The players also want the right to be paid beyond the scholarships they receive, which typically don’t cover the whole cost of attending school.
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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 play or allowing them to join a union.
“This puts the nail in the coffin of organizing college players”, said Ronald Meisburg, a former NLRB general counsel and onetime board member.
Its ruling disappointed both the union organizers, who had won overwhelmingly in a vote among the players, and the Steelworkers, which backed them, while cheering right wing lawmakers.
“It is a bump in the road”, Waters said. Kain Colter, a former co-captain of Northwestern’s team, explained that being a football player at the school was essentially a job. But he said the push for unionization had already pressured the NCAA to take athletes’ grievances more seriously. “It turned out to be the right thing to do, and I don’t regret it”. As sports economist Andy Schwarz writes, the message to college athletes at private universities is clearly that there’s no forum to which they can turn.
The biggest factor in how it ruled, the board said, was the NLRB’s jurisdiction, which extends only to private schools like Northwestern, Notre Dame and the University of Southern California.
“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.
There is no further option on Northwestern participants, as Monday’s NLRB determination is included with no option for beauty. “Anything we telegraph will be crushed”, Huma says.
After weighing the case for more than a year, the full five-member NLRB essentially punted on the matter and dismissed the case altogether, saying “the Board did not determine if the players were statutory employees under the National Labor Relations Act“.
“I don’t see those institutional problems going away”, Meisburg said.
A former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor thinks a ruling against football players at Northwestern is good for college football. The NCAA also granted college athletes access to unlimited meals.
Northwestern football player Justin Jackson walks to practice at… Just days from the start of the 2015 football season, the National Labor Relations Board has benched the idea of football players unionizing. Those ballots were sealed during the appeal and will now be destroyed.
Northwestern University has since released a statement demonstrating that it is pleased with the NLRB’s decision, which reads less like a decision and more like an opportunity to decline making a hard ruling.
In ruling initially for the players, Ohr cited their heavy workload (practice), their obligation to follow orders from their bosses (coaches) and their compensation (athlete scholarships).
The NLRB used phrases like “does not have jurisdiction”, “this decision is narrowly focused”, and “this question does not have an obvious answer” over and over again. You know, and actually the Pac-12, for instance, the presidents got together and said that they needed to take these various steps that the players are calling for.
Drew said it was “interesting” that the board reserved its authority to revisit this issue, cautioning several times that its decision is based upon the particular facts of the Northwestern case.
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Economist Andy Schwarz has some strong thoughts on what the NLRB’s “decision” means for college athletes. Applying federal unionization laws to a single team in the Big Ten would create imbalance in the conference, not uniformity and stability in labor relations. Because the ruling would have affected only Northwestern, a pro-union arrangement could have wreaked havoc in terms of consistency of rules.
