Posts tagged MIT
Union accused of forcing Jewish students at MIT, Stanford, and Cornell to fund pro-Hamas agenda
August 12, 2025 // At MIT, following the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, the UE affiliate supported campus protests favoring Hamas, the letter states. Five Jewish graduate students requested religious accommodations to avoid paying dues to the union, citing conflicts with their faith. UE General Secretary-Treasurer Andrew Dinkelaker reportedly denied the requests, saying, “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees to a labor union.” At Stanford, three graduate students faced similar challenges. Their requests for accommodations were met with what the letter calls an “abusive” questionnaire, which the union dropped after legal pressure.
Cornell University Graduate Student Files Federal Charges Seeking End to Union Boss Control Over Graduate Students
July 14, 2025 // Student case attacks Obama-era federal labor board ruling that exposed graduate students to union boss power
Dartmouth Ph.D. Student Hits Graduate Student Union With Federal Charges for Illegal Religious Discrimination
October 3, 2024 // A series of rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during the Obama and Biden Administrations gave union officials the ability to seize monopoly bargaining power over graduate students, and at private institutions like Dartmouth, unionized graduate students are subject to federal private sector labor law. Such law allows union officials to force those under their power to pay dues or fees as a condition of employment in a state like New Hampshire (where Dartmouth is located) that lacks Right to Work protections.
Jewish MIT Graduate Students Force Anti-Israel Union to Abandon Discriminatory Demands for Dues Payment
August 21, 2024 // everal Jewish graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have prevailed in their legal cases to cut off financial support to the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU), an affiliate of the United Electrical (UE) union. The students, all of whom received free legal assistance from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, objected to GSU union officials’ anti-Israel activities, particularly their support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Another MIT Grad Student Hits GSU Union with Federal Labor Charges for Illegally Seizing Money for Radical Union Agenda
April 29, 2024 // According to Boukin’s charges, she and other graduate students resigned their memberships in the GSU union, revoked their dues “checkoff” authorizations, and objected under Beck to paying anything going toward GSU’s “political and non-representational agenda and expenditures.” Despite these requests, the charges note, union bosses have “refused to process those Beck objections, refused to immediately reduce the amount of dues and fees collected from Charging Party’s and other graduate students’ [compensation], refused to stop the dues checkoff, and refused to provide Charging Party” with an independent audit explaining the union’s expenses and reduced fee calculation.
Jewish MIT Graduate Students Slam BDS-Linked Union with Federal Discrimination Charges
March 29, 2024 // The university students object to the union’s anti-Semitic advocacy, including the union’s endorsement of the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement. Each of the EEOC charges state that the union is “discriminating against me based on a failure to accommodate my religious beliefs and cultural heritage” and “discriminating against me based on national origin, race, cultural heritage & identity.” The students sent individual letters asserting their religious objections to supporting the union and asserting their rights to religious accommodations, but union officials brazenly rejected each request and continue to demand dues from the students.
One Small Union Is Stoking Much of the Militant New Graduate Worker Organizing
May 30, 2023 // With around 35,000 members, the UE is not a huge union. It was once the third-largest — and arguably the most left-wing and democratic — member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, with around a half-million members in core industries, until it fell victim to postwar anti-communist purges, raids from other unions and plant shutdowns. But the union revived itself by the 1990s. Famously, UE workers at the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago occupied their plant in 2008, and today the union boasts a range of affiliated locals across sectors and industries from California to Vermont.
Focus organizing drives on workers without college degrees, US unions told
May 8, 2023 // n contrast, unionization hasn’t taken off nearly as rapidly at many blue-collar, lower-paid workplaces. No other Chipotle restaurant has unionized since workers in Lansing, Michigan, voted last August to make theirs the nation’s first unionized Chipotle. Only one Amazon warehouse is unionized in the US, just two Apple stores and four Trader Joe’s. Those companies have mounted fierce anti-union counterattacks to slow and they hope stop the spread. Chris Rosell, the Teamsters’ organizing director, says one reason unionization of blue-collar workers often doesn’t catch fire is that it’s frequently easier for anti-union consultants to scare and deter those workers. “Blue-collar workers often aren’t as educated about this union-busting stuff,” he said. “They could be more susceptible to these kinds of tactics.” Rosell said the Teamsters often run elaborate campaigns that seek to inoculate workers from the pressures and propaganda from anti-union consultants. He said the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, hopes to double the union’s membership and focus organizing on such area trucking, warehouses and sanitation work. Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs with Justice, a labor rights group, says it’s often harder to unionize blue-collar workers because they tend to have less economic security than educated workers and have greater fear of what will happen to them if they’re retaliated against, perhaps getting fired, for seeking to unionize.
Push to unionize at college dorms is growing
March 31, 2023 // Colleges have been a breeding ground for illness and social havoc since the pandemic began, and much of the onus has been placed on RAs, who are appointed to shepherd the well-being of an entire floor of younger students. In the past, that has typically meant hosting events, mediating roommate disputes, and perhaps guiding an overserved first-year safely to bed. For this, RAs are compensated with free or discounted housing and meal plans. But in recent semesters, and especially since schools reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, those responsibilities have ballooned. RAs who spoke with the Globe describe being deputized as “COVID police” to enforce masking and social distance, and wrangling students whose university — or even high school — experience was stunted by lockdowns and remote learning. Several schools later assigned RAs to longer overnight “on call” shifts and additional check-ins with residents.
Graduate Unions: Why Student Workers at University of California, Temple, More Are Striking
March 27, 2023 // HELU was founded in 2021 in an effort to fill those shoes. At a digital summit that July, members of 75 unions and labor organizations convened to draft a “vision platform” laying out everything from their legislative commitments (like Sen. Bernie Sanders’s College for All Act) to their support of student debt cancelation. The endgame is a unified academic labor movement capable of securing public investment and reorienting higher ed to “prioritize people and the common good over profit and prestige.” To date, 130 unions and affiliated groups representing over half a million workers have endorsed the platform. The first step in realizing this vision, says Jaime, who attended the 2021 summit, is to build union density. “Transforming academia is not going to happen in one single contract campaign. We have to organize workers in every single university in order to achieve real change,” he says.