The National Labor Relations Board’s ruling Wednesday that college athletes have the right to unionize carries a few large implications.
Perhaps the most startling is that students participating in sports are, effectively, employees of the school and therefore have the right to collective action. The federal agency considered scholarships a method of paying athletes, rounding out the definition.
We found it hard to disagree with the ruling. Here’s why:
—These athletes work 50 to 60 hours a week performing intense labor, while working for an organization that doesn’t have to cover their medical costs should they be injured. (An outcome that isn’t exactly unheard of when it comes to full-contact sports.)
—The vague idea of paying these athletes, around whom a multi-billion dollar industry has been constructed, is dismissed out of hand by the NCAA.
—The most progressive proposal on the table from the NCAA is to give each athlete a $2,000 stipend. In the whirlwind of free-floating cash that is the national college football economy, the NCAA is not quite willing to give each player 0.001 percent of an average coach’s salary.
In this kind of environment, it’s obvious that something needed to be done. While there is some debate as to the effectiveness of unionizing these students, the state of things as they are is simply unsustainable.
The NCAA’s position is that these student-athletes are amateurs, primarily students before anything else. It seems to think that most of these players chose to go into football on a whim, to give them a chance to supplement their studies.
Tell that to the “student-athletes” of UNC Chapel Hill, some of whom read below a third-grade level, according to a study conducted earlier this year. The idea that college recruiters see them as students first and athletes second is wrong on its face.
They are recruited to work in a huge, profitable entertainment industry, with a portion of education on the side. (If they have enough time, that is.)
If they are willing to spend their youth, and risk their health, working in that industry, then they have the right to fight for adequate protection and compensation.
If unionizing is the way to secure those two conditions, then it’s a welcome, and long-overdue, change.
