No Unionization: Board dismisses ruling to allow college athletes to unionize

If NU’s players made a lot of noise with their decision to unionize, they sounded like a whisper in a hurricane Monday, when the NLRB announced that it had chosen not to rule on the matter.

The National Labor Relations Board has dismissed a historic ruling that Northwestern University football players are school employees who are entitled to form what would be the nation’s first union of college athletes.

– Early April 2014: Pro-union athletes set an April 25 date for scholarship football players at Northwestern to vote on whether to unionize.

Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation, told Campus Reform that the NLRB’s decision “is a welcome, albeit rare, instance in which the Obama Board majority declined to aggressively expand Big Labor’s forced unionism powers”.

Monday’s ruling emphasized that the NLRB has jurisdiction only over private schools, like Northwestern.

“In the decision, the Board held that asserting jurisdiction would not promote labor stability due to the nature and structure of NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision”, the board said.

“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.

That doesn’t mean the organizing drive by the United Steelworkers union and the College Athletes Players Association was a waste of time.

The idea that a union shop leader would be able to schedule practice breaks or negotiate travel upgrades for Northwestern football players always seemed a bit preposterous.

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.

As the Two-Way previously reported, football players at Northwestern, a private university outside of Chicago, brought suit against the university “to have a voice at the table”, according to NPR’s David Schaper. The NCAA is now helping to pay for families to attend the Final Four and College Football Playoff. But the NCAA’s stranglehold on college athletes and their schools is beginning to loosen.

Q: What is the next step in the relationship between the NCAA and its athletes? “A court can’t say this is too tough for us, we don’t want to make a ruling, but that’s what the NLRB just did”.

Advocates have said unionization would help athletes protect their health and financial interests.

In March 2014, NLRB’s Region 13 regional director Peter Sung Ohr ruled that, under Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), scholarship athletes are considered university employees who are eligible to form a union. They may be changing for self-serving reasons than out of the kindness of their hearts, but the fact is that college athletes are a lot better off now than they were even five years ago, and it’s not as if conditions have ever been as terrible as the harshest critics of college sports like to argue.

Not that you would know it by the official NCAA reaction to the ruling.