Posts tagged Will Sussman
Will Sussman: Columbia Students Should Decertify Their Union
August 5, 2025 // Columbia students are fed up with their union’s focus on radicalism over bread-and-butter issues. “As a Jewish Israeli student at Columbia, the union has done absolutely nothing for me,” said Alon Levin, a graduate student in electrical engineering. “I have heard more blatantly racist and discriminatory language from them than anything that would remotely resemble aiding me in, say, addressing my cost of living or my health insurance concerns.” The problem with graduate student unions is not limited to Columbia, as I learned at MIT.
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 students sue union, say they are forced to pay dues to anti-Semitic organization
April 2, 2024 // “Jewish graduate students are a minority at MIT. We can’t remove the GSU or disabuse it of its antisemitism,” Sussman wrote. “But we also can’t support an organization that actively works toward the eradication of the Jewish homeland, where I have family living now.” Sussman and his colleagues initially sought recourse through non-legal channels, sending letters to the union asking for an exemption. UE allegedly denied these requests, however, writing in their reply to Sussman that “no principles, teachings or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees to a labor union.” The students reportedly filed their charges through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal body responsible for enforcing worker laws that “make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex … national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.”