New York University is a university born of a labor riot. In 1834, when New York City stonecutters learned that the stone for a new university building on Washington Square was being quarried and cut using free prison labor from the newly opened Sing Sing, they petitioned the state for intervention — the use of prison labor, they argued, was “taking the bread out of their mouths.”

When the state ignored their claims, they took to the streets of lower Manhattan, hammers in hand, for a four day riot. Eventually the National Guard was called in to quell the unrest, and the soldiers were stationed in Washington Square Park, so that the first stones for what would become NYU could be laid. It was, perhaps, an inauspicious beginning, foreshadowing a long history of labor agitation on NYU’s campus.

On December 11, workers wrote the most recent chapter of NYU’s labor history, this time at the ballot box. The graduate employees of NYU — including teaching, research, and program assistants at the Washington Square campus and at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute — won an overwhelming victory, voting 620 to 10 to be represented by the Graduate Student Organizing Committee/United Auto Workers (GSOC/UAW) Local 2110. In doing so, we once again became the only private university student employees to have union representation.