Earlier this morning I published a piece entitled “Is Big Time College Sports a Plantation Economy?” In it, I lambasted millionaire coaches and administrators who profit from the unpaid labor of college athletes, and then whine when some of those players leave college early to become professionals.
Later that same afternoon, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rendered its decision in the case of Northwestern University athletes who are seeking the right to form a union. The case was brought by a group called College Athletes Players Association (CAPA).
In a decision that I find to be completely unsurprising and entirely justified on its merits, the NLRB ruled that the players do indeed have the right to form a union. Why? Because they are employees.
The entire report is available here. The two key findings are, quote:
- Northwestern University (“The Employer”) is engaged in commerce
- College Athletes Players Association (“The Petitioner”) is a labor organization
Northwestern University has already said it will appeal the decision. In other words, Northwestern does not want to pay the talented performers whose games sell hundreds of thousands of tickets per year and also generate revenue through radio and television broadcasts.
This should come as no surprise. And not to pick on Northwestern; this applies to virtually every college in America at the moment. But the bottom line is this:
Colleges don’t want to pay anyone a fair wage anymore.
Or at least that’s the way it often seems.
After all, between two-thirds and three-fourths of all college instructors are now part-time adjuncts who earn starvation wages and no benefits. These are people with doctoral degrees (mostly), teaching America’s college students. If schools can avoid paying them a living wage, what are the chances they’ll willingly pay student-athletes anything at all? Up until now, zero.
In addition to exploiting instructors, may colleges, notably public state colleges, have increasingly wiped staff employees off their roles by sub-contracting the work to exploitative labor companies.
More and more custodial workers, food workers, and other support staff are no longer hired by colleges. Instead, the schools just hire massive corporations like Aramark to supply the labor for them. Instead of getting decent pay and state benefits, these workers typically end up with minimum wage or not much beyond it, and few or no benefits.
In other words, colleges have eagerly followed the general corporate trend of degrading their full time workers by either turning them into underpaid part-time workers or by outsourcing their jobs to third parties.
But the push back just arrived. And surprise, surprise, it didn’t come from the staff workers or even the fancy pants Ph.D.s like me. It came from the students, a select group of whom bring in billions of dollars in revenue to colleges and have nothing to show for it except payment in kind: waivers on tuition and fees. They get some food. Maybe some free sneakers.
Do you doubt they really bring in billions? Consider this: CBS is paying 10.8 billion just for the rights to broadcast the men’s NCAA basketball tournament during the years 2011-2024. That doesn’t count the gate receipts or the concessions, just the television rights. It also doesn’t count everything that goes on in the regular season. That’s more money. And of course, then there’s college football. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
Where this goes from here, no one knows. But hopefully the NLRB decision signals the beginning of the end of an unfathomably corrupt system wherein college coaches and administrators make hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per year, athletes are banned from receiving cash payments under threat of lost scholarships and suspensions, and are compensated only in kind.
Enough is enough.