Northwestern Football Players Can’t Unionize After All

The National Labor Relations Board announced Monday that it would not wade into the case of Northwestern football players who were seeking to unionize, meaning college football will remain union-free, at least for the time being.

But the NLRB has now ruled that allowing Northwestern players to bargain with their school over policies that apply to the entire NCAA could make some schools more competitive than others.

While the NLRB did not formally rule on the central issue of whether the players are in fact employees, electing not to assert jurisdiction, the decision is a serious blow to the athletes’ unionization effort and did not give the Northwestern players the opportunity to appeal.

In January 2014 Northwestern football players, led by former quarterback Kain Colter, called the NCAA a dictatorship and asked for the right to form labor unions for college athletes.

The truth is the people who run major college football and basketball are so fearful of losing control of their lucrative cartel that they will fight any effort to change the rules, whether it be paying players to pay or allowing them to join a union.

“The NCAA and its member schools are committed to providing the best support possible for all college athletes and will continue to do so in the future”, Remy said.

When Northwestern’s football players voted to unionize last year, it made national headlines.

“The overall legacy from this movement is that when players come together to stand up for what they believe in, things get changed”, he said.

The NCAA, which governs the popular and lucrative world of US university sports, has long held that “student athletes” are not university employees but students whose participation in sports is part of their education.

George Atallah, the NFL Players’ Association’s assistant executive director of external affairs, condemned the NLRB’s decision via Twitter on Monday.

Buried on Page 23 of Northwestern University’s final brief filed with the National Labor Relations Board was the idea that the nation’s top labor authority should refuse to become involved in college athletics and should not even consider whether Wildcat football players could form a union.

Colter and Huma co-founded CAPA, a first-of-its-kind union to represent student athletes in sports programs. The players lost, so the board must have agreed with Northwestern and the NCAA, right? A month later, football players cast secret ballots on whether to unionize. And by the NLRB’s own standards of what constitutes an employee, athletes would seem to qualify.

Even if the players won’t be unionizing under federal law anytime soon, that doesn’t mean the organizing campaign is scuttled, said Fred Feinstein, a former general counsel for the NLRB.

Advocates say unionization would help athletes protect their health and financial interests. The NLRB noted that the states of Ohio and Michigan – which have three Big Ten universities – have laws specifying that scholarship athletes are not employees.

Huma also said the move by the football team helps move forward potential reforms when it comes to the treatment of college athletes.