The vote could present a huge shakeup to the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s model, which currently only allows college athletes to financially benefit from their role on teams through name, image and likeness.
March 5, 2024
By Natalie Kainz
The Dartmouth Men's Basketball team voted 13-2 in favor of becoming the first-ever labor union for college athletes on Tuesday afternoon.
The vote could present a huge shakeup to the National Collegiate Athletics Association's (NCAA) model, which currently only allows college athletes to financially benefit from their role on teams through name, image and likeness.
The National Labor Relations Board paved the way for the union vote on Feb. 5, after Regional Director Laura Sacks ordered an election for the team.
“Because Dartmouth has the right to control the work performed by the Dartmouth men’s basketball team, and the players perform that work in exchange for compensation, I find that the petitioned-for basketball players are employees within the meaning of the [National Labor Relations] Act,” Sacks said in a statement.
Dartmouth has pushed back against the ruling, filing an appeal to postpone the election or impound the ballots. In the motion, which is pending with the NLRB, the university argued that the athletes are "students first and athletes second," and participate in college basketball to further their educational aims, like all students who participate in any recognized extracurricular activity.
Cornell Sports Law Professor Michael L. Huyghue called the classification of college athletes as regular students a “mockery,” because it neglects the millions of dollars that colleges are paid for television contracts, marketing rights and ticketing sales.
“We’ve just reached a point where the anti-trust laws are suggesting universities don’t have a right to capitalize on all that revenue,” said Huyghue.
Dartmouth still has five days to file an objection to the union election, and the decision by the NLRB can be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court.
“Unionization is not appropriate in this instance,” Dartmouth wrote in a statement to NBC News. “The costs of Dartmouth’s athletics program far exceed any revenue for the program.”
But Huyghue said the mere fact that an employer has not been successful in generating revenue does not mean its employees don't have a right to unionize.
The push for the team to be recognized as a union was started by Dartmouth men's basketball players Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, who told NBC News Now they had to take on jobs to sustain their finances while also being student-athletes.
“We don’t get a stipend or any type of benefit for being athletes even though we are working like full time jobs basically by being on the team,” Haskins said.
This isn't the first time a college athletics team has made a bid to be recognized as employees. In 2014, Northwestern University's football team sought union status from the NLRB.
Although a union election was held, the ballots were destroyed because the NLRB ruled the following year that the prospect of union and nonunion teams in college sports could create competitive imbalances on the field.
College sports has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry that richly rewards coaches and schools while the players remained unpaid amateurs.
ASSOCIATED PRESS / March 5, 2024
HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — The Dartmouth men's basketball team voted to unionize Tuesday in an unprecedented step toward forming the first labor union for college athletes and another attack on the NCAA's deteriorating amateur business model.
In an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board in the school's Human Resources offices, the players voted 13-2 to join Service Employees International Union Local 560, which already represents some Dartmouth workers. Every player on the roster participated.
"Today is a big day for our team," players Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil said in a statement. “We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past. It’s time for the age of amateurism to end.”"
The school has five business days to file an objection to the NLRB and could also take the matter to federal court. That could delay negotiations over a collective bargaining agreement until long after the current members of the basketball team have graduated.
Dartmouth pushed back on the decision — again — in a statement, saying it was supportive of the five unions it negotiates with on campus, including SEIU Local 560.
“In this isolated circumstance, however, the students on the men’s basketball team are not in any way employed by Dartmouth,” the school said. “For Ivy League students who are varsity athletes, academics are of primary importance, and athletic pursuit is part of the educational experience. Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate. We, therefore, do not believe unionization is appropriate.”
Although the NCAA has long maintained that its players are “student-athletes” who were in school primarily to study, college sports has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry that richly rewards coaches and schools while the players remained unpaid amateurs.
Recent court decisions have chipped away at that framework, with players now allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness and earn a still-limited stipend for living expenses beyond the cost of attendance. Last month’s decision by an NLRB that the Big Green players are employees of the school, with the right to form a union, threatens to upend the amateur model.
"We will continue to talk to other athletes at Dartmouth and throughout the Ivy League about forming unions and working together to advocate for athletes’ rights and well-being,” Haskins and Myrthil said.
A college athletes union would be unprecedented in American sports. A previous attempt to unionize the Northwestern football team failed because the teams Wildcats play in the Big Ten, which includes public schools that aren’t under the jurisdiction of the NLRB.
That’s why one of the NCAA’s biggest threats isn’t coming in one of the big-money football programs like Alabama or Michigan, which are largely indistinguishable from professional sports teams. Instead, it is the academically oriented Ivy League, where players don’t receive athletic scholarships, teams play in sparsely filled gymnasiums and the games are streamed online instead of broadcast on network TV.
Myrthil and Haskins have said they would like to form an Ivy League Players Association that would include athletes from other sports on campus and other schools in the conference. They said they understood that change could come too late to benefit them and their current teammates.
The team includes four seniors, five juniors, three sophomores and three freshman.
“We have teammates here that we all love and support,” Myrthil said after playing at Harvard last month in the Big Green’s first game after the NLRB official’s ruling. “And whoever comes into the Dartmouth family is part of our family. So, we’ll support them as much as we can.”
Mary Kay Henry, the international president of the SEIU, said the players “will go down as one of the greatest basketball teams in all of history.”
“The Ivy League is where the whole scandalous model of nearly free labor in college sports was born and that is where it is going to die,” she said.
__
By JIMMY GOLEN AP Sports Writer
Jimmy Golen covers sports and the law for The Associated Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment