After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union. Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3. This enables graduate students who get paid as research assistants or for teaching to engage in collective bargaining and to strike against the University if the bargaining reaches an impasse. The University of Chicago opposed the students’ efforts to join a union, but the University can’t prevent it.
You can see why the University would oppose unionization, for often research assistantships and teaching are regarded by universities as training rather than jobs; and if there were a strike, it would cripple research at the school as well teaching itself, for in some courses graduate teaching assistants do much of the work. But the students prevailed. I didn’t have much of a dog in this fight, except that I thought the possibility of strikes was a dangerous byproduct of unionizing.
But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions. And you may not want to do that. In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions. That, they claim, is Constitutionally prohibited “compelled speech.” You may have already guessed that this involves the war in Gaza.
Click the screenshot to read. I’ve put an excerpt below
An excerpt by Baude (there’s more at the site):
A few years ago, the graduate students at the University of Chicago, where I teach, formed a legally recognized labor union. Last year, that union expanded to include the law school, at least to the extent that law students engage in paid work such as providing research assistance. Law students who want to work as research assistants must either join the union and pay dues, or else pay agency fees to the union even if they do not join. Either way, giving money to the union is a legally required condition of working as a research assistant.
Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, the union, engages in political speech that some law students find quite objectionable. The union is part of the United Electrical, Radio and Mine Workers of America, which also engages in political speech. For some law students, having to give money to these causes is an unacceptable condition of employment.
Yesterday, a group of those students, Graduate Students for Academic Freedom, filed a federal lawsuit against the union arguing that the arrangement violates their First Amendment rights under cases like Janus v. AFSCME, which holds that compelled agency fees “violate[] the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”
You can read the complaint here, and the motion for a preliminary injunction here.
This is from the complaint, so you can see what the students are objecting to. Bolding is mine:
INTRODUCTION
1. Graduate students at the University of Chicago have been put to the choice of halting their academic pursuits, or funding antisemitism. That is unlawful.
2. In the Winter of 2023, graduate students at Chicago voted to unionize, and are now exclusively represented by GSU-UE—a local of United Electrical (UE).
3. That is a real problem. Among much else, UE has a long history of antisemitism. It is an outspoken proponent of the movement to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” Israel (BDS)—something so clearly antisemitic that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have condemned it as such. Indeed, for years, the union has had a consuming fixation with the world’s only Jewish state—a fixation peppered with all-too-common rhetoric. UE has charged Israel with “occupying” Palestine; has branded Israel an “apartheid regime”; and has accused Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing.”
4. GSU-UE is cut from the same cloth. On campus, it has not only echoed its parent union’s rhetoric, but has added to it. It took pains to publicly “reaffirm” its commitment to BDS just one week after the October 7 terrorist attacks. And it has joined the “UChicago United for Palestine Coalition,” which gained notoriety for its protest encampment and hostile takeover of the Institute of Politics. Through it, GSU-UE has joined calls to “honor the martyrs”; fight against campus “Zionists”; resist “pigs” (i.e., police); “liberate” Palestine from the “River to the Sea,” and by “any means necessary”; and “bring the intifada home.” Jimmy Hoffa’s union this is not.
5. Nonetheless, under a recent collective bargaining agreement extracted by the GSU-UE, graduate students at the University must now either become dues-paying members of the union, or pay it an equivalent “agency fee,” as a condition of continuing their work as teaching assistants, research assistants, or similar positions.
6. Constitutionally speaking, that is not kosher. The union’s ability to obtain agency fees from nonconsenting students is the direct product of federal law—i.e., it involves governmental action, subject to the First Amendment. But if GSU-UE wishes to wield such federally backed power, it must accept the responsibility that comes with it; it cannot use a government-backed cudgel, outside constitutional constraint. And if the First Amendment means anything, it means students cannot be compelled to fund a group they find abhorrent as the price of continuing their work.
7. The stories of Plaintiff’s members lay bare the stakes that are at issue here. One member is an Israeli; another a proud Jew with family fighting in Israel; and some are graduate students simply horrified by the union’s antisemitism—as well as its other (to put it mildly) controversial political positions, which reach well beyond collective bargaining to virtually every hot-button subject (e.g., abortion, affirmative action, policing, gender ideology, even the judiciary). Although members come from different backgrounds, none can stomach sending a penny to this union.
Now I’m no lawyer (I only play one on television), but it seems that this is indeed compelled speech: Jewish students are being forced to endorse policies that can be regarded as anti-Israel and likely as antisemitic. Nor do I know the solution, unless it’s to ditch the agreement that qualified students should have to join the union. It seems to me, in my ignorance, that unions, like universities, should be “institutionally neutral”: they should not take political or ideological positions that have nothing to do with the working of the union itself.
The First Amendment itself prohibits compelled speech. As a free-speech site says,
The compelled speech doctrine sets out the principle that the government cannot force an individual or group to support certain expression. Thus, the First Amendment not only limits the government from punishing a person for his speech, it also prevents the government from punishing a person for refusing to articulate, advocate, or adhere to the government’s approved messages.
The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) is the classic example of the compelled speech doctrine at work.
In this case, the Court ruled that a state cannot force children to stand, salute the flag, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The justices held that school children who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, for religious reasons, had a First Amendment right not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the U.S. flag.
In oft-cited language, Justice Robert H. Jackson asserted, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
The problem, of course, is that this doctrine applies only to the government punishing people for their speech or for refusing to adhere to approved governmental speech. Since schools are arms of the government, they can’t be forced, as noted above, to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But the plaintiffs argue that the power of unions ultimately derives from the government—from legislative acts. From the complaint:
80. Step one asks: “Whether the claimed constitutional deprivation resulted from the exercise of a right or privilege having its source in state authority.” Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U.S. 614, 620 (1991). And the answer here is yes: GSU-UE’s extraction of fees is the product of its legal power to bind all workers to a single collective bargaining agreement, as their sole and exclusive representative.
81. The Supreme Court has said as much: The “collection of fees from nonmembers is authorized by an act of legislative grace—one that we have termed ‘unusual’ and ‘extraordinary.’” Knox v. SEIU, Local 1000, 567 U.S. 298, 313-14 (2012).
This case, then, would seem to be an important one, for it could decide whether unions in general can indeed take political positions that are seen as implicitly endorsed by their members. And, of course, unions regularly endorse political candidates.
The fate of this case thus depends on whether the compelled speech involved in being a union member is construed as being connected with government. As I said, I think unions, representing a broad spectrum of views among their members, should be politically neutral even if there’s no governmental connection. Compelled speech is chilled speech and inhibits free speech; this is why our university has its institutional neutrality embodied in the Kalven report.
But if the court does find that union activities occur under the aegis of government, then it’s game over: the plaintiffs win. We shall see.
I don’t think union membership should be a requirement for holding any job. My wife went through this when she was a teacher in public schools in upstate New York.
The argument the union makes is that the employee who opts out of union membership will still enjoy wage increases negotiated by the union for all the employees in the bargaining unit, which includes him. Therefore to avoid the free-rider problem, all employees covered by the union contract must pay agency fees (“union dues”) even if they don’t join the union. Otherwise no one would pay dues and everyone would be a free rider, except the committed Marxists. Eliminating the requirement to pay agency fees is a legal way to break a union by starving it of cash. (Didn’t the Wisconsin legislature try this with its public service unions a few years ago?)
Typically, the employer acts as the collection agent for the union, deducting dues or fees from the employee’s paycheque and remitting the amount to the union. Employers get, as a quid pro quo for saving the union reps having to go around and shake people down every payday, the promise that the union will not call wildcat strikes during the life of the collective agreement.
I get the union argument. It’s not the non-union employees problem if the union doesn’t work, except through coercion.
My recollection is that union membership is not required in New York for public employees, and the 2018 Janus decision also exempts employees from the requirement that they pay the equivalent of union dues. That may have been too late to help your wife.
It should be noted that the Janus decision was based on the illegality of compelled political speech, so it may well be that there is a good Supreme Court precedent for the U of C (one of my own alma mommies…..) grad student complaint.
Does one know why the students could not form a union de novo?
An interesting question, but given the likelihood that a union solely made up of graduate students would endorse all the same positions that the UE does, the plaintiffs’ situation would not be improved.
No idea how to interpret the technicalities here. On the one hand we have ample case law about compelled speech coming from state or federal government authorities. But U of Chicago is a private university. Unions, though, are checked and balanced by the government to some extent.
Then there is the fact that the students are employed by the U of Chicago, but their union is from a machinist union (?) very confusing. But insofar that the union is associated with the university, can’t one argue that they need to adhere to the Kalven principles? I really don’t know.
I think that there are dimensions to the Janus case that you are not addressing. Firstly, Janus addressed the issue of “agency fees” or “fair share” fees for public sector employees. Since University of Chicago is a private University, they are bargaining in a different environment subject to a different legislative history. If I had more time, I’d look into it but I am presuming that since they are grad students, Yeshiva does not apply to them.
Unions take political positions all the time. When they do so, it is done through the mechanisms of Union Democracy. The leadership, the Boards, etc. are all elected. If people don’t like the public positions of the Union leadership, they are free to criticize their leaders and even run for office in the Union and try to change the position. They can make a public statement in opposition to the leadership. There is no compelled speech here.
The arguments about agency fees are well known: Unions have to represent everybody once a Collective Bargaining Agreement is in place. Endorsing Janus and its extension to private sector unionization implicitly endorses the hamstringing of unions to lobby successfully for their members and to speak out on issues that concern their members.
For identification purposes only: I am a former President of my Faculty Union, the Shawnee Education Association, an affiliate of the Ohio and National Education Association and have also served in the past as its chief grievance officer. My statements herein however represent my opinion and not that of any organization. The only reason I bring it up is that it bears on my qualifications to speak on this issue.
Indeed, but they did accept the lawsuit. I don’t have the credentials you do; I am just opining as a layperson. I gather, though, that you have already decided this case. Do you have credentials as a judge or lawyer, too?
I don’t think I commented as a lawyer or judge or said anything about whether or not the Courts might take this case or how they might decide it. I can only comment as an academic (Labor Relations was one of my fields in graduate school) and as someone active in an academic Union, and as a citizen of the country who supports Unions. I never offer “legal opinions” but I think I have sufficient background to provide informed comment. I’ve seen the Courts make terrible decisions on Unions, often breaking precedent. Janus was a clear break with precedent. I think I can say that I think Janus was a bad decision and I think I can say that Yeshiva was a bad decision. I think I can also say that if Unions are prohibited from making statements on public issues, they will be hobbled in their abilities to protect their member’s interests. I know how Unions work in terms of their governance structure.
Have I “decided” the case legally? No, I haven’t read the briefs. I don’t know what statute they are bargaining under but I do know that Janus applies to public sector Unions and that applying it to private sector Unions is going to gut the operating premises of NLRA, subsequent amendments, a whole body of administrative decisions by the NLRB and do serious harm to the labor movement. To be frank, I think I am qualified to offer an informed, academic response for why I don’t like where this is going and why it looks to me like another break from precedent on long established principles governing labor unions. I guess I have decided from what I have read that am “agin it” and that this does not look like an advance for academic freedom to me at all.
When the grad students signed up for union representation, they should have known what they were signing up for. Unions donate huge sums of money to the democratic party, and influence party platform via those donations. They engage in political speech as a rule; this is not novel. Maybe the grad students at the time of joining the union were in favor of the political speech as it’s highly likely that as college grad students that they lean left. It’s part of the deal with the devil when you join a union that your dues will go toward political donations and that the leaders will take political positions.
Agreed. These students voted to join the union, correct? As far as I see, looking up the states in our country, Illinois is not a “right to work” state. From the point of unionization, anyone who chooses to work in a position included in that union, knows what they’re getting into. I’m not saying it would be an easy decision for all involved but they would be privy to what it means to join a labor union.
Another option is for the bargaining unit to vote to decertify the union as their bargaining agent (on the grounds of mis-use of dues) and try to find another union whose political leanings are more to their liking. As the trespasser encampments on university campuses showed, though, organized labour is pretty much in lock-step on the Israel question. They might try the United Dirigible and Veeblefetzer Workers of America, last seen in the yellowing pages of back issues of MAD Magazine.
Grad students at my university have long had their own labour union to represent students who were university employees working directly for the university as teaching assistants. This worked well. Recently they argued for status as university employees with union representation when students are working on thesis research. Here the grad student is not working *for* the university but is instead working *with* a professor in a training collaboration. Employee status has benefits but also costs, one of which is dismissal for all the usual reasons employees can be dismissed from businesses (restructuring, budget crisis, redundancy, poor performance). Earlier this year the university dismissed >100 administrative staff members to address a budget shortfall. Future crises will see grad student employees dismissed as well. In our current culture, grad students are apprentices who we train & shelter from the elements, and once admitted can only be dropped from the graduate program for misconduct or unsatisfactory progress. [edit to add: this happens ~never] Once they become just another group of employees, that status will be lost to the detriment of the students and at the cost of the mentor-trainee relationship with professors. That relationship has been the best thing about my career as a professor, and I hate to see it lost to the cravings of the marxist organizers of the grad student union.
I agree that the graduate student unionization makes sense for teaching assistants…and only then. Otherwise it is highly damaging for the entire enterprise for students to be unionized for research. It has lead to all sorts of problems in my University and that’s to say nothing about the steep rise is costs to fund unionized students and postdocs. It also has led to very bad behavior on the part of students. Not surprisingly they want the benefits of workers but don’t want to be treated like workers (nor do I want to treat them like workers).
Weird. It turns out grad students have to pay rent to and the university hasn’t built enough housing for them. For GSRs the only influence of unionization that I’ve seen has been that if everything goes south (ie irreconcilable conflicts between the PI and the student) they can TA until they can find another professor to pay them. Don’t pretend the students don’t have the short end of the stick
Let me be much more explicit.
When negotiating for the union the argument from students was they are workers when TAing (true) and need better benefits and protections from abusive PIs (more on this below). However the cost of unionized students and postdocs is so high as to break the system. The minimum salary for a postdoc here is now about 75K (a jump of like 20K in one year when it happened with no warning, no assistance form the university on current grants, and not taking overhead, fringe, etc. into account-just salary). Of course grants are flatlined so now a rather large NSF grant pays for about one student/postdoc only and maybe a bit of summer salary. That’s just not tenable. If the students and postdocs get the short end of the stick in your words, their deal is still way better than when I was a grad student or postdoc-even adjusted for inflation (I’ve done the calculation). At this rate you are paying like 200k/paper per student even as a theorist. BTW at my university PIs CANNOT get relief from having grad students do extra TAing. That option vanished a while back here.
Worse than this is the behavior issues. For example our students staged a walkout of classes that the professors hold to introduce their research to students over a shortfall of, effectively, 80 dollars over the first year between those that had been assigned TAing spots and those that were not in the 1st semester, even though we told them this might happen in their contract and we gave them all an extra 1K for travel expenses pro bono. There have been complaints from many students that the union leaders in the department are coercive and create bad lab environments. The students threaten to take collective action like sabotaging recruiting weekends. They strike not just wrt to teaching but also research (which is biting the hand that feeds them and is pretty unheard of in, say, Europe as far as I’ve heard where students have been unionized for a while).
And that “abusive PI” thing? I have talked to GC here. Not one union complaint has been filed about PI behavior. All grievances have been about $$. The students I see now are far worse than they were 20 years ago, they demand far more, they behave like babies (generalizing of course-not all but in a statistical sense) and they cost and get paid much more. This breaks the system. One of the things I am most proud of when I look back over my career is mentoring students and postdocs who have gone on to great things on their own in academia. Over 30 of them mostly in top places. I don’t want to do this anymore because of the broken system we now have.
“[N]or do I want to treat them like workers.” Me too! The grad-student-as-apprentice is the professor’s moral responsibility to train & nurture; but the grad-student-as-wage-employee is just a means of knowledge production.
A day late, but just wanted to tell Mike that this has been a good discussion…thanks for kicking it off. In a simplistic vein, as a grad student many decades ago, I was pleased simply to have tuition paid and a modest stipend beyond that, that when one found a couple of room mates, would pay rent for shelter and food at the university dining hall and local greasy spoon. I was happy to assist in labs and grade papers a few hours a week for this guaranteed compensation under assistantships and pleased beyond belief when I was transferred over from assistantship to fellowship after a few years wherein no taxes or social security were deducted as it was considered a pure scholarship for which I did no work for the university. However, in later years I found a small downside to the fellowship in that when I applied for social security, the years under assistantship counted but those under fellowship did not. I was part of a different generation…just extremely happy to be supported as I studied to further qualify myself for a future career and gainful employment.
I would have thought that the power of unions ultimately comes from the membership. To have a large number of people acting in concert, such as striking, allows significant impact. The legislation that comes in around unions and their rights and abilities reflects that power but is not the source of it.
I hope it is not too far off-topic to mention an unintended consequence of grad student unionization. Prior to several court cases that found that teaching assistants and research assistants were “employees,” grad students were not counted as faculty. Since then, grad students who work as TAs or RAs are counted as “adjunct” faculty. The AAUP loves this, as it expands the number of potential dues-paying members, and allows the AAUP to inflate statistics on the number of adjuncts in academia. While I have always been sympathetic to the financial plight of poorly paid grad student TAs and RAs, I’m not sure that treating them as adjuncts is a way to resolve that issue.
Can the University fire grad students for publicly disagreeing with the Union? Since there is not much choice, it’s probably best to pay “agency fee” but be vocal about being opposed to its politics, even forming a “counter-union” association with big online presence. Just thinking aloud.