The Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) is a labor union representing graduate teaching and research assistants at New York University (NYU). GSOC is affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, United Auto Workers Local 2110, an amalgamated union that also represents employees at the Village Voice newspaper, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Museum of Modern Art, and several other locations. Formation and first contract GSOC is one of several labor organizations of graduate student teachers and researchers that formed at private universities in the 1990s. It is the first graduate employee union at a private U.S. university to have achieved collective bargaining unit recognition and negotiated a contract. (The contract expired in 2005 and the collective bargaining relationship with the university is scuttled.) When GSOC began to organize in the late 1990s, members believed that shifts in the academic labor market, including greater reliance on graduate student teaching and research, made necessary the formation of collective bargaining units. Members also sought a collective voice in their pay and working conditions. In 2000, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) unanimously ruled that graduate assistants were statutory “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act. As well, it stipulated that NYU was obliged to enter into collective bargaining negotiations with GSOC after a majority of graduate employees at the university voted in favor of the union in an NLRB election. In accordance with federal labor relations law and motions made by NYU and GSOC, the bargaining unit represented by GSOC in contract negotiations did not include graduate students who were primarily funded by private fellowships, those whose funding was not contingent on the performance of any work, and some other categories. In 2002, GSOC and NYU negotiated the first graduate assistant union contract at an American private university. (Many public universities already had union contracts under state labor laws.) The three-year contract increased stipends (dramatically for some), instituted a health care plan, and created a third-party arbitration procedure for economic disputes. 2005-2006 strike In 2004, a newly constituted NLRB voted 3–2 to reverse its 2000 NYU decision in a case involving graduate assistants at Brown University. The Republican-controlled board stated in their decision that "there is a significant risk, even a strong likelihood, that the collective-bargaining process will be detrimental to the educational process." The dissenting opinion stated that "Today's decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality", and