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“Though they are not union members, our clients must still accept the union’s representation,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs told JNS.
By: Vita Fellig
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide on Friday whether to hear the case of six professors at City University of New York—five of them Jewish—who want to sever ties with the public university’s faculty union, which they say is antisemitic.
A decision from the high court is expected on Monday when it is scheduled to release its orders, Jeffrey Lax, a law professor at CUNY and one of the five Jewish plaintiffs, told JNS.
Lax, Avraham Goldstein, Michael Goldstein, Frimette Kass-Shraibman, Mitchell Langbert and Maria Pagano filed a petition with the high court in July, challenging “aspects of New York State’s ‘Taylor Law,’ which grants union bosses monopoly bargaining power in the public sector,” according to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is aiding the plaintiffs.
“This gives union bosses the power to speak and contract for public workers, including those that want nothing to do with the union,” the foundation stated on Dec. 23. “In addition to opposing the union’s extreme ideology, the professors oppose being forced into a ‘bargaining unit’ of instructional staff who share the union’s objectionable beliefs or have employment interests diverging from their own.”
The six professors argue that the law unfairly requires them to accept the representation of the Professional Staff Congress, a 30,000-member union, whose anti-Israel public statements they consider antisemitic. The plaintiffs cite “a host of discriminatory actions perpetrated by union agents and adherents, including a June 2021 union resolution that the professors viewed as ‘antisemitic, anti-Jewish and anti-Israel,’” per the foundation.
Nathan McGrath, president of the Fairness Center, which is representing the professors, told JNS that the New York State law violates the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.
“Our clients are arguing that New York’s Taylor Law runs afoul of the First Amendment by forcing these professors, most of whom are Zionist Jews, to associate with an organization they believe is antisemitic,” he told JNS. “Though they are not union members, our clients must still accept the union’s representation.”
McGrath said the professors’ only recourse is to “quit their jobs entirely.”
“They are asking the Supreme Court to provide them an avenue to continue in their public service without the coercive representation of a union that they believe hates them,” he said.
Lax told JNS that he finds it “outrageous” that a union actively supporting Jew-hatred continues to fight to represent Jewish professors at CUNY.
“They want Zionists out of CUNY, and they don’t want us holding jobs there,” he said. “Yet they’re fighting to be our bargaining representatives. They don’t bargain for us and multiple organizations have found CUNY liable for antisemitism.”
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, U.S. Department of Education and a New York State investigation have uncovered Jew-hatred at CUNY, Lax said.
“The union doesn’t negotiate to protect Jews,” he told JNS. “In fact, they support antisemitism, and they are the cause of much of the antisemitism on campus.”
“They chant ‘Zionism out of CUNY,’ so why are they fighting to keep us? They shouldn’t,” he added.
(JNS.org)
