The director of the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago ruled on March 26 that student-athletes at Northwestern University are actually “employees” of the private university and can therefore form a union, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Citing the high demand placed on athletes by universities—50-60 hours a week during training, 40-50 hours a week during the four-month football season, tight monitoring of social media activity, outside jobs, living quarters, and so on—NLRB regional Director Peter Ohr wrote, “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies.”
Northwestern University immediately announced its intent to appeal the decision to the NLRB’s head office in Washington, but many legal experts think the players will prevail there. The board is charged with looking out for workers’ rights, not those of employers, universities, or behemoths like the NCAA. The university has other legal options, though, and with the backing of the NCAA and its undeniable history of winning legal battles in the end, Northwestern might win.
However, other legislation now in the hopper against the NCAA is likely to strain the association. This could compromise the association’s ability to defend its long-held faith in amateurism and the presence of Olympics sports on college campuses, and it could accelerate changes the association has known were coming for a while. In other words, the NCAA has become increasingly aware of the need to change parts of its operations: changes to its voting structure, $2,000 toward athletes’ college expenses beyond scholarships, more autonomy to elite conferences, etc.
“At some point, the NCAA really needs to contemplate structural change that accommodates some form of amateurism but that is a very different model than what we’re accustomed to,” said Michael McCann, a law professor and director of the Sports & Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire’s School of Law, in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
If players can form unions and acquire collective bargaining rights, it could change the nature of college athletics substantially. For example, players could be compensated for their employers’ use of their images and likenesses, even if payment is delayed until after the athlete-student leaves the school.
The Journal gave this a humorous tone, however, quoting Sen Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and former president of the University of Tennessee. “Imagine a university’s basketball players striking before a Sweet 16 game demanding shorter practices, bigger dorm rooms, better food and no classes before 11 a.m. This is an absurd decision that will destroy intercollegiate athletics as we know it,” the Journal quoted him as saying.
The New York Times published a series of comments about this case.
Contributors were Andrew Zimbalist, an economist; Allen Sack, professor of sports management; Kenneth L Shropshire, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the director of its Sports Business Initiative; Amy Privette Perko, executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics; Glenn Wong, a lawyer and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Billy Hawkins, professor of kinesiology at the University of Georgia; and Ellen J Staurowsky, professor in the department of sport management at Drexel University.