The bargaining unit for the school system’s employees is fixated on BDS advocacy and unabashed in the harassment of Jewish professors. But they are fighting back.
The bargaining unit for the school system’s employees is fixated on BDS advocacy and unabashed in the harassment of Jewish professors. But they are fighting back.
T he charge that palpable antisemitism is an emerging fact of life in the Big Apple — locus of the world’s highest concentration of Jews outside of Israel — might strike many as hyperbole or even paranoia. But as a recent Tablet article convincingly declares, “It’s Open Season on Jews in New York City.”
While the Tablet article documents the outbreak of hate crimes committed against Jews in the five boroughs — injustices compounded by the failure to prosecute perpetrators — the foulness of antisemitism is far from limited to the city’s mean streets and nasty subways. Indeed, it has festered in the one place that the memory and experience of many New Yorkers hold as a hospitable bastion for Jewish students, teachers, and intellectuals: the City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban university system.
But the times indeed are a-changing: On-display bias at CUNY has become so rampant that it has sparked an important free-speech/labor lawsuit, a counterattack from antagonized and rights-denied teachers who seek to overturn parts of New York’s infamous Taylor Law, which the plaintiffs claim mandates monopolistic representation for public employees. More important, they charge that the law — and the brazen activities of CUNY’s teachers’-union leadership — defies the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 2018 Janus ruling, which held compulsory government-union membership and mandatory dues-paying unconstitutional.
Alums for Campus Fairness recently voiced outrage over CUNY’s bias. “CUNY was once a proud institution where countless Jewish leaders, scientists and artists sought their education,” the group declared in an ad published in the September 8 New York Post. But now, “Jewish students are increasingly ostracized by CUNY leadership as the administration does nothing to combat antisemitism.”
Like its beleaguered students, many of CUNY’s Jewish professors, especially those holding pro-Zionist positions, know too well that this once-hospitable institution has evolved into an intimidating workplace — so much so that New York City’s left-bent city council held hearings in July to expose the school system’s normalizing of antisemitism. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also recently found that the Brooklyn-based Kingsborough Community College “has discriminated and retaliated against” one professor “and other similarly situated individuals on the account of religion.”
Piled on to the malicious campus antics, the endless anti-Israeli “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) campaigns that are a staple of progressive protest-theater, and the colleague-hounding tactics of CUNY’s Palestine-obsessed “Progressive Faculty Caucus” is the contempt the faculty union — the decidedly leftist Professional Staff Congress/CUNY (PSC) — harbors for its members who are observant Jews holding pro-Zionist positions.
For example: 50 CUNY professors resigned from the PSC in 2021 after the union adopted a “Resolution in Support of the Palestinian People” that declared “the PSC-CUNY cannot be silent about the continued subjection of Palestinians to the state-supported displacement, occupation, and use of lethal force by Israel”; derided the country for its “practice of dispossession and expansion of settlements, dating back to its establishment as a settler colonial state”; and “affirmed the right of faculty, staff, and students to advocate for campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions without penalty.”
And then there is this: Last year, PSC created “Not in Our Name,” an effort to intimidate “homegrown Zionists within CUNY.” It launched with a statement that spouted:
Palestinian voices are at the core of our coalition and we stand to uphold their demands for global liberation, resistance by any means necessary, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the return of all land prior to 1948, and ending the occupation. We commit to Palestinian liberation as defined by Palestinians. These principles are not negotiable.
Led by James Davis, an English professor at Brooklyn College, the PSC has become a hotbed of discrimination, empowered by the representation monopoly the Taylor Law grants for public-employee unions. Indeed, Taylor — amended by New York’s leftist legislature in anticipation of the high court’s then-expected Janus decision — actually permits government-employee unions to assign workers a diminished, second-rate status.
In a January 2022 Wall Street Journal op-ed boldly titled, “I’m Stuck With an Anti-Semitic Labor Union,” Avraham Goldstein, a CUNY mathematics professor, explained that, “in New York’s eyes, nonmembers like me legally can be treated as an underclass, deserving of lesser services than our union-member colleagues.”
Some “nonmember.” PSC refused to accept Goldstein’s resignation from union membership and continued taking union dues from his paycheck. Why, the observant Jew wonders, should New York “countenance forcing Jews to associate with a union that doesn’t want them around”?
“I feel like I am living in Germany in 1933,” he tells National Review. “How can you have an antisemitic union represent thousands of Zionist teachers?”
Goldstein is not the only wronged CUNY scholar with access to a keyboard. Jeffrey Lax is an observant Jew and pro-Zionist. Not only a CUNY grad, Lax is currently chairman of the business department at Kingsborough Community College. He described the system as once being “a safe haven for Jews.” But he took to the New York Daily News to catalogue the nastiness that is part and parcel of how the PSC treats select academics with his views of late:
I witnessed this spirit of viciousness up close in April of 2019 when five professors surrounded me in the faculty dining room and began screaming at me. Twice I tried to leave, but they physically stopped me. One professor put his hand above my head and said, “We’re not done. We’re just starting.”
What’s a beleaguered, insulted, harassed, intimidated, rights-denied, dues-purloined, pro-Zionism professor like Goldstein, like Lax — and like many others who have borne the brunt of a pocket-picking public-employee union steeped in bias — to do?
Sue.
And they have. Pushed by relentless intolerance and confrontations and insults, fueled by their desire to seek alternative representation, the duo has been joined by CUNY employees Michael Goldstein, Frimette Kass-Shraibman, Mitchell Langbert, and Maria Pagano in a federal lawsuit, Goldstein v. PSC / CUNY, now before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and have secured the representation of both the Fairness Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation — two acclaimed entities with strong backgrounds in securing Janus rights for workers aggrieved by public unions.
National Right to Work’s William Messenger, who argued Janus before the Supreme Court in 2018, says “the Goldstein case is a modern example of an old problem with compulsory union representation.” He reminds all of important precedent:
In 1944, the Supreme Court in Steele confronted the issue of black employees who were forced to accept the representation of a racist union. Now, almost eighty years later in Goldstein, we have Jewish professors who are being forced to accept the representation of a union they consider anti-Semitic. The solution to this old problem is straightforward: the government should stop forcing citizens to accept a union’s representation against their will.
In the Goldstein filing — which claims “over 260 members of PSC have resigned and revoked their authorizations for dues deductions since PSC adopted” its pro-Palestine resolution — the plaintiffs slam the union throughout. They charge that it
has continued to advocate positions and take actions that Plaintiffs believe to be anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Israel, in a manner that harms the Jewish plaintiffs and singles them out for opprobrium, hatred, and harassment based on their religious, ethnic, and/or moral beliefs and identity. Because of this, they have no faith and confidence in PSC’s ability to represent them as their exclusive, fiduciary representative, and they desire to end such forced representation.
Goldstein (who now requires a guard to be with him when he is on campus) and his allies also claim the PSC, in addition to ostracizing observant, pro-Zionist professors, treats them harmfully as second-class employees:
PSC does not represent Jewish and pro-Israel members of the bargaining unit and instead works to eliminate them from CUNY. . . . PSC hurts some members of the bargaining unit economically, does not offer the same level of representation to Higher Education Officers (“HEOs”), and prioritizes the pay of part-time adjuncts and others over HEOs.
Also coming in for legal attack is New York’s long-standing Taylor Law. At odds with the spirit of Janus — Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion holds that “states and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees” — Taylor in practice has empowered PSC to continue confiscating the funds of the plaintiffs, as well as many other CUNY workers who have tried to leave the union. Worse, PSC’s monopolistic representation of mistreated and abused CUNY employees persists despite union actions that “subject the Jewish plaintiffs to hostility on the workplace and in the general public, and single them out for opprobrium, discrimination, and hatred based upon their religious, ethnic, and/or moral beliefs and identity.”
The plaintiffs want out, and new representation. “We are not anti-union,” says Lax. “We are asking for more unions, not less. We are pro-freedom, and pro-choice.” In addition to demanding that their Janus rights be upheld relating to the PSC’s continued dues confiscation, the Goldstein sextet charges that parts of the Taylor Law related to exclusive representation are unconstitutional and must be overturned:
By compelling Plaintiffs to associate with employees in the bargaining unit whose views they oppose and whose interests are not aligned with Plaintiffs, have deprived and are depriving Plaintiffs of their First Amendment rights to free speech and association, as secured against state infringement by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and 42 U.S.C. § 1983
With its well-documented findings that portray a union as steeped in bias that harms some of it workers, seemingly with intention, Goldstein v. PSC/CUNY is sizing up to be more than a just another post-Janus case about government-union noncompliance and sneakiness. Here, with the toxic marriage of monopoly and discrimination, labor law may have put itself in a position to be harshly scrutinized by the federal courts — the same system that felt no restraint in upending the decades of horrendous legal precedent undone by the high court in Janus.
As the Fairness Center’s Danielle Acker Susanj — the nonprofit’s vice president and senior litigation counsel — puts it:
Our clients just want the freedom to choose someone other than the leaders of an anti-Semitic union to represent them in their employment with the university. But under the current monopoly representation scheme in New York, they’re stuck with a union that despises their beliefs. Instead of protecting our clients from discrimination, New York is empowering union officials to put their discriminatory words into practice. Our clients want to win the right for themselves and their colleagues to choose another representative.
It has been a long time in coming, but has it come? Possibly: Thanks to the PSC’s brazen and hostile activities, and its obsession with placing ideology over its members’ needs and dignity, the days of exclusive representation, at least in New York, may be numbered.