The Cornell Graduate Students United – United Electrical (CGSU-UE) is undertaking its first membership drive and transition to mandatory dues payments. These dues payments are collected by Cornell as payroll deductions, meaning the amount of the dues is deducted from grad students’ paychecks. Two issues block this effort: CGSU-UE is fighting over how the religious exemption to dues collection should be implemented and a student is challenging whether graduate students are employees before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). \
The CGSU-Cornell collective bargaining agreement gives benefits to all covered workers and in exchange requires those workers to either join the union, pay an “agency fee” to the union, or donate the same amount to charity. The covered workers are “all graduate students enrolled in Comell University PhD and Master’s degree programs at the Ithaca, Cornell Tech (Roosevelt Island) and Geneva campuses who receive a stipend from Cornell University.” “Fellows” and “graduate teaching research specialists (GTRS)” are excluded.
Processing Religious Exemptions
Two graduate 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. In response, Cornell delayed processing dues withholdings pending clarification of the dispute.
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.
On June 19, CGSU posted on Instagram:
The caption of the post says, “If Cornell doesn’t comply with our contract and the law, our membership will respond in kind.” They promise to file a Stage 3 grievance, which promptly results in arbitration.
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.
“Both nationwide and on the Cornell campus, the [United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America] (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.”
RELATED: Cornell Grad Students Sue Union Over Religious Objections to Dues
Similar cases involving religious freedom and union dues have recently been litigated. In 2024, five Jewish graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scored religious accommodations that allowed them to pay money to pro-Israel charities instead of to the UE union. In a related case for another MIT graduate student, attorneys secured a settlement that required union officials to inform the entire MIT graduate student body (over 3,000) of their rights under the Communications Workers of America v. Beck Supreme Court decision. Beck permits nonmembers to cut off dues payments for union political or ideological activities.
The CGSU-UE contract allows three options for graduate students: 1) become a voting member that pays dues, 2) become a non-member that pays agency fees, or 3) be a religious objector that donates to charity. To promote the first category, the CGSU-UE held its first election and is requiring students to sign a membership card in order to vote in the election. Those membership cards are then submitted to Cornell to start a payroll deduction for membership dues.
Are Graduate Students “Employees” Covered by the NLRA?
On July 14, Russell Burgett, a Ph.D. candidate in chemical physics, launched a groundbreaking federal labor case challenging the CGSU-UE’s authority to maintain exclusive representation powers over him and his fellow graduate students.
Burgett, who opposes the union and is not a member, filed his charges at the NLRB with free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys.
The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing private sector labor law. For many years, the NLRB ruled that graduate students did not fit the definition of “employees” and were not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. In 2000, the NLRB ruled that grad students could be employees. Then it reversed that in 2004, when it reasoned that graduate assistants cannot be statutory employees because they “are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university.” Burgett’s case is a direct challenge to the NLRB’s 2016 Columbia University decision, which overturned those long-standing precedents, again.
Burgett’s charges assert that Cornell graduate students are not “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act. For that reason, the charges say, CGSU-UE union officials’ attempts to force them to abide by a union contract – including provisions that effectively mandate the students pay union dues or fees to complete essential parts of their graduate programs – violate federal labor law.
As of July 2023, there were at least 156 active graduate student unions in the U.S.
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Furthermore, Burgett’s charges contend the union contract is illegal because it forbids the university from doing business with students who abstain from union membership or union financial support. He further contends that union agreements that require an entity to cease doing business with persons who refuse to associate with the union are a clear violation of the National Labor Relations Act.
It may take years for the NLRB to reach a decision on Burgett’s challenge. In the meantime, Cornell has entered into a collective bargaining agreement with CGSU-UE and will honor it, as long as students are given the option of donating an amount equal to union dues to charity.
Are Masters of ILR Students Covered?
The New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) has four degree programs: the undergraduate program, a Ph.D. program, the Master of Science program (MS ILR), and a Masters program (MILR). Students in all four programs can be hired as Teaching Assistants (TA) on a part time basis. In 2024-25, ILR conferred 93 Master degrees and 2 Ph.D. degrees.
As with all of Cornell, ILR is facing budget tightening, in part due to the pay increase awarded to Ph.D. students last spring. So, the Dean of the ILR School Alexander Colvin, Ph.D. ’99 tried to reduce the compensation provided to the Masters students. Some Masters students were offered GTRS positions.
The ILR website warns “The Master of Industrial and Labor Relations (MILR) degree is self-funded.” The website is careful to explain what aid is available but makes no promises. MILR students pay an annual SUNY-subsidized tuition of $46,658. Comparable cautions are on the MS ILR page. It warns, “While funding is limited, applicants who are admitted to the MS program within the ILR School will be offered any available funding in their admission letter.”
CGSU Instagram post
On August 7, the CGSU Board and others signed an op-ed in the Sun entitled, “ILR Is Union Busting: CGSU-UE Graduate Workers Stepped Up and You Can Too.” The Op-ed and a related Instagram post claim that the MS ILR students are covered by the union and should be guaranteed funding for tuition and health insurance. MS ILR students are currently not guaranteed this, and ILR told the affected students to take out loans to cover any financial shortfalls. Thus far, CGSU has not addressed whether these students are a part of their collective bargaining agreement or are being charged union dues.
Dean Colvin met with interested students, and CGSU students showed up to support their claims. As a result, the Dean is scraping up funding for the second-year MS ILR students and is offering entering first-year MS ILR students fall semester fellowships.
