“We may have not seen the death of amateurism quite yet,” said Feldman, the Tulane professor. The threat of NLRB action could be enough to kill off the expression, which the NCAA repeats as an almost fetishistic mantra. Abruzzo said the effect of the term is to disguise the true nature of the employment relationship and thus discourage players, i.e. The memo also told the NCAA and its member institutions to stop using “student-athlete” to refer to its students who are athletes. “It’s time to end the charade of amateurism and finally ensure all athletes the rights and benefits they have long deserved.” Anything else? “Executives, who are mostly white, have long profited off the labor and talents of college athletes, who are mostly Black,” he said. Sen Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the treatment of college athletes is a civil rights issue and introduced legislation that would grant them the ability to bargain over their pay and working conditions. “Considering the resulting uncertainty and to address the many other challenges facing college athletics, we hope that Congress will step in and provide clear and uniform legal standards consistent with recent court decisions,” he said. Paying players at private schools - or even some of them - and not public ones would also create a competitive imbalance. The schools say paying top athletes will create an imbalance within teams and drain money from non-revenue sports like field hockey and fencing. Either way, they would be entitled to the protections afforded other private sector employees. “I don’t think the board can or should punt,” she said.Īs employees, players would have the right to form a union - if they choose. Abruzzo said that if the NLRB receives another case like the Northwestern one, it would likely be decided differently. Nothing, until another team attempts to unionize or a player makes an unfair labor practice claim. “We believe that not only the college but also the conference itself directly and immediately controls the terms and conditions of employment,” she told the AP. But Abruzzo said in an interview with The Associated Press that the NCAA and its conferences, which are private, could be considered “joint employers.” The NLRA only covers private institutions the majority of the biggest college athletic programs are public schools. Those in non-revenue sports could bargain over working conditions, though most would be hard-pressed to argue for pay. Who is affected?Īlthough football in the five largest conferences is college sports’ biggest money-maker, the memo would extend protections to all athletes who meet the legal definition of an employee: someone who performs services for an institution and is subject to its control. Abruzzo was a deputy general counsel who said she was “intimately involved” in writing the original opinion. Wednesday’s memo reinstated an opinion that had been issued by an Obama appointee and rescinded by his Trump-appointed successor. Why now?Ĭollege sports have become, appropriately enough, a political football in Washington as control of the NLRB has swung from the Democratic administration of Barack Obama to Republican Donald Trump and back to Democrat Joe Biden. “Players at academic institutions who engage in concerted activities to improve their working conditions have the right to be protected from retaliation,” she wrote. Abruzzo also said that collective action by athletes in response to the killing of George Floyd, as well as efforts to salvage their seasons during the pandemic, demonstrated that they “better understand their value in generating billions of dollars in revenue for their colleges and universities, athletic conferences, and the NCAA.”
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