On Tuesday, July 15, senior administrators from the City University of New York (CUNY), Georgetown University, and the University of California, Berkeley were called to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in a hearing entitled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” This series of hearings uses allegations of antisemitism as an excuse to demonize and delegitimize universities, unions, the Left, and the pro-Palestine movement by arguing that anti-Zionism and criticism of the Israeli government is the same as anti-Jewish discrimination or hatred, despite the proud and growing tradition of anti-Zionism within the Jewish community. The committee includes some of the most far-right, bigoted representatives in Congress, including one who quoted Hitler (positively) in a speech and one who believes peace in the Middle East is only possible if Jewish people and Muslims all convert to Christianity.
They don’t care about antisemitism — they care about destroying the movement for Palestine, higher education, and the labor movement.
CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez testified only a few weeks after four faculty members at Brooklyn College, all active in the Palestine movement, were fired, without the knowledge of their department chairs, who had already assigned them classes for the fall. The union has stated that this has “all appearances of an ideological purge” and accused CUNY of engaging in a “new McCarthyism.” In a press conference the day before the hearing, union president James Davis said it was, “being used to ambush university leaders yet again, to smear faculty and students yet again, to threaten to defund our institutions yet again, and to dismantle higher education.”
This is the ninth hearing from the House Committee on Education and Workforce investigating antisemitism at universities. But what is new about this hearing is the attack not only on pro-Palestine faculty and students, but on labor unions. In their questions, the committee members primarily focused on UAW Local 4811, which represents graduate assistants and academic researchers at the University of California who went on strike in May 2024 in response to violence at the UCLA Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which represents faculty, staff, and graduate assistants at CUNY. One week before the hearing, the president of an anti-union law firm published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal providing anti-union talking points, many of which the Republican members of the committee parroted in their questioning. While the title of the hearing says it’s about antisemitism, it was really about anti-labor, anti-Palestine and anti-Left political repression.
Unions are tools of political organizing against the repression at the center of the Trump administration, as well as increasingly tools against the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s austerity policies, and anti-immigrant attacks. The committee members’ questions about the UAW and the PSC make their anti-union agenda clear: to undermine unions and attack their ability to fight back. Union members must understand the real stakes of this hearing; the fight against the repression of the Palestine movement is also a fight to defend unions as tools for workers to fight back — and on unions themselves.
An Attack on a New Generation of the Labor Movement
As we have been reporting over the last several years, we are witnessing a resurgence in the labor movement — a new generation of workers unionizing their workplaces and going on strike, including at giants like Amazon and Starbucks. Workers are increasingly connecting their union struggles to the Black Lives Matter movement, queer rights (especially trans rights), Palestine, abortion, climate change, and immigrants’ rights. Workplace organizing is increasingly seen as a viable path of combat in class struggle, and the capitalist class is well aware of the threat it poses, if these seeds are allowed to grow.
Academic unions in particular have grown in both number and militancy in the last decade, in large part owing to the National Labor Relations Board’s 2016 Columbia decision that ruled student workers at private universities are allowed to unionize, but also through a pattern of chain reaction, in which a union drive, contract campaign, or strike precedes new organizing among other sectors of the same university workforce. Some of these unions (like UAW 4811, which represents roughly 48,000 workers) are quite large, and academic workers in the UAW in particular are playing a progressive role not only in their own workplaces, but in organizing alongside their autoworker union siblings through formations like UAW Labor for Palestine.
UAW 4811 and the Right To Make Political Demands
It is no wonder that the House Committee singled out UAW 4811; the local’s 2024 strike following vigilante violence at the UCLA Gaza Solidarity Encampment was a highly significant event for the labor movement. The union’s official strike demands were tied to free speech, funding disclosures, divestment from weapons manufacturers, and the right to opt out of certain funding sources, linked to unfair labor practice charges filed against the university. Much of the enthusiasm and momentum for the strike among the membership came from workers’ widespread interest in going beyond workplace demands and taking labor action in support of the Palestinian people, identifying their structural role as workers as a strategic way to channel their fighting spirit into the potential for real change.
While being questioned by Robert Onder (R-MO), UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons pledged his opposition to UAW 4811’s support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. A few minutes later, Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) asked Lyons “what guard rails the university [would] put in place to make sure that collective bargaining is not going to be used to push foreign policy demands.” When Lyons answered that both unions and employers are allowed to put forward demands, Mackenzie pushed Lyons to make a commitment to strongly oppose any “foreign policy considerations being forced into a union negotiation.” (These questions and their responses can be found at 1:51:33 and 2:01:45 in the hearing recording.)
The focus of the attacks is on U.S. labor’s ability to act as internationalists and make demands that extend beyond the workplace, not for the workers’ own sake, but for the sake of workers around the world. The committee is drawing a clear line: unions cannot be allowed to support internationalist demands. That being said, 4811 must not concede its right to make internationalist demands supported by its members in hopes of getting the university and the government off its back; the agenda is broader than merely stifling union influence at the edge of campus, and if unions give an inch, the forces that oppose them will attempt to take a mile.
PSC-CUNY, BDS, and Union Security
While the PSC has not engaged in the kind of militant labor action around Palestine and free speech that UAW 4811 did, the PSC has an important left sector that has been demanding pro-Palestine stances from the union. This includes pushing for BDS, engaging the union in the encampment, staging a wildcat sickout for Palestine, and building a unified struggle between students and faculty at Brooklyn College against repression of an attempted student encampment. It’s no wonder that the committee focused on the PSC: they want to crush this left current. This process is already underway, as CUNY fired four pro-Palestine faculty, all of whom are active in the union and trying to unite labor with the struggle for Palestine.
The committee attempted to smear the PSC for both individual members’ pro-BDS stances and past BDS-related resolutions passed by the union’s delegate assembly. Another line of questioning focused on a years-long attempt by certain former PSC members to undermine the scope of public sector unions’ ability to represent their members in bargaining.
In 2021, after the PSC delegate assembly passed a resolution dictating that union chapters host events to discuss BDS, five faculty members chose to leave the union, both in protest of the resolution and the claim that the union was insufficiently representing their interests by allegedly focusing more on adjunct faculty issues than full-time faculty interests. Supported by multiple anti-union organizations, they filed a lawsuit (which the Supreme Court refused to hear earlier this year), arguing that it’s not enough to be allowed to quit the union and refuse to pay dues — they don’t want the union contract to apply to them either.
This lawsuit is being fought under the banner of opposing antisemitism, but it is, at its core, an anti-union lawsuit, which could have consequences for public sector unions (and potentially, in the long run, private sector unions as well) across the country. The individual faculty members participating in the lawsuit may have been motivated by their anti-Palestine views, but the organizations supporting them certainly have an additional anti-labor agenda they are seeking to advance through attacking the movement for Palestine.
While people like the Republicans on the committee and the author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed are arguing that public universities and their unions are creating a hostile working environment for pro-Israel Jewish people, it’s anti-Zionist faculty, staff, and graduate student workers who are being doxed and fired, with both local and federal politicians (those on the committee) calling for even harsher and more widespread discipline. This includes significant numbers of Jewish students and faculty who have been attacked by the Trump administration, the Zionists, and the Far Right.
This hearing should raise alarm bells for us all.
The fight for Palestine is inseparable from the fight against repression; when people are fired or imprisoned for their activism, their ability to continue their political work is hampered, and defending free speech is critical for recruiting more people into any movement, especially those who sympathize but fear the consequences of speaking up. Defending the movement allows the movement to advance — and failing to defend our unions would mean not only weakened ability to wield our power as organized workers against the genocide, but weakened ability to fight for (or against) anything else as well. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has staked out its position, and now we must dig in to defend ours.