A New York area labor union has been accused of enabling antisemitic discrimination in complaints filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), both US government agencies, The Algemeiner has learned.

Submitted by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law on Tuesday, the complaints charge that the New York Legal Assistance Group’s (NYLAG) union — A Better NYLAG (ABN) — “actively obstructed” measures that would have reduced antisemitic activity at the nonprofit, which receives copious public funding from the local government. After nearly two years of alleged abuses and smear campaigns, the Brandeis Center said, Jewish NYLAG employees are seeking a legal remedy as a last resort to protect their rights and save an institution at risk of losing its reputation for fostering justice and equality before the law.

“Jewish American union members, like all other working people, are entitled to union representation that supports them fairly and equally against toxic environments,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a press release announcing the actions. “In this case, the union actually made things worse, actively attempting to block management efforts to address a workplace that had been made inhospitable for Jewish workers. This is exactly the opposite of what unions should be doing.”

Marcus, a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the US Education Department, added, “We must hold labor unions accountable when they exacerbate antisemitic environments, just as we do with universities, public schools, and other institutions.”

According to the complaints, antisemitism emerged at NYLAG and ABN following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, with employees using the workspace as a platform for endorsing the terrorist organization’s atrocities of rape and murder of the young and elderly. After, for example, NYLAG attempted to console Jewish employees by sending an email which acknowledged the severity of Hamas’s violence, ABN followed up by accusing Israel of “occupation and war crimes.” Such behavior continued in different forms at NYLAG, wholly endorsed by ABN, the Brandeis Center said.

At one point, a NYLAG employee allegedly distributed buttons which said, “Resisting colonialism is not terrorism.” Soon, pro-Hamas arts and crafts began appearing in NYLAG common spaces. “Respect existence or expect resistance,” said one homemade poster to which its creator clipped red and green butterflies. “Long live the resistance,” said another. Facing a deluge of complaints from outraged Jewish employees, NYLAG’s general counsel imposed a neutrality policy on the organization’s common spaces, forbidding partisan political expression that deviated from its purpose.

Rather than facilitating the policy’s success as an antidiscrimination measure, ABN, a chapter of United Autoworkers of America (UAW), accused the nonprofit of violating the “the National Labor Relations Act, which protects our right to protest unfair working conditions” and declared its intent to “file an unfair labor practice” charge against it. Avoiding a protracted legal fight with its own union, NYLAG never enforced the rule despite pleas from Jewish employees.

“These signs demonstrate propaganda meant to demonize Jews and/or Zionists and Israel,” one employee wrote to upper management just last month, according to the complaint. “I am unable to work in this environment, so I often work in areas of the office without so many sings. These signs are having the discriminatory effect of pushing Jewish people and/or Zionists out of these spaces. As a Jewish person, I should not have to work in such close proximity to signs that direct hatred towards me.”

The complaint requests relief which would enforce ABN’s compliance with fair representations guaranteed in NLRA bylaws and terminate its “interference” with NYLAG’s efforts to purge its organization of antisemitism.

In Tuesday’s press release, Brandeis Center senior counsel and former New York City Council member Rory Lancman said, “These Jewish legal services attorneys have dedicated their professional lives to representing poor and marginalized New Yorkers facing eviction, deportation, and loss of access to health care and other critical government services, so imagine their shock and disappointment when their own union sided with those marginalizing them and fomenting an antisemitic, toxic work environment.”

More Jewish professionals are experiencing workplace discrimination, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

According to a new study by the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department, antisemitism in academic medical centers located on college campuses is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish health-care professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate.

Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study includes survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish health-care professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.

“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author Alexandra Fishman said on Monday in a statement. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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