The following article is from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation’s bi-monthly Foundation Action Newsletter, January/February 2025 edition. To view other editions of Foundation Action or to sign up for a free subscription, click here.

Foundation-backed students defend rights as union bosses seek more power at universities

Ben Logsdon is a Ph.D. student in mathematics at Dartmouth College. But it doesn’t take a genius to realize that union officials’ refusals to accommodate his religious objections just don’t add up.

HANOVER, NH – Just weeks after National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys triumphed in anti-discrimination cases for Jewish Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate students who sought to stop forced dues payments to a radically anti-Israel union, union officials began creating other problems for university students.

In nearby New Hampshire, Dartmouth graduate student Benjamin Logsdon sought free Foundation legal aid against Graduate Organized Laborers of Dartmouth (GOLD-UE) union officials. The GOLD union — which is an affiliate of the same United Electrical (UE) union involved in the Foundation’s MIT cases — is forcing Logsdon to accept the union’s monopoly “representation” powers against his will, even after he voiced his religious objections to the union’s radical stances on the conflict against Israel.

Grad Students Exposed to Union Coercion & Privacy Violations

Meanwhile, several graduate students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, are pushing back against an attempt by Vanderbilt Graduate Workers United (VGWU, an affiliate of United Auto Workers) union bosses to impose union control over them and their colleagues. Specifically, three students are seeking to intervene in a federal case in which VGWU union officials are illegally demanding the university hand over the students’ private information to aid in their unionization campaign. Foundation staff attorneys filed motions for intervention for these students in October 2024.

Foundation attorneys are arguing that union officials severely violate students’ rights in both of these cases. However, the reason that union officials are in power on college campuses at all traces back to flawed rulings from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under both the Obama Administration and Biden Administration. These rulings subject graduate students to pro-Big Labor provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which create issues for students’ freedom both inside and outside the classroom.

Logsdon, a Christian Ph.D. student in mathematics at Dartmouth, slammed the GOLD union with federal anti-discrimination charges in September 2024 at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). According to those charges, shortly after the GOLD union finalized its first monopoly bargaining contract with the Dartmouth administration, he sent a letter to United Electrical General Secretary-Treasurer Andrew Dinkelaker explaining that he objected to being affiliated with GOLD on religious grounds and needed an accommodation.

“I sought to be removed from the UE and GOLD-UE bargaining unit as a reasonable accommodation,” Logsdon’s Foundation-backed charges say.

Dinkelaker refused to offer Logsdon an accommodation that “satisf[ied] [his] religious conscience or beliefs,” according to the charges, which violated his rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Courts have recognized a variety of Title VII religious accommodations over the years for men and women who have religious objections to union affiliation, including paying an amount equivalent to union dues to a charity instead of union bosses. However, Logsdon seeks a different accommodation: to remove himself from union bosses’ control entirely.

At Vanderbilt, three students who identify themselves in legal documents as “John Doe 1,” “John Doe 2,” and “Jane Doe 1” are contending in their Foundation-backed motions for intervention that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) forbids the Vanderbilt administration from disclosing their personal information to any third parties without their permission, including the VGWU union.

At the union’s behest, NLRB Region 10 has already hit the Vanderbilt administration with a pair of subpoenas demanding personal student info, while ignoring objections from several students expressing concern at the disclosure.

So far Vanderbilt has resisted the NLRB’s subpoenas, and fortunately a federal court has temporarily allowed the university to refuse to comply with them.

The Foundation-backed students’ motions to intervene argue that the subpoenas “are an attempt to violate FERPA’s protections, privileging union interests over the graduate students[’] privacy rights.” It also points out that FERPA allows students to seek “protective action” if a university receives a subpoena seeking their personal information, as in this case.

The Vanderbilt students and their Foundation attorneys are demanding an opportunity to properly defend their privacy interests under FERPA. Foundation attorneys have already filed Requests for Review asking the NLRB in Washington, DC, to weigh in on the matter.

Union Monopoly Power Has No Place at Universities

“Graduate students around the country are discovering that union bosses don’t respect their individual rights and would rather use students as pawns to force their demands on a university administration, or advance an extreme political agenda,” commented National Right to Work Foundation Vice President and Legal Director William Messenger.

“Union monopoly bargaining is a system particularly ill-suited to an academic environment. Indeed, it is wrong for anyone to have a union monopoly imposed on them against their will and then be forced to pay union dues under threat of termination.”