How Labor Unions Feed Campus Anti-Semitism
COMMENTARY BY NATHAN MCGRATH
Originally published in The Wall Street Journal.
After Hamas’s brutal attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, labor unions at the University of California, Berkeley and the City University of New York took hard-line anti-Israel stances at the expense of Jewish employees. When leaders from UC Berkeley and CUNY testify Wednesday before Congress about discrimination against Jews, lawmakers should confront them about labor unions running amok.
At UC Berkeley, Karin Yaniv arrived from Israel in 2022 to pursue postdoctoral work in microbiology. Shortly after Oct. 7, the union that represents Ms. Yaniv and 48,000 other UC workers—United Auto Workers Local 4811—condemned Israel and later established a “Union Village” within UC Berkeley’s encampment. Ms. Yaniv chose to join the union so she could discuss with union officials how its actions harmed Jews and Israelis on campus.
Ms. Yaniv says she was barred from union working groups, excluded from union communications, and targeted for harassment during union meetings. So were other Israelis, including those whose relatives had been taken hostage by Hamas. She discovered that the union planned to push the university to adopt boycott, divestment and sanctions policies against the Jewish state and found on the union’s Google Drive a list of members of the UC Board of Regents with Jewish or Israeli ties. Ms. Yaniv and another Israeli colleague attended the union’s BDS exploratory committee meetings. After they left one meeting, a witness who stayed behind reported hearing union officials lament that the two Israelis would “just mess up” the committee’s work.
In January 2025, Ms. Yaniv sued the UAW for employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. She is represented by my organization, the Fairness Center, a nonprofit law firm that helps those harmed by public-sector unions. Ms. Yaniv alleges that the union failed to condemn violence on campus and helped create a hostile work environment for Israelis and Jews.
Union officials doubled down. In legal filings, the union claimed it had in fact condemned violence—violence supposedly perpetrated against pro-Palestinian union members by the university and police during attempts to disperse an encampment. The union also requested a protective order to prevent Ms. Yaniv and her lawyers from publicly disclosing the identities of union members and officials who she alleges violated her civil rights. The case is currently in discovery, and the judge didn’t accept the union’s first attempt to muzzle Ms. Yaniv.
Conditions at CUNY are similarly dismaying. Jeffrey Lax is a business professor and was a longtime union member at one of the CUNY system’s schools, Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. In 2021 Mr. Lax and dozens of his Jewish colleagues resigned from the Professional Staff Congress, their union. The PSC had passed a resolution that labeled Israel an “apartheid state” and endorsed BDS. The U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission had already found that the PSC discriminated when union officials scheduled meetings on the Sabbath knowing that Mr. Lax couldn’t attend. PSC officials also promised in July 2022 to “create networks and programs within the CUNY Jewish population to . . . unlearn Zionism,” attended anti-Zionist protests, and objected to university efforts to end illegal encampments after Oct. 7.
Although Mr. Lax wanted nothing to do with his union, he had no choice. In most unionized public-sector workplaces, even nonmembers must accept a union’s “exclusive representation,” meaning Jewish CUNY professors have to allow the PSC to represent them in contract matters even though the union prohibits nonmembers from voting on contracts. The Supreme Court opted not to review the practice after a legal challenge by Mr. Lax and others represented by the Fairness Center. Exclusive representation was upheld by lower courts, leaving Jews’ terms and conditions of employment in the hands of union officials responsible for effectively purging them from their membership rolls.
The experiences of Mr. Lax and Ms. Yaniv expose a structural problem for Jews at public universities. Join the union and face harassment and discrimination, or leave the union and lose any voice in the workplace. When CUNY and UC Berkeley officials appear before the House Education Committee, they should explain how they plan to resolve this Catch-22.
Mr. McGrath is president and general counsel of the Fairness Center.