by A federal official said Monday that members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team were employees of the university, clearing the way for the team to hold a vote that could make it the first unionized college sports program in the country.
In a statement, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Boston, Laura Sacks, said that because Dartmouth had “the right to control the work” of the team and because the team did that work “in exchange for compensation” as team and game. tickets, the players were employees under the National Labor Relations Act.
An election date on whether to unionize has not yet been set, and the result would have to be certified by the NLRB. The university and the NCAA are expected to appeal the director’s decision.
In September, all 15 players on the team’s varsity roster signed and filed a petition with the labor board to unionize with the Service Employees International Union. On October 5, Dartmouth lawyers responded, arguing that the players did not have the right to bargain collectively because, as members of the Ivy League, they did not receive athletic scholarships and because the program lost money each year.
The NCAA and its member schools have long resisted attempts to unionize college athletes, defending the student-athlete model that has been criticized by labor activists, judges and elected officials over the years.
In 2014, Northwestern’s football team led the highest-profile attempt by a college program to unionize, arguing that because players were compensated through scholarships, they had the right to bargain collectively.
In a ruling similar to Monday’s, a regional director of the labor board said that the Northwest interns They were university employees.and union elections were held. But the sealed ballots were ultimately destroyed after the five-member NLRB ruled in August 2015 that players did not have the right to bargain collectively.
The environment surrounding labor rights in college athletics has changed since then.
“A lot has changed in the business of college athletics,” said Jason Stahl, founder and CEO of the College Football Players Association, which promotes college football players’ unionization efforts.
In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s ban on compensating college athletes violated antitrust law, forcing the NCAA to allow athletes to profit from their own name, image and likeness. The realignment has altered the traditional geographic boundaries of conferences, increasing travel times for players in leagues that will soon stretch from the West Coast to the East Coast.
According to available polls, support for unions in general is also higher today than in 2015.
Michael LeRoy, a professor and sports labor expert at the University of Illinois, said he expected an election would be held at Dartmouth, in which votes would not be revealed, before the NLRB issued its final ruling.
Mr. LeRoy also noted that the current NLRB, under President Biden, had expressed more support for unionization efforts among college athletes than President Barack Obama did during the Northwest union drive.
In September 2021, Jennifer A. Abruzzo, general counsel for the board, said that college athletes should be considered employees under federal labor law, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling that year that college sports were a profitable enterprise. , and argued that classifying them simply as “student-athletes” would have a “chilling effect” on organizational efforts in university programs.
“This particular labor board has been very transparent in their view that at least some college athletes are, in fact, employees,” LeRoy said. “That was not the case in 2014.”
