Eight years, three months, and eleven days ago, GSOC-UAW's first contract with NYU expired.  Since the NLRB had struck down its own four year old precedent a year earlier, and NYU had unilaterally decided to make GSOC a thing of the past, this meant that August 31 was the last time NYU's graduate employees had union recognition.  In protest, many of them (this was the day before I started grad school, also the day I signed a union card) sat down in the street and blocked traffic in front of Bobst library, the site of invisible grad employee labor, of so many student suicides, and of the offices of President Sexton and his university leadership team.

Today GSOC is once again recognized, winning an American Arbitration Agency-supervised election by a total of 620 votes to 10.  I'm in a mild state of shock, and I'm pretty misty eyed, thinking about all of the people that made this possible, from the newer cohorts I don't even know to folks like Mike, Susan, Maggie, Tracy, Paul, Jenny, Franny, George, Steve, Andy, Miabi, Joanna, Leigh Claire, Jessie, Bekah, Sonia, Tricia, Stephanie, and everyone else who helped lead the union through the strike, Brenda and Mary and Anita and Jeffrey and Maris, who gave up a year or more of their lives for a union they didn't even belong to, the undergraduates who stormed Bobst, Rana, Patrick, Stefanie, Dacia, Lauren, Kari, Emmy, Tammy, Natan, Liz, Alex, David, Burgard, Magali, "the twins," union peter, sarah, paulette, lilly, and everyone else who sustained the union through the house of delegates and years of limbo and FAR4 and John Sexton's imperial circumatlantic (and pacific) expansions and debt-financed fire island bungalows.  Apologies to many folks I forgot to mention.

I have many criticisms of UAW strategy and leadership, but the refusal to walk away and abandon GSOC, or to sell it out to administrative trap doors like the 2005 open shop proposal or FAR4 or a TA-only, Washington Square only unit deserve a lot of praise and made this moment possible.  As folks think about what the second contract will look like, I hope one thing that people mull is a refusal to agree to noninterference in academic matters, a clause which both limited the scope of what GSOC could do (academic matters are our working conditions) and gave NYU some admittedly cynical ammunition with which to demonize the union and the grievances it filed while trying to contest administrative moves to staff union jobs with then non-union and much cheaper adjunct labor.  If the only power we have is in our labor and our ability to refuse to perform it, I don't think that academic workers should be afraid to organize to transform our workplaces beyond the limited scope of fordist collective bargaining regimes.  I also think it's important to remember that without ongoing shopfloor organizing across the university, the union is vulnerable to future attack and weakened even in the absence of any unionbusting initiative on NYU's part, so the question of a sustainable culture of constant and ongoing organizing becomes paramount.  Finally, the NYU strike and subsequent struggle have been linchpins for the broader movement across the US of the organization of contingent academic workers at private universities.  Workers at Columbia and Penn got arrested with us multiple times.  GESO sent four organizers and a researcher down for the duration of the strike and months afterwards.  I think it's important that GSOC find similarly powerful ways to be in solidarity with these and future struggles in the coming years.  Congratulations and thank you to everyone who made this possible.