On June 18, two Cornell University graduate students filed federal antidiscrimination charges against the Cornell Graduate Student Union (CGSU) and its parent, the United Electrical (UE) union. The students, David Rubinstein and Louie Gold, maintain that union officials are illegally harassing graduate students who submit valid religious objections to paying compulsory union dues.
CGSU dues equal 1.44% of workers’ pay, and the CGSU-Cornell collective bargaining agreement reached earlier this year gave objectors alternative options due to religious objections. One option includes donating an amount equal to their dues to charity:
“If a Graduate Student Worker has a sincerely held religious belief, as defined by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), that prohibits them from joining and maintaining membership in a union, they may elect to pay the amount equivalent to initiation fees and monthly dues to charitys.”
The EEOC definition includes “moral or ethical beliefs” within “religious belief.”
Rubinstein and Gold are both Jewish and believe affiliating with or financially supporting the UE unions conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs. This is based in part on CGSU’s pro-Palestinian resolutions. The graduate students filed their charges at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) with free legal representation by National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys.
In their charges, Rubinstein and Gold explain that they are targets of an illegal practice in which UE union officials harass and interrogate religious objectors rather than comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination, including on the basis of religion.
As their charges explain, rather than comply with their valid requests for religious accommodations, UE union bosses instead sent questionnaires containing demands like, “[P]lease include the name and address of the organization sponsoring the [religious] services you attend and the name of the faith leader(s),” and “How long have you had your religious belief?” The end of the questionnaire states that “the UE national union will review your religious objection upon receipt and may have follow-up questions” (emphasis added).
Rubinstein and Gold argue in their charges that they and other students who received this questionnaire have already discharged their legal duties when they informed the union of their objections to paying dues. They stated,
“Both nationwide and on the Cornell campus, the UE, CGSU, and their other campus affiliates have been at the forefront of demonizing Israel, seeking its destruction, and supporting Hamas’s violent and barbaric terrorism against Israel and its inhabitants,” the charges read. “The unions had no objective or bona-fide reasons to doubt the basis for my accommodation request or to question my sincerely held religious beliefs, observances, and practices.”
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that objectors must only describe a sincere religious objection to union affiliation. Federal law requires union officials to provide religious accommodations to such objectors. An accommodation often permits the objector to divert an amount of money equal to dues to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity instead.
Cornell claims that the collective bargaining agreement does not provide CGSU with the right to test or challenge members’ requests for religious exemptions. Cornell is “shocked and dismayed” that the union is sending emails to grad students giving them only two options – to enroll as dues-paying members or “agency fee” paying non-members, without providing the third option of paying to charity instead.
Laurie M. Johnson, the Cornell HR official in charge of implementing the new collective bargaining agreement, said, “Despite best efforts by the University, the Union has prevented the University from properly implementing the Union Security Article, and is preventing Graduate Student Workers with religious, moral or ethical objections from exercising their rights under the Collective Bargaining Agreement.”
