Jewish workers have supported unions and led labor movements for generations, but now those same entities are "selling them down the river," Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga., chair of the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, said during the panel's hearing about union Jew-hatred on Tuesday.
"Today, we will hear about how unions like the United Electrical Workers and a United Auto Workers affiliate, A Better NYLAG, would rather defend union members who engage in disruptive, discriminatory and antisemitic behavior than fulfill their duty to fairly represent all the workers they represent," Allen said at the hearing.
Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said during the hearing that he and colleagues were not attacking unions.
"We're attacking abusive union leadership that are not doing what they are supposed to do for their union membership," the congressman said. "That's why the Republican Party is now being seen as the party of the working man and woman, the rank and file."
Steve Rosenberg, Philadelphia regional director for the North American Values Institute, told JNS that the hearing was "a critical turning point in the national conversation about antisemitism in unions."
"By finally elevating the firsthand stories of Jewish stakeholders and holding these organizations accountable, Congress is sending a clear message," he said. "Silence and inaction in the face of hate are no longer acceptable. Unions must be safe for all members, including Jews."
Attorneys Kyle Koeppel Mann (New York Legal Assistance Group) and Glenn Taubman (National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation), Cornell University doctoral candidate David Rubinstein and Joseph McCartin, professor and executive director of Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, testified before the subcommittee.
Mann told Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the former committee chair, that she and her colleagues "never considered ourselves as a separate group in the office, but we've essentially been pushed into our own little Jewish ghetto, where we can only discuss matters of the office with each other."
"We don't feel that the union has our back," she said.
The lawyer testified that she voted to unionize in 2019, thinking it would result in "better pay, caseloads, and workplace conditions." A Better NYLAG created what she called a "hostile, antisemitic workplace" after Oct. 7, so Mann quit the union in 2024.
She told the House panel that there were posters stating "intifada now," "long live the resistance" and "abolish the settler state" on the union office's walls for months.
She also testified that union members walked around the office wearing keffiyehs and carrying Palestinian flags. NYLAG clients are "traumatized by walking into our office," Mann said. "We have to shield them from the images that surround our cubicles and try as quickly as possible to get them to a conference room without seeing so many of the intimidating, harassing materials that surround the office."
"In preparing this testimony, I have been retraumatized. I can't believe that the environment at NYLAG is still so toxic," Mann stated. "Our rights as Jews are being violated by the union, which has failed in its responsibility to fairly represent its Jewish members. Looking back on the past almost two years, I have wasted so much time fighting for a fair, nontoxic workplace, but gotten nowhere."
Rubinstein testified that a union organizer emailed his entire department at Cornell, "calling me an 'apartheid apologist.'" The doctoral candidate had said he was concerned about pro-Hamas protests on campus.
When the Cornell Graduate Student Union — an affiliate of the United Electrical Workers — required all graduate students to pay dues, the university told Rubinstein and other Jewish students that they would just have to check a box, and their religious exemptions "would not be challenged," he testified.
When he and others checked the box, he said, the union harassed them with "invasive and burdensome questioning," he testified. (He filed a federal complaint against the union, after which it recognized his objection.)
"As the steward of taxpayer dollars, Congress should hold Cornell accountable to its obligations under Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act," he testified. "When the university allows Cornell Graduate Student Union and United Electrical Workers to create a hostile environment for Jewish students, it must face consequences."
Taubman, the lawyer at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, testified that federal labor laws give unions "unique privileges granted to no other private organization in America."
"Unions' actions that are overtly hostile to Jews are coddled and protected by federal law," due to the broad view of "protected concerted activity" that the National Labor Relations Board, an independent federal agency, took under former President Joe Biden, Taubman said.
He told the panel that Congress ought to redefine graduate students as "students," rather than "employees," and strengthen Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act "to better protect employees of faith from unions' antisemitism and radical ideologies."
"These would be small steps to restore individual employees' right to not be part of a forced collective that takes hateful, pro-Hamas views on foreign events happening more than 5,000 miles away from the workplace," Taubman testified. "What could be more American than that?"
Taubman told Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., that in more than four decades at the foundation, he saw unions as "representatives who did politics on the side." Now he sees things differently.
"They are political powerhouses and that do bargaining on the side," he testified.
McCartin, the Georgetown professor, testified that "the historical record clearly shows that labor has been a bastion of opposition to antisemitism and remains so."
"The labor movement is a democratic movement," he said. "It allows for free speech and difference of opinion. Much of what we'll hear today speaks only to that aspect of it."
This JNS.org report was republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate.