopoly bargaining power not only permits union bosses to dictate the conditions of graduate students’ academic work, but also gives them the power to force students to pay dues in states that lack Right to Work laws (like Massachusetts).

Even worse, union bosses are able to conduct disruptive strikes that stunt academic progress and frequently have outrageous political elements that have no connection to academics: For example, the recent strike United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials engineered against the University of California system was designed to defend anti-Israel rioters who were suspended and pressure university administrators into divesting from companies supporting Israel.

“Mr. Sussman’s situation should provide to American legislators a harrowing example of the kind of harm workers experience when union bosses seize monopoly bargaining power and become the mouthpiece for an entire workplace,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “The NLRB under Biden and Obama has done even more damage by expanding this coercion into academia, where campus unions have fomented unprecedented division all while threatening dissenting students with the loss of their academic work if they don’t pay up to support radical union activities.”

“National Right to Work legislation would ensure that those trapped under unwanted union influence can protect their hard-earned money from flowing into union bosses’ pockets,” Mix added. “Ultimately, though, no individual should be forced under union bosses’ so-called ‘representation’ against their will, no matter whether the source of their opposition is religious, political, or any other reason.”

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.