Zach Schwartz-Weinstein marched alongside fellow graduate student workers and union supporters from Judson Memorial Church to Washington Square Park on April 27, 2006, to support the recognition of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee. They demanded that NYU negotiate a second contract with the graduate student union. The marchers sat down and blocked traffic on Washington Square North. Ten minutes later, New York City police officers arrested Schwartz-Weinstein and 56 others for “civil disobedience,” the New York Times reported at the time.
“Nothing that graduate students have ever won at NYU has come without a strike or strike vote,” Schwartz-Weinstein, a former Ph.D. student in American Studies and a historian of university labor, said. “It is unfortunate that NYU has forced another strike to happen. But members of GSOC should be commended and applauded for continuing to fight for the rights of graduate employees and against the casualization of academic labor on a national scale.”