The National Labor Relations Board ruled last week that graduate student workers at private universities have the right to organize unions. The result of a petition by graduate students at Columbia University seeking recognition by the United Automobile Workers, the ruling reversed a 2004 ruling under a Bush-era National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that graduate students at Brown University were not workers, but “primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university.”

The decision comes at the same time as a sharp uptick in graduate worker organizing at other private universities. It also comes roughly one year after graduate workers at New York University won a contract for the second time, after a protracted struggle led to voluntary union recognition by the university administration, making NYU the first and only graduate worker union at a private university in the country.

The NLRB ruling, coupled with the recent NYU contract victory, should kick off a surge of graduate worker union activism at private universities around the country.