Academic worker unions have faced two major challenges in recent decades: the invalidation, legally and politically, of their status as workers on campus, and the increasing corporatization of universities. Just at the moment where universities are imposing increasing austerity and precarity on their own workforces, they, often with the help of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are often denying graduate workers, teaching assistants, and adjuncts the designation of “worker” with a right to collectively bargain.

But what these unions do have is a history: of labor organizing, of all kinds of workers, on their campuses. This history has served as a major resource for sustaining organizing campaigns even when university administrations would like to deny their existence. Here, we speak to Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, an independent scholar and veteran of multiple organizing campaigns. We discuss the cross-union and cross-campus solidarity that’s kept academic worker organizing alive, graduate workers’ changing status at the NLRB, and how strikes and picket lines can serve as a new source of learning at the university.