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The University of Oregon’s new $95 million Football Performance Center features rugs woven by hand in Nepal, furniture sourced from Italy and floors made of Brazilian wood. The Ducks have so fully embraced a corporate marriage with a sports apparel maker that they proudly call themselves the “university of Nike.”
And yet if you’re a player at Oregon or anyplace else in college athletics, you can’t be paid a dime for the work, and the health risks, that make all that opulence possible.
If you hate Act 10, then you should despise the way big-time college sports is organized.
Only weeks before the college football season was set to start (Wisconsin plays its first game versus perennial powerhouse Alabama on Sept. 5), the National Labor Relations Board denied players at Northwestern the right to form a union. The New York Times aptly described the ruling as “a clear victory for the college sports establishment.”
The players made a strong case that, based on their workload and expectations as athletes and the fact that they were compensated through scholarships, they were paid university employees. And as employees they should have the right to form a union.
But the NLRB essentially said that it just didn’t want to upset the apple cart or, maybe more accurately, the rich college sports gravy train that pays athletic directors and athletic department employees, coaches and assistant coaches, and television network executives millions, while it offers meager scholarships to the guys who risk injury on the field for our entertainment.
This is just a classic case of the people who are actually producing the wealth getting the shaft, while others get very rich on the backs of their labor.
Still, the NLRB left the door open for a union, and I’m pretty confident that some day the players will walk through it. For one thing, the ruling applies only to Northwestern. Other players at other private universities can still bring similar petitions. The NLRB only deals with private employers, so the UW wouldn’t be covered directly.
And that’s another reason the NLRB ruled as it did. It said that a ruling in favor of the players at Northwestern would create “instability” in the labor market because it would apply to only one school while the others in the Big Ten and at other campuses would remain non-union. Similar pleas of “instability” echo down through history whenever workers wanted a standard workweek, safe conditions, a minimum wage, etc. No doubt ending slavery was terribly destabilizing to the labor market in the South.
In any event, the NLRB didn’t rule on the fundamental claim that athletes are employees. It was enough to make the “destabilizing” finding for the board to duck the issue.
For all that I am hopeful that things are headed in the right direction. The NCAA recently gave the biggest, richest conferences, including the Big Ten, the latitude to pay their players for the full cost of their living expenses as well as tuition and fees. This could amount to about $5,000 for each player, and the UW athletic department has set aside about $2 million to make those payments.
This is a start, but $5,000 is a pittance when you consider that ESPN is paying college football $7.3 billion to televise the new college playoffs alone (this is above and beyond regular season revenues) and last year saw the teams and conferences involved in no less than 39 bowl games take in $500 million in revenue and a $400 million profit after expenses.
So I’m hopeful that the added payment for living expenses will morph into a simple cash payment for services and then that amount can be bargained collectively through a union representing all Division 1 college football players. Through the collective bargaining process, big-time college football players may eventually get their fair share of these big paydays.
You cannot say you hate Act 10 but love the current college football anti-union establishment. Some day you may be able to enjoy both the game and the system.