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.