University Teaching Assistants Stand Up to Unions’ Compelled Speech

​Earning a graduate degree is one way to stuff knowledge into one’s brain. But the stomach still needs food, the body still needs a place to shower and sleep, and every student needs a little extra cash to go out with friends. This is why for graduate students, working as a teaching assistant is one way to make ends meet while earning a Ph.D.
 
For decades, teaching assistants – better known as “TAs” – have complained about being overworked and underpaid. Many grumble that their professors offload too much of their teaching load and benefit from free research help for their next paper or book. The running joke: TAs just grade papers until they pass out. Understandably, graduate students sought to unionize to set limits on their labor and seek better pay.
 
That is a good thing. But union membership should never come at the cost of freedom of speech.
 
“Campus labor groups once motivated by economic fairness are increasingly governed by ideological litmus tests,” writes Jon Hartley, a doctoral candidate in economics at Stanford University, in The Wall Street Journal. The unions that represent teaching and research assistants in academia are often steeped in far-left ideological agendas that many don’t support and don’t want to endorse support with their dues.
 
This was the case at the University of Chicago, where graduate students are going to court to protect their First Amendment rights against their union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Mine Workers of America. The union’s local, GSU-UE, is a proponent of the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” movement against Israel, branding Israel an “apartheid regime” that commits “ethnic cleansing.” The union has joined in the campaign to “fight against campus Zionists,” resist “pigs” (meaning the police), and “liberate” Palestine from the “river to the sea” by “any means necessary.”
 
Jewish students understandably regard their compelled dues as forced subsidies of antisemitism. So they are going to federal court for being compelled to pay a union that, they believe, leans hard against Israel and Jews.
 
Hartley himself is suing for being forced by the Stanford Graduate Workers Union for refusing to sign a membership form and pay dues to that same union that supports progressive causes such as abortion, public subsidies for “gender-affirming care,” and defunding the police. Because the union’s advocacy contravenes his Roman Catholic faith, he is seeking a religious-objector accommodation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Hartley writes:
 
“At both Stanford and Chicago, union leadership insists that such coercion is routine – part of collective bargaining. But there’s a world of difference between negotiating wages and punishing dissenters. When students are told they can’t work, teach or study unless they pay dues to a political organization, it’s no longer about labor rights – it’s about freedom of association, conscience and speech.”
 
On Labor Day, we celebrated the solid advantages unions have brought to all Americans, from the five-day work week to the eight-hour workday. Even if you buy the idea that Americans should be forced into union membership (and some of us don’t), no one should be forced to support speech they find objectionable. This is especially true in academia, where the freedom to study, teach, and research is held to be sacrosanct.

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