The National Collegiate Athletic Association gave a resounding cheer to a federal decision to reject a bid by players at Northwestern University to form a union, saying the decision helped prevent “instability” in college athletics.
“The National Labor Relations Board’s decision to reject jurisdiction and dismiss the union petition in this case is appropriate. In its ruling, the NLRB recognized the NCAA continually evolves to better support college athletes. In recent years we have provided college athletes with multi-year scholarships, free education for former college athletes and unlimited meals … This ruling allows us to continue to make progress for the college athlete without risking the instability to college sports that the NLRB recognized might occur under the labor petition,” the association said in a statement.
The five-member board’s unanimous announcement reverses a March 2014 decision by a board regional director, who ruled that the players were employees of the university, not principally students. Therefore, they had the right to form a union.
The case could have create a major precedent in collegiate sports, since players were previously considered students not eligible for collective bargaining. Though the ruling applied only to Northwestern athletes, other athletes could have cited it as a precedent if they tried to unionize.
The NCAA vigorously opposed the ruling from the start. In their briefs to the board, they argued that the regional director ignored contrary evidence that the athletes were students, pointing to a 97 percent graduation rate at Northwestern University. The rate “demonstrates the emphasis that Northwestern places on the academic success of its student-athletes,” the association argued.
The board agreed that “scholarship players” were different from players in professional leagues. “[T]he scholarship players are required, inter alia, to be enrolled full time as students and meet various academic requirements, and they are prohibited by NCAA regulations from engaging in many of the types of activities that professional athletes are free to engage in, such as profiting from the use of their names or likenesses.”
However, the board said that a bigger issue was that it wasn’t clear it had jurisdiction in the first place, since the National Labor Relations Act limits it to private sector labor matters, even though Northwestern University is a private school.
“Despite the similarities between [college] football and professional sports leagues, [it] is also a markedly different type of enterprise. In particular, of the roughly 125 colleges and universities that participate in [NCAA Division I] football, all but 17 are state-run institutions. As a result, the Board cannot assert jurisdiction over the vast majority of [NCAA] teams,” it said in the ruling.
Without jurisdiction over all of the schools that Northwestern played against, the board reasoned that it could not effectively regulate labor matters for its student-athletes.
