As I reported yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that graduate student workers are employees with full rights to organize a union. And today, the New York Times came out in favor of the decision in the strongest of terms.

It’s hard for me to express what this means to me and scholars of my generation. (I apologize in advance for this trip down memory lane. As I said on Facebook the other day: the earth belongs to the living, this moment belongs to today’s grad student, not yesterday’s).

As long-time readers of this blog know, I was actively involved in the TA organizing drive at Yale for about a decade. Reading the Times editorial, in fact, I recalled that the first time my name appeared in the Times, almost a quarter-century ago, was as a union activist at Yale.

When we were organizing in the early 1990s—and some of my friends were doing this back in the 1980s, if not earlier—a labor union for grad students seemed to so many people like the most outrageous proposition in the world. Graduate students weren’t workers; they were privileged (apparently, only the wretched of the earth deserve a union). Anyone supporting the union had to be some kind of poseur, trying to pretend they were part of the working class. I know it seemed that way to me when I got to graduate school. Everyone—from the smug sophomore writing his articles for the Yale Daily News to the pompous professor, who was sure he knew what his graduate students really wanted and needed, to the president, alumni, and trustees—everyone was sure that the idea was nonsense. Everyone except the dedicated men and women in GESO—now Local 33!—and their allies in Locals 34 and 35.

And here we are today. Suddenly that opinion—held only by a militant minority, an opinion deemed by the respectable to be extreme, radical, outrageous, nonsensical, absurd—is common sense. Even the New York Times, which recruits many of its reporters and editors from the Yale Daily News, believes it.

Some people look upon this turnabout and think, yay, Obama! Others, remember the years and decades of struggle that went into it, and think, this is what collective action is all about. This is how whatever modicum of civilization we’ve managed to achieve in this country was created. This is how patient and pressing you have to be if you want to see anything good come into this world.

Which is why, incidentally, I get so irritated when that Realist—be he 25 or 55—decides to lecture me about the long slog, the Weberian increments, that progress requires. Honey, I’ve been slowly boring hard boards longer than you’ve been alive.