Morning Wire - Jewish Professors Challenge Union Representation | Sunday Extra

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

A group of Jewish professors is suing their openly Marxist teachers union, arguing that forced representation by a union actively engaged in anti-Semitism violates their First Amendment rights. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Birch Gold: Text "WIRE" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation information kit. Black Rifle Coffee: Give back by drinking America's coffee! Get an exclusive discount with code DAILYWIRE: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a potential landmark Supreme Court case, a group of Jewish professors is suing over being forced to be represented by a teacher's union, they say, is actively engaged in discrimination against them and other Jewish people. The First Amendment case could change the law of the land when it comes to unions and forced representation. In this episode, we sit down with one of those professors and the attorney arguing that his civil rights are being violated. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

It's Sunday, October 6th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Hey guys, producer Brandon here. Black Rifle Coffee helps you wake up each morning feeling dialed in and ready to make the most of your day. And now's your chance to get 20% off your purchase using code DailyWire at black rifle coffee.com. All of their explosive coffees are roasted right here in the USA by a veteran-led team of expert roasters obsessed with crafting the perfect cup of coffee. Every Black Rifle purchase makes it possible for Black Rifle Coffee Company to help provide funding, training and equipment to our nation's military and first responders.

Head to their site now for 20% off your purchase with Code Daily Wire. Joining us now is Jeffrey Lacks, professor at Brooklyn's Kingsborough Community College and Nathan McGrath, President and General Counsel at the Fairness Center, who's representing LACS and his colleagues. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. First, it would be helpful for our audience to hear a bit about your backgrounds. Nathan, you have a special expertise related to this case, correct? Right. Well, I'm the lead attorney on this case. Glad to be here. My background, I always say nobody, like, wakes up dreaming to be a lawyer in our area. There's very few who do it, maybe like less than 30 around the country. And in 2012, actually, I ended up taking a job with national right to work, spent five years there, kind of cutting my teeth in this area of law, ended up being recruited by the Fairness Center and came up here. And I have just really devoted my,

my practice to representing people who public sector union officials have violated their rights, whether it's constitutional rights or they've retaliated against them for exercising constitutional rights and even union corruption. And so I've spent a lot of years kind of steeped in this area of law. And so when Jeff and his colleagues came to us with a constitutional question involving union officials, that was right up my alley and I was able to jump in with that. So clearly you've seen a lot of these kinds of cases coming into this particular lawsuit. Well, Jeff, you also have a legal background, but also years of teaching experience at the college you're now suing, correct? Yes, I'm one of six professors who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

I have five years of litigation experience, and then I went into academia full-time. I've been at Kingsborough Community College as a law professor since 2004, and I've been the chair of the Department of Business there. since 2011. And Nathan says that there are very few people who do what he does. I'm going to one-up him. There's nobody who's done what I've done, which is not only sue my boss while I'm working for them, but also sue the union that represents me against that boss at the same time. That sounds complicated. There's nobody doing that. Except maybe the six plaintiffs who are joined with me. That's a rarity. I'm sure it is. So let's talk about this. case. What's the timeline of events that led you up to the point that you're taking legal action

all the way up to the Supreme Court? Well, CUNY has been a hotbed of anti-Semitism for years, and I've been blowing the alarm on that personally. And then I founded a group called Safe Campus, students, alumni, and faculty for equality on campus a couple years ago, well before October 7th. And we've been talking about the systemic anti-Semitism at the university for all these years. I have an op-ed in the New York Post regarding this lawsuit and also the history of anti-Semitism at CUNY dated, I believe it's September 25th. But what a lot of people don't know is the union, the PSC, CUNY, the professional staff Congress of City University of New York has been a driving force. And I would say the main driving force of the specific incidents of anti-Semitism at the university. And we've seen what's going on behind the scenes for years.

I saw that what happened on October 8th, which is people defending Hamas and things of that horrid nature, I knew that day was coming. And I was warning people for years that that day was coming. I just didn't know that October 7th, the most horrific event to happen to Jews, on that scale since the holocaust obviously i couldn't predict that but we knew eventually the mask would be ripped away from the faces of the people who went and defended the monsters who did what they did in october 7th and that i knew what eventually happened one day so usually when i do interviews and i've been on fox a lot of times and a lot of different radio shows they always asked me was

i surprised by what happened in october 7th and i say yes i was surprised by the events of october 7th and i say yes i was surprised by the events of October 7th, but I was not surprised by the reaction of academia and faculty of October 8th, because I've been seeing it behind the scenes for a decade. And at my university, I'll just finish with this, these two stunning things. One thing that I saw was that over about a 10-year period, CUNY and New York, first of all, CUNY is the largest urban university in the country. It's got 25 campuses and it's got about 240,000 students. And its senior administration, which has 45 people, has zero Jews. Now, it is hard to hire 45 people and not just fall over a Jew in a city that's 20% Jewish. So that was a methodical thing that they did over that period. And the head of

discrimination at CUNY, the person in charge of discrimination across all 25 campuses is Sally Abadala. She is a former Care Minnesota director. Now, Care Minnesota, for your listeners who may not know, is not just a care chapter. It is one of the most extreme care chapters. And she was the leader of the BDS movement, boycott divestment and sanctions movement, an anti-Israel anti-Semitic movement at that chapter. She's the head of discrimination, meaning she's in charge of anti-Semitism across the university. So, again, something like that does not happen by accident. it is purposeful. And the union is really behind so much of this because of the people they push to get hard at the university, because they get funding. And they helped strategize, for example,

the Gaza encampments that you guys also on TV. And our group Safe Campus has emails that document that they were strategizing with these quote unquote students. And I say it that way because a lot of them really were not students. The faces are students, but really there's always faculty members, and that means a union with money driving all this stuff. So we have a lot of emails that show how horrifying the organization is of these unions that support these illegal activities. And I'll just add one last thing, and then I'll let Nathan talk. The unions are Marxist. And I don't say that for dramatic effect. I'm not exaggerating. They actually call each other comrade at union meetings and they're not joking. They celebrate Marx's birthday at my campus.

So they are full on dyed in the will Marxists. And in fact, they don't support Democrats. That's the thing that is the most stunning of all. Democrats think these people are these crazy lunatic radical Islam and Marxists are on their side. They're not. In New York, my union didn't support Bill de Blasio. They supported Cynthia Nixon because she was the more Marxist candidate. They didn't even support Andrew Cuomo. They supported Teachout, who again was the more Marxist candidate. So if you think that Bill de Blasio is a moderate, you're insane. And that's who my union is. And so now you are forced to be represented by this union, which begs the question for Nathan, how is that even possible legally? Yeah, I mean,

How is it possible? It goes all the way back to the 1940s to a Supreme Court decision there. The Supreme Court said, we're going to allow this scheme, basically, where state law can force people to be represented by a union for collective bargaining. You know, terms and conditions of employment and for grievances and disciplinary matters. Those types of things will allow certain states if they want to to force different. They're called bargaining units, basically groups of employees at different places of employment to be represented only by the union, meaning they can't speak for themselves, they can't make any deal with the contract for themselves. The union gets to do it all, and these people are forced to accept whatever the union

negotiates for them. And so in this situation, what we're seeing across the country, unions are trying to negotiate BDS stuff into contracts now with employers, which obviously would be horrible for our clients and just generally speaking, you know, what does that have to do with terms and conditions of employment? So anyway, in 1944, the Supreme Court basically was like, yeah, we think this is a little bit of an impingement on your constitutional rights, but we're going to allow it because we're going to say the union still has a duty of fair representation. Basically, doesn't matter who you are, whether you're a union member or not, because we're basically taking your voice away and giving

all this power to the union, the union, they'll have to represent you fairly. And that was kind of reaffirmed by the court in the 80s. But what we're doing here today, what Jeff and his colleagues' case is putting before the Supreme Court, I think, is just the very clearest cut example of what the court has blessed, even though they've admitted as recently as the Janus decision in 2018, that this is an impingement on constitutional rights is putting before the court this scenario. And Jeff's situation crystallizes it. Like, this doesn't work anymore, where you give a union that says they speak for 30,000 professors in New York City, they're their voice, and they speak for them on all these topics. And yet they're out pushing the BDS movement. They're coming out with resolutions.

against Israel and pro-Palestine. Well, whatever you believe personally on that issue, our clients don't believe that, yet the union says they speak for them. And I had to laugh the other day. I was kind of looking through one of the transcripts in this case of a lower court hearing we just had. And the federal judge even during the hearing, as I was presenting oral argument, at one point he said, what does the union have to do with popping off about policy

in the Middle East and international relations. And I just wanted to, I want to be like, hey, that's a good question, Judge. Maybe you should ask the other side. Like, what is the union doing, popping off about these issues? It doesn't have anything to do with New York City professors

in their terms and conditions of employment. So we're presenting this to the Supreme Court. We're basically giving them the ability to say, yeah, exclusive representation doesn't work anymore. And if they were to take the case in Roland Jeff's favor, it would fundamentally change the landscape of labor law across the country because it simply comes down to this. People would finally be free to choose who speaks for them and who doesn't speak for them.

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that espresso kick and sometimes a smooth silky latte just wins it's exceptional but effortless like actually effortless simply press brew and explore nispresso what else keep exploring at nespresso.com it's frankly hard for the layman to believe this is allowable under current law what about the financial side of this are professors forced to pay union dues or is it just that you have no other voice than this union. Because of the great work of organizations like the National Rights to Work Foundation and the Fairness Center, because of their great work, Janus transpired. And Nathan's organization was very much involved in Janus happening and allowing me to actually get out of the union. So our union at the time of Janus had over 30,000 members. Our union,

and they have to publicize their data, I believe, every year. The last time I looked, they only had just over 23,000 members. So that tells you how many people are disillusioned with our union. That's 7,000 people, thanks to Nathan's work and his organization's work, they were able to opt out of the union and to answer your question more directly, not pay dues. However, the second part of your question, you said it exactly right, which is that we still are subject to,

because of the state law, what's called the Taylor Law in New York State, we are required to be part of the bargaining unit, meaning that whatever terms our union negotiates for us, we are bound by those terms. And in my case, and also, I believe also I can speak for my five co-plaintiffs cases, it's not just that we disagree fundamentally, ideologically, and find appalling. the views of our union. It's really not just that. It's much more practical. Our union right now has no contract with the university. They're negotiating a new contract now. And anybody who even watches a little bit of the news has seen in the news that universities like Columbia and our university, we've really been at the forefront of the anti-Semitism problem with those two

speakers, if you recall, that when viral their videos at CUNY Law School, with their hate, not only of Jews, but of America itself, talking about how capitalism is a problem and Western culture and really urging the downfall of America. So the fact that they bargain for us, when there's so much anti-Semitism at our university, a report just came out on September 25th, I believe, or 24th, which is what I wrote my op-ed on in the New York Post,

the next day, which said that the anti-Semitism was so pervasive that the City University of New York must completely overhaul its anti-Semitism policies. And look, that's underscored by the fact of what I said in the beginning of this interview, which is that a care director and BDS activist, an anti-Semitic activist, is the head of anti-Semitism, of overseeing anti-Semitism at our university. I don't know what could possibly lead to a situation where you hire someone who's an avowed anti-Zionist representing thousands of Zionist Jews at CUNY. So our union, while they're currently bargaining for our new contract, they are actually chanting at the same time. Our union delegates, the people who represent me are chanting Zionists out of CUNY and Zionism out of CUNY.

They chant that, our delegates. and they organize rallies where they chant that. They hate me. They hate people like me. They hate Zionist Jews. They hate the overwhelming majority of Jews who are Zionist Jews. So they are literally negotiating for anti-Semitism on my campus. Yeah, I remember when we first took the case for Jeff.

And as a lawyer, it makes me shudder a little bit representing another lawyer because it's like, oh man, here we go. But we had this really long conversation in the beginning. And the conclusion of it, Jeff was like, listen, this isn't about being anti-union or anything like that. It's about giving people a choice, right? So that if you have a union that is, as he was talking about, fundamentally against them and all these types of things, you have a choice to leave that union and have someone else represent you or represent yourself or just choose not to be represented, you know, at all. That's what this case is about. It's about when people want a different option that the government can't force you under the thumb of someone who is radically opposed to you, doesn't have your best interest in mind. We have a First Amendment, guys, freedom of speech, freedom of association. We have religious liberties. The exclusive representation system is contrary to all of that. The Supreme Court has recognized that basically over a number of

cases where it's written about it being an impingement upon First Amendment rights. This case gives the court the opportunity to finally cleaning this up and say, you know what, this doesn't work, this is no good. And I think Jeff's case perfectly illustrates why it needs to be taken down. It's certainly a stark representation of all those arguments against the current state of laws regarding unions. Final question, what's next for this case? What are the next steps? So Jeff and his colleagues have, like we mentioned, filed before the Supreme Court asking them to take their case. Oddly, the other side, they waived their right to respond. And the court actually came back on September 12th, I think it was, and said, nope, we want to hear from you. We need a response. So that's currently due pretty soon here. We're going to hear back from their side, the union. And then the Supreme Court will probably later this year figure out whether they want to take the case or not.

Well, let's hope they do. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for covering this. Thank you, John. Really appreciate it. That was Jeffrey Lacks and Nathan McGrath, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.