In the wake of Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team’s vote to form the first-ever student-athlete bargaining unit, House Republicans are warning that unionization poses an “existential threat” to the future of college sports.
On March 12, a House panel heard testimonies concerning the implications of a recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency charged with enforcing labor laws. In the ruling, an NLRB regional director found that Dartmouth’s basketball players are school employees and should have the right to collectively bargain.
Dartmouth appealed the decision, and the case is now moved to federal court, a process that could take years and be decided long after the 15-member basketball team graduates. The players, meanwhile, voted 13–2 in an NLRB-supervised election to join a union that already represents some Dartmouth employees.
The Dartmouth vote comes as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which has a stake in more than $1 billion in revenue from media rights and marketing deals tied to college sports events, is asking Congress to pass a law affirming that college athletes shouldn’t have employee status. The vote only added to the NCAA’s urgency, as recent court decisions threatened its long-held business model that treats athletes as unpaid amateurs.
Republicans: Increased Costs Means Less Sports Programs
“Classifying student-athletes as employees is an existential threat to the future of college sports on many campuses,” argued Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), chair of the Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee.“The increased costs of unionization and administrative headaches would threaten to make low-funded programs economically unviable.”
Mr. Owens warned that there would be “fewer teams, fewer scholarships, and fewer opportunities for young people.”
The Republicans called several experts and college representatives to the witness panel, including Matthew Mitten, a professor at Marquette University who specializes in sports law.
When asked by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) what programs will be cut if the NLRB ruling on Dartmouth is upheld, the professor replied that non-revenue-generating women’s sports and Olympic sports would be first on the chopping block.
“A number of sports that are now intercollegiate will be downgraded to club sports,” the professor told the congressman.
The Republicans argued that when institutions start to cut programs, fewer students will be able to get a college education—with or without a scholarship.
Democrats: ‘The Sky Is Not Falling’
Democrats countered that it’s fair that college athletes can share in the revenue that they help generate.“After [the] college sports industry rakes in billions [of] dollars, such college athletes—who are the reason the industry is so popular—do not fully share in this profitable industry,” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.) said. “At the same time, many college athletes ... are exploited and lack basic health and safety protections.
“[The Dartmouth basketball players] are trying to ensure that they can advocate for safer playing conditions, among other priorities. Contrary to what we hear today, their efforts do not mean the end of college athletics, and the sky is not falling.”
Democrats also dismissed the concern regarding the financial future of college sports should the NLRB decision stand, accusing their Republican colleagues of trying to “scare” students with unrealistic outlooks.
“Now is not the time to scare our students with highly unlikely worst-case scenarios and bad-faith exaggerations of the impacts ... the recent NLRB decision will have on collegiate sports,” Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) said.
“This just applies to one team and one private university in a very specific situation.”
Mark Pearce, a law professor who heads Georgetown University’s Workers’ Rights Institute and a former NLRB chair, spoke in favor of classifying college athletes as employees, noting that the term “student-athlete” was coined by the NCAA’s legal team as a way to avoid paying compensation to the widow of a football player who died after an injury sustained in a game.
“It was a defensive strategy on the part of NCAA in the 1950s to preserve it from lawsuits,” the panelist told Mr. DeSaulnier. “This term-of-art ’student-athlete' stresses the amateurism in order to be able to argue that this student was not an employee but a student, and therefore they would be escaping liability.”
Collective bargaining, Mr. Pearce said, could be an effective way to address the issues that college athletes face and wouldn’t spell doom for college sports.
“Professional sports teams have been able to function and make adjustments,” he said. “It’s not going to be one-size-fits-all, at all.”
