Labor experts weigh in on Breads Bakery workers’ demand to cut ties with Israel |
New York Jewish Week via JTA — The news that workers at Breads Bakery, an Israeli chain in New York City, were demanding “an end to this company’s support of the genocide happening in Palestine” as part of a union push has triggered concerns among those worried about surging anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
“This is going to spread,” Deborah Lipstadt, the former United States special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, wrote on X on Thursday. “This is not spontaneous. This is part of an effort to marginalize Jews and Israel.”
But is an Israel boycott as a union demand even possible to achieve? Do workers have rights when it comes to protecting their beliefs about Israel? What role are unions playing in anti-Israel advocacy? And what might happen next at Breads?
To answer these questions, we reached out to two labor scholars — Harry C. Katz, the director of the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at Cornell University, and Samuel Estreicher, an attorney and scholar on labor and employment law and arbitration law at New York University. We also visited a rally by Breads’s supporters on the Upper West Side on Friday afternoon.
Here’s what we learned.
The Breaking Breads workers are doing something unusual, Katz said. He said he was not aware of other examples of employees making demands related to Israel as part of a unionization effort.
“There are unions who have taken out political stances, but the stances are ‘we oppose the Netanyahu government,’ or ‘we oppose the invasion of Gaza,’ ‘we are sympathetic to BDS,’” he said. “They’re allowed to take that stance, but they have not done what you’re asking about.”
Of course, unions can and do use their might to advance political agendas. But that often happens in the advocacy space, with unions reminding decision-makers that they represent a powerful voting bloc, not in bargaining within individual units.
The insertion of Israel demands in a unionization announcement reflects an anti-Israel swing within swaths of organized labor in the United States and beyond.
In December 2023, United Auto Workers, the union that Breaking Breads has filed under, became the largest union to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. It was a sharp departure for the union, which had previously been staunchly supportive of Israel.
In March 2025, UAW came to the defense of two members at Columbia University who had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests there, including Grant Miner, who headed a union chapter representing 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students employed at the school before being expelled.
The “assault on First Amendment rights being jointly committed by the federal government and Columbia University are an attack on all workers who dare to protest, speak out, or exercise their freedom of association under the US Constitution,” UAW said in a statement at the time.
UAW national and the local group representing Breaking Breads, as the union is calling itself, both did not respond to a request for comment.
Slim to none, Katz and Estreicher both said.
For one thing, it’s far from assured that Breaking Breads will even succeed in being recognized as a bargaining union. The employees announced........