Union Driving
The Dartmouth men's basketball team is starting an experiment that could change college sports.
Dear readers,
Welcome to the 150th edition of Southpaw! As we wrote in our last newsletter, we’re trying out a slightly different publishing schedule moving forward, which is why there wasn’t a newsletter last weekend. If you have thoughts or feedback on our new approach, feel free to drop us a line.
This week, though, we’re tackling a story that’s squarely in the Southpaw wheelhouse. Let’s get to it.
-Calder and Ian
Last week, the 15 members of the Dartmouth University varsity men’s basketball team filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board seeking to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a labor union that represents close to two million service workers in the United States and Canada. In so doing, the players put real stakes behind an argument that a growing number of labor groups, Brett Kavanaugh, the National Labor Relations Board, and yours truly have endorsed in one form or another: that student athletes are employees of their colleges and universities, and that they deserve the same legal rights and protections that all workers should enjoy.
In an op-ed published in Dartmouth’s campus newspaper this week, two members of the team made their reasoning clear: “Like these other groups of students on campus, we are asserting our right to act collectively,” the players wrote. “The age of amateurism and the brazen exploitation of athlete labor and intellectual property should be over. It is time for a new model for collegiate sports in the United States to be built.” In concrete terms, the players wrote, they want to be fairly compensated for their labor so they don’t have to work other campus jobs to make money, and they want the college to agree to cover a larger share of the medical and disability costs that they sustain on the court. On the whole, it’s not a radical ask, though the implications of recognition would be vast.
The players are on firm legal footing. In September 2021, Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, issued an advisory memo stating that college athletes should be treated as employees, in direct contradiction to the NCAA’s own policy. Earlier that year, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion in NCAA v. Alston — a dispute involving non-cash, education-related compensation for student athletes — suggesting that the NCAA’s amateurism model “would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in the United States.” In that same opinion, he suggested that collective bargaining could provide athletes with some short term remedies until the Court can rule more comprehensively on the legality of the NCAA’s business model.
This isn’t to say that the Dartmouth players’ unionization push is a sure bet. In 2014, players from the Northwestern University football team began a similar effort, but their unionization petition was ultimately dismissed by the NLRB. The Ivy League — which will ultimately decide how hard it wants to fight the effort — issued a statement this week promising that it is “carefully considering” the petition, but as we’ve seen in countless labor disputes throughout the years, Ivy League institutions are hardly friendly to organized labor.
That said, the Dartmouth team’s effort is probably the strongest college athlete unionization effort to date. Because Dartmouth competes in the Ivy League, the team’s unionization push avoids the legal pitfall that ultimately sunk the Northwestern football players’ efforts — namely, that a players’ union would give private colleges like Northwestern an unfair competitive advantage over public universities in their same leagues. (A side note: the idea that fairly compensating workers for what they do creates a competitive advantage says quite a bit about the ridiculous system the NCAA has in place.) Moreover, an entire network of labor groups have popped up in recent years to help organize college athletes, meaning that Dartmouth’s players won’t be left to navigate the unionization process on their own. To cap things off, today’s NLRB is markedly friendlier to labor unions than the NLRB was in 2014, and public opinion has shifted decisively in unions’ favor.
The broader question that Dartmouth’s unionization push brings up is also important. If the Dartmouth men’s basketball team wins recognition but becomes a simple outlier among even Ivy League athletes, universities would be able to mostly continue to treat their athletes with impunity. But if the team’s potential success sparks a nationwide movement to unionize in order to get paid, this could be the beginning of a sea change.
There are still a lot of hurdles to get there. First, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team needs to win their own fight in a decisive enough manner that other teams follow suit. Then, private colleges playing in conferences with public ones need to figure out union distinctions and whether the “unfair competitive advantage” argument continues to hold weight. And finally, enough teams need to decide its worth it. Speaking frankly, a bunch of Ivy League kids unionizing is one thing. The Notre Dame football team would be another. But what Dartmouth can do is open the door for all of that, and open the door to athletes getting paid in an equitable way beyond the ever-confusing NIL system.
Obviously, we hope that their effort succeeds and that they are able to win a contract that guarantees fair pay for their labor. But even if they don’t win on paper, they will have succeeded in further eroding the myth that college athletes are different than any other sort of worker. And that, in itself, is a victory worth applauding.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . a requiem for the Times’ sports section? “Say it ain’t so: The New York Times sports section says goodbye” by Tom Jones in Poynter (September 19, 2023).
. . . the end of the Julie Ertz era? “Julie Ertz Was The USWNT” in Defector (September 22, 2023).
. . . how the New York Liberty captured the city amidst a boom in popularity? “Give the Liberty Their Crown” by Emma Carmichael in New York Magazine (September 22, 2023).