A legal battle that will open the door to unionization for some college athletes took an expected, yet important step Thursday when the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against the NCAA, Pac-12 and USC for unfair labor practices.
All three parties will argue against the NLRB’s lawyers at a hearing scheduled for Nov. 7. The hearing is the next step in one of several mounting challenges to the NCAA’s fundamental belief that college athletes are not employees and thus should not be paid directly. Their athletic performance.
“USC, the Pac-12 Conference, and the NCAA, as joint employers, deny their players their statutory right to organize and join together to improve their working and playing conditions, if they choose to do so,” the NLRB said. General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. “Our goal is to ensure that these players, like any other worker, can fully and freely exercise their rights.”
If athletes — the charge applies only to football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball players — are viewed as employees under the National Labor Relations Act, they would have the power to organize and collectively bargain against schools for a larger share of the billions. Dollars of revenue generated each year by college sports as well as other workplace protections.
The NCAA was firm in its position that college athletes should not be employees of their schools. Several association, conference and school leaders have lobbied Congress in recent months to create a federal law that defines college athletes as non-employees.
The NCAA believes turning athletes into employees could lead to a system where athletes can be fired for poor performance and create complications for international athletes as well as Title IX compliance, according to Tim Buckley, the agency’s senior VP of external affairs. He said in a statement Thursday that the NCAA believes its rules need to be updated, but that the employee’s situation was not the right solution.
“The complaint issued by the district today appears to be driven by a political agenda and is the wrong way to help student-athletes succeed,” Buckley said. “…The Association believes that student-athletes, school leaders and congressional representatives are well placed to make such sweeping changes to college sports.”
If the administrative law judge overseeing the November hearing finds that the NCAA, Pac-12 and USC violated labor practices, the decision will almost certainly lead to an appeal that would require the NLRB’s board to decide whether the football and basketball players are employees. whether eligible Because of the nature of the complaint, the board will not be able to opt out of expressing opinions about employee status for athletes as it did in 2015, when Northwestern football players sought the right to form a union.
The lawsuit against USC, the Pac-12 and the NCAA was filed in February 2022 by the National College Players Association, an advocacy group involved in pushing states to write legislation that would force the NCAA to change its policy on earning money from player names. did , deals with images and analogies.
“While disappointing, this allegation is neither new nor surprising; it merely perpetuates a position that the National Labor Relations Board erroneously expressed many months ago, and which will significantly diminish the educational experience of our student-athletes,” USC said in a statement. .
NCPA founder Ramogi Huma said Thursday that they believe the process will prove athletes are entitled to all the rights and protections of workers in America.
“FBS football players and NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball players, most of whom are black, are exploited physically and financially by NCAA sports,” Huma said in a statement. “One of the reasons this injustice plagues all athletes in these sports nationwide is because NCAA sports have denied them rights under labor laws.”
The decision by Abruzzo’s workers to pursue the three groups as joint employers raises the possibility that all college athletes could be given the right to unionize as a result of this case. The NLRB does not have jurisdiction over public universities, so courts must determine which conferences and the NCAA act as an employer to make decisions that apply to all schools that compete in college sports.
