The board said in the ruling statement, “The Board held that asserting jurisdiction over a single team would not promote stability in labor relations across the league”. As the line between student-athlete and athlete continue to blur, and college football promises to continuing growing, these are essential issues that schools will have to contend with. However, experts in labor law and college athletics say the board was simply dodging a difficult issue and possibly even making it harder for similar groups to unionize in the future.
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“Although we do not decide the issue here, we acknowledge that whether such individuals meet the board’s test for employee status is a question that does not have an obvious answer”, the NLRB said.
Letting the players organize “would not promote stability in labor relations”, the NLRB ruled, and that’s a key objective of the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
He also said the country “would be well served” if the board members used the same “bipartisan, common sense approach” in other high-profile cases before it. Republicans have accused the board, which has a 3-2 Democratic majority, of being too pro-union.
The NLRB released its decision Monday. In addition, every school in the Big Ten, except Northwestern, is a state-run institution. The NLRB left the door open to private schools banding together to unionize as one entity in its decision. The board warned, though, that any deterioration in the conditions faced by college athletes could make it rethink its decision to stay on the sidelines.
“It seems to me they took the road that was easiest rather than what was right”, Zola said. “What they did is quintessentially what we want our students to do: engage in things that matter to them”.
In explaining its decision, the NLRB said that it doesn’t have jurisdiction over state-run colleges and universities, which make up 108 of the roughly 125 FBS teams.
“If there is more of a free market system … then allowing one school to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with its players may not have as much an impact”, said Gabe Feldman, the director of the sports law program at Tulane University Law School.
“Some of the changes that have been adopted were items that were on the Southeastern Conference agenda before the unionization effort was identified”, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey told AP in a phone interview. Having a union could have allowed the athletes to pursue greater medical benefits, and given them a more powerful voice in terms of things like practice hours, and being actually you know compensated for the time spent on their athletic obligations.
Monday, the NLRB chose that no union could be framed, refering to basically the change it would bring about in the positions of school sports by permitting Northwestern players to shape a union while understudy competitors at different schools proved unable. “As the University has stated previously, Northwestern considers its students who participate in NCAA Division I sports, including those who receive athletic scholarships, to be students, first and foremost”. But that clearly would not be the case with college athletics given the lack of an existing union structure.
Football players at Northwestern University may have lost a bid to unionize on Monday, but a broader legal challenge has targeted the practice of excluding college athletes from sharing in the multibillion dollar bonanza they help generate.
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Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor now working for Economics21 and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Thus, the Board offered these flimsy justifications-fear of disrupting the array of bowl-eligible state schools, the intimation that the NCAA was keeping an eye on the issues between “student-athletes” and their university quasi-employers-lacking believability and failing to address the arguments of Colter and his organizing colleagues.
