The men’s basketball team at Dartmouth University has voted to unionize despite being warned of consequences by the school.
Following a 13-2 vote, the players elected to join the Service Employees International Union Local 560. Some workers of the Ivy League university are already members of the union. The vote marks the first time a college sports team in America has opted to join a labor union.
“Today is a big day for our team,” said Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, two Dartmouth players, in a statement reported by Inside Higher Ed. “We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past … Let’s work together to create a less exploitative business model for college sports. Over the next few months, we will continue to talk to other athletes at Dartmouth and throughout the Ivy League about forming unions and working together to advocate for athletes’ rights and well-being.”
Dartmouth has five days to file an objection with the National Labor Relations Board, which supervised the team’s vote through the school’s Human Resources office.
On March 1, the NLRB rejected Dartmouth’s motion to introduce new evidence challenging the basketball team’s effort to unionize. The school maintains that NLRB regional director Laura Sacks erred when she found in February that the players meet the organization’s definition of employees and permitted the union vote.
Sacks disagreed and said no extraordinary circumstances were present to warrant reopening the case, reports Sportico.
The NCAA, which oversees college sports, has moved to expand ways athletes can make money in recent years after decades of concerns about maintaining amateur status.
“Although the NCAA has long maintained that its players are ‘student-athletes’ who were in school primarily to study, college sports has grown into a multibillion dollar industry that richly rewards the coaches and schools while the players remained unpaid amateurs,” reports WHYY.
The organization unanimously voted in 2019 to allow for new ways for college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness. At the time, the NCAA stipulated that student-athletes could not be treated as employees of their universities and that there should be a “clear distinction between collegiate and professional opportunities,” per CNBC.
Dartmouth has warned the basketball players that joining the union could be a disadvantage in some circumstances. In a memo to the players, the school noted that as a union “all members of the team become part of the collective bargaining unit, leaving any individual student disagreeing with that outcome without any right to remove himself from the Union.”
The school also warned that if an agreement between the union and Dartmouth was not in alignment with rules set out by the NCAA or the Ivy League, the team could be ineligible to compete.
Finally, the school told the players that classifying the players as employees could mean any international student on the team may be “at risk of noncompliance with F-1 visa requirements.”
