My Union Dues Are Being Used Against Israel Jewish grad students at MIT already face antisemitism on campus. Their anti-Israel union won’t divert their dues to charity. By Will Sussman
Cambridge, Mass.
“Your objection to paying dues or fees is based on your political views and not your religious belief.” That is what my union told me when I objected to paying dues to a union that seeks the destruction of Israel.
I came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021 to get a doctorate in computer science. I consider myself a student, but the National Labor Relations Board in 2016 brushed aside decades of precedent and ruled that graduate students are employees subject to unionization. A plurality of MIT graduate students (46.7%) voted to install the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, known as UE, as our exclusive bargaining agent, and the university capitulated to its demand for a contract with mandatory dues.
UE endorses the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and “urges the union at all levels to become engaged in BDS.” Minutes of a meeting in 2020 of the MIT Graduate Student Union confirm that the UE local is engaged in BDS. The GSU website uses Squarespace , according to a member of the union organizing committee, because “Wix is an Israli-owned [sic] company, which conflicts with BDS.”
Since Oct. 7, Jewish students at MIT have been terrorized by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate on campus. When the university warned unruly protesters who were occupying a building that they risked suspension, the GSU backed the protesters and condemned “MIT’s threats against students exercising their basic First Amendment rights.”
In January, when MIT brought disciplinary charges against two graduate student protesters, the GSU blamed “external pressure from billionaire donors and right-wing politicians” and organized a protest on campus. The GSU said the demonstration was to protest MIT’s alleged violation of the union contract by enforcing anti-discrimination rules. One picket sign read, “Anti-Zionism ≠ Anti-Semitism.”
Jewish graduate students are a minority at MIT. We can’t remove the GSU or disabuse it of its antisemitism. But we also can’t support an organization that actively works toward the eradication of the Jewish homeland, where I have family living now.
That is why many of us asked for a religious accommodation that would divert our compulsory dues from the UE to a charity. The union denied my request, telling me last month in a letter that “no principles, teachings or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees to a labor union,” that one of UE’s founders was Jewish, and that opposition to BDS isn’t a position I hold for religious reasons. In other words, UE thinks it understands my faith better than I do.
With the help of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, I joined three other Jewish graduate students in filing discrimination charges against the union with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet winning our cases won’t solve the problem nationwide, as UE represents graduate students at a dozen other universities, including Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Stanford.
We need a national solution. Congress must act to protect our freedom of religion and association—our right to decide for ourselves how to be Jewish.
Mr. Sussman is a doctoral student in computer science at MIT and president of MIT Graduate Hillel.
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