Board dismisses ruling to allow college athletes to unionize

In a unanimous decision, the National Labor Relations Board has rejected Northwestern University football players’ petition to form a union by declining to assert jurisdiction in the case.

Kain Colter, the former Northwestern quarterback who led the organizing push, tweeted that he was “disappointed by the NLRB ruling”.

Instead of allowing a union that would bargain over wages and working conditions, the board deferred to the governing structures of college sports already established by the NCAA and its conferences.

If a legal “win” over the Northwestern players can produce this much change, imagine what a defeat might bring? Ballot boxes will remain sealed while the university challenges the effort to unionize. And by the NLRB’s own standards of what constitutes an employee, athletes would seem to qualify.

Ramogi Huma says the ruling Monday by the National Labor Relations Board doesn’t prevent another attempt for athletes to try to unionize. The decision is seen as a victory for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), as the NLRB’s decision essentially denies the players’ request to become university employees.

The petition had been filed by the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA). “It’s a delay. In the meantime, players don’t have the leverage they need to protect themselves”.

The Pac-12 also decided in October that athletes injured during college competition would have medical coverage for up to four years after graduating.

Together, they woke up college athletic administrators, who previously were far too busy sipping cocktails with fat cat supporters to worry about whether players had enough money to take a date out for pizza and a movie. “What’s gone on in the last year is night and day”. “We dealt with it fine, but I think it hurt our team’s performance on the field”. It means that the effort to unionize college athletics is all but dead.

Like a microcosm of the institution it was asked to make a decision on, the NLRB’s seven-page explanation was filled with contradicting notions and paradoxes.

But the feeling here always has been the student-athletes are not employees. Given the absence of any controlling precedent, we find it appropriate to consider whether the Board should exercise its discretion to decline to assert jurisdiction in this case, even assuming the Board is otherwise authorized to act. “And the scholarship players do not fit into any analytical framework that the board has used in cases involving other types of students or athletes”. The NLRB noted that teams stage football games in exchange for substantial revenue.

No. It happened because the NCAA and schools got scared.

Northwestern’s status as the only private school in the Big Ten was a factor in the decision. The NLRB wants to promote stability, but a lack of a ruling isn’t making anything more stable. In the Big Ten conference, for example, state laws in Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana make a players’ union impossible.

Northwestern football head coach Pat Fitzgerald, rear center, shouts at players who run through drills at practice at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside campus on Monday, August 17, 2015, in Kenosha, Wi. “By statute the Board does not have jurisdiction over state-run colleges and universities”.