NLRB ends Northwestern’s unionization bid

Alan K. Cubbage, Northwestern’s vice president of university relations, said in a statement that Northwestern considers its student-athletes to be students and the school is pleased with the NLRB’s decision.

The NCAA is happy to tell you all of this, especially after Monday’s announcement that the National Labor Relations Board “declined to assert jurisdiction” on a petition by Northwestern football players to have the right to unionize.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said allowing Northwestern players to do so could upset the competitive balance between college teams.

The full National Labor Relations Board today dismissed a petition by the College…

“In other contexts, the Board’s assertion of jurisdiction helps promote uniformity and stability, but in this case, asserting jurisdiction would not have that effect”, the ruling said. Most reports suggested the players voted against unionizing, but no one will ever know for sure.

In its “ruling” that dismissed the College Athletes Players Association, the NLRB didn’t rule, which is technically by the book.

No. The board said the case applied only to the Northwestern football team.

Ronald Meisburg, a former general counsel for the NLRB and a onetime board member, said Monday’s ruling would serve as precedent and likely compel regional NLRB offices nationwide to flatly reject future petitions, no matter which union activists submit them.

But in the end, the NLRB’s ruling turned on a more technical question: whether it should rule on a case that would overwhelmingly affect state-run colleges and universities, institutions over which it has no jurisdiction. The Board didn’t even overturn the notion that the scholarship football players at Northwestern are employees of the University.

The ruling annuls a 2014 decision by a regional NLRB director in Chicago who said scholarship football players are employees under law and thus entitled to organize. It has been under increasing scrutiny over its amateurism rules and has been fighting lawsuits from former athletes over everything from head injuries to revenue earned from the use of their likenesses in video games. Still, it seems like setting them up with some cash while supposedly being amateurs working on their studies compounds the problem rather than confronting it. That being said, I am sorry that the NLRB has decided against college athletes seeking a seat at the table, and I look forward to further efforts that would allow players the right to bargain collectively.

– April 4, 2014: A United Steelworkers official, Tim Waters, says players from other universities have been in touch with the Steelworkers and expressed interest in forming unions at their schools.

Together, they helped crystallize public opinion over the treatment of big-time college athletes at a time when conferences were signing huge TV deals that would leave schools swimming in cash. The board noted that the NCAA has recently taken steps to sweeten the pot for players, guaranteeing them four-year scholarships instead of one-year, renewable grants, for example.