It’s 6:20 on Friday morning and a crowd is gathering in front of the Washington Square Diner on West 4th Street. Pleasantries are exchanged, but there is little need for introductions—almost everyone here knows each other, at least tangentially.

With the exception of Sociology Professor Jeff Goodwin, we are the only members of the group who are neither members of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), NYU’s union of graduate employees, nor staff members at the United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents GSOC.

But everyone is there for the shared purpose of lobbying members of the National Labor Relations Board and Congress in the hopes of fast-tracking GSOC’s pending case, and in the dark, early hours of a February morning, all distinctions disappear—no student, graduate or undergraduate, wants to be awake before the sun rises.A bus arrives after only a few minutes, and a couple of hours later we wake up to find that Scott Sommer, the New York Sub-Regional Director of UAW Region 9A, is passing out lunch money. Next down the aisle come individual copies of the day’s itinerary and a DC subway map, then folders containing press materials weave their way from seat to seat until the last two are in the hands of the pair of grad students sitting in the back row. With that excitement over, conversation drops to a minimum and sleep overcomes most of the passengers. By the time we arrive at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in DC, the combination of cool air, new surroundings, and a few more hours of sleep has everyone looking alert and anxious to make some progress in GSOC’s prolonged struggle to gain collective bargaining rights.

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In the folder that we’d been given on the bus, placed between a press release and a colorful brochure featuring grad students at their most photogenic, there was a copy of a letter addressed to Lester Heltzer, Executive Secretary, National Labor Relations Board. Now, standing on the sidewalk in front of the NLRB, we are faced with a poster-board-sized version of that very letter, which the GSOC delegation will bring with them as they try to hand-deliver the original version to Heltzer.

The letter itself is an appeal to the Board, now back at its full capacity, to rule on the union’s almost two-year-old case. In 2004, under the Bush administration, the Republican-majority NLRB ruled that graduate employees at Brown University were students, not workers, and took away their collective bargaining rights. In 2005, when GSOC’s original contract expired, the NYU administration refused to negotiate a second, sighting the Brown decision as legal precedence. Now, GSOC is asking the Democratic-majority NLRB to reverse that decision and give them back their right to form a union.

“I think that there’s a good opportunity for the Board to overturn some of the extremist decisions of the Bush-era NLRB, which took away the rights of workers to organize. And I think that would help send a message to politicians across the country to stop the attacks on unions and on collective bargaining rights, which are fundamental democratic rights,” said Dan DiMaggio, a PhD student in Sociology.

With that history in mind, the group, now accompanied by Julie Kushner, the Director of UAW Region 9A, enters the building, but we soon discover that we are not allowed to go up to the offices. Instead, Heltzer meets us in the lobby, and Kushner presents the letter to him there. After a few words from both of them, the students—in appearance but not in the legal sense, as Heltzer jokes—introduce themselves and then make their way back out of the building.

“Since the very beginning, NYU, as a large private institution, has gotten so much attention from other universities around the country. Graduate teaching and research assistants everywhere have looked to this as an opportunity where they would be—once this is all resolved—in a position to gain collective bargaining rights at their university. So this has always been a very watershed moment for the movement of graduate TAs and RAs,” said Kushner, standing just inside the NLRB doors. “Our sisters and brothers in public institutions have enjoyed collective bargaining rights for many, many years, and so it really is about bringing the private universities into the twenty-first century.”

When we walk back outside, we see that the UAW workers have passed out signs to the graduate students during our absence. It is noon, and just as our itinerary had predicated, a press conference is about to begin. The NYU delegation far outnumbers the members of the press, but everyone soldiers on with the plan regardless.

Members of supportive organizations, such as Jobs With Justice and United Students Against Sweatshops, share a few encouraging words, and then Jeff Goodwin, the Sociology professor who took the bus down with us, talks about the faculty support for GSOC. Rana Jaleel, a PhD student in American Studies, speaks of the GSOC members who couldn’t be there because they do not have childcare or sufficient healthcare—both problems that a contract could solve. Neil Myler, a PhD student in Linguistics, then describes his daily activities, which, as he emphasizes, sound a lot like work. After a short chant of “We teach, we work, we are NYU,” the crowd disperses.

It is a low-key affair, but the excitement picks up when someone discovers that the site of NYU’s soon-to-be Washington DC campus is nearby. The group hurries around the corner to find a building still under construction and, hanging from the fence, a sign reading, “Future Home of New York University.” The graduate students rush across the busy road while a UAW organizer tries to stop traffic and we quickly snap a few photos.

Safe and sound back on the sidewalk, someone mentions that Occupy DC is on the way to the subway stop that we need to reach. The next morning the police will raid the encampment, but when we arrive at about 1:00 on Friday afternoon, the tents are up and the People’s Library is open. One graduate student shouts, “Mic check,” and, gaining the attention of occupiers spread out around the park, proceeds to speak via the People’s Mic about the importance of workplace democracy and the group’s reasons for traveling to DC. Another then continues the People’s Mic to share a message of solidarity from Occupy Wall Street and NYU4OWS.

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After a short ride on the DC subway, a place of unimaginable cleanliness where no one litters, walls are graffiti-free, and cell phones work perfectly, we arrive at the House Office Buildings for the second half of the trip. We head through security and down to the cafeteria where we make use of the money we’d been given earlier on the bus, and then split into four groups for the remainder of the afternoon.

The UAW has arranged appointments with the staffs of eight members of Congress, and each of the groups will meet with two of them. The goal of the lobbying is to convince the politicians to put pressure on the NLRB in order to speed up the process and, ideally, to get a ruling on the case in time for an election this semester. I am assigned to the group led by Ted Feng, the Assistant Director of UAW Region 9A, and our two appointments are with members of California Democrat George Miller’s staff and a member of Texas Democrat Ruben Hinojosa’s staff.

Finding ourselves finished with those assignments with over an hour to spare, the group of six walks over to the National Mall. We fail in our mission to reach the Washington Monument, but once on the bus, a bet on what time we’ll arrive back in New York is made between ourselves and four others, so there’s still a chance for redemption. We quickly realize that we’re alone in wishing for traffic on the journey home.