http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/07/nyuNYU Strike Is Over — Without Contract
NYU Strike Is Over — Without Contract
Graduate students who spent the last semester on strike at New York University have returned to their classes, with a quiet end to what was once seen as a landmark labor action.
The students, affiliated with the United Auto Workers, had been fighting for the university to recognize them as a union. NYU previously had done so, and had been the only private institution to ever do so for its graduate students. But following a National Labor Relations Board ruling that the university didn’t have to recognize the union, NYU stopped doing so when the students’ sole contract expired.
The strike began with large rallies and vows to continue the fight until a union was won. The labor action was seen by many as crucial not just to NYU, but to other private universities where graduate students have pushed without success to unionize. But by the end of the spring semester, the strike was hardly visible on the NYU campus, except for periodic protests or media events. In the end, the strike ended without grand public announcements by either side.
The UAW’s Web site makes no mention of the strike ending. But The Washington Square News reported Wednesday that union organizers were showing up for their teaching assistant jobs, and no longer planning strike activity. Organizers told the student paper that they were not giving up their fight for collective bargaining, but that since the make-up of the graduate student body changes every year — with some students moving on and new ones arriving — it was appropriate to see if the reconstituted group wanted to strike.
FULL story at link above.
I gave to the strike fund a few months back.