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.

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.

The three-year contract increased stipends (dramatically for some), instituted a health care plan, and created a third-party arbitration procedure for economic disputes.

[citation needed] 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 dissenting opinion stated that "Today's decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality",[1] and further that "It disregards the plain language of" Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, which "defines employees so broadly that graduate students who perform services for, and under the control of, their universities are easily covered".

Its primary grounds for this decision were the claim that GSOC had filed several grievances on non-academic matters regarding teaching assignments and that it had offered to negotiate with GSOC as long as the union would agree, before the start of negotiations, to surrender the previous contract's third-party arbitration and agency shop provisions and become an "open shop" union, common in many southern states but largely without precedent in New York.

However, on an official website devoted to the labor dispute, NYU to date has only cited two "non-academic" grievances, both of which were decided in the university's favor by an independent arbitrator appointed by both sides.

On April 27, 2006, GSOC announced at a membership convention that a public majority of its members continued to support the union and had signed a petition which called on the University Leadership Team to bargain a second contract.

GSOC members resumed their teaching duties on September 5, 2006 (the first day of classes for the 2006–2007 academic year), officially ending their six-month-long strike without receiving a second contract or winning back administrative recognition of the union's collective bargaining rights.

[5][permanent dead link‍] Several actions taken by the Sexton administration during the strike have sparked strong opposition among many faculty, students, and observers, including some who are not supportive of GSOC.

When the professors teaching these classes discovered this, a strong reaction among faculty against this perceived violation of academic freedom forced a reversal of the move.