Earlier this year, a flurry of news reports announced that Peter Ohr, Director of the National Labor Relations Board’s Chicago office, had designated Northwestern University’s football players as employees of the university who can form a labor union if they wish. The players held a union election in April, the results of which won’t be revealed until after the full NLRB in Washington hears Northwestern’s appeal of Mr. Ohr’s ruling.
Immediately after that ruling was announced, adults who should know better began criticizing it by means of apocalyptic statements predicting the imminent demise of college sports. Emblematic of these statements was one by Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee predicting that the decision would lead to college athletes “demanding shorter practices, bigger dorm rooms, better food and no classes before 11 a.m." and characterizing it as “an absurd decision that will destroy intercollegiate athletics as we know it.”
Such overheated, uninformed rhetoric ignores the compelling reasons underlying Mr. Ohr’s conclusion that Northwestern football players who receive athletic scholarships are university employees. They spend 50 to 60 hours per week on football during a month-long preseason training camp, plus 40 to 50 hours per week during the three-to-four-month-long regular season. When offseason training is taken into account, players enjoy only nine weeks per calendar year free from football-related obligations. During much of the year, then, they spend more time on football than on their studies.
Furthermore, they receive no academic credit for playing football, and their supervisors are coaches, who are not faculty members. Under these circumstances, Mr. Ohr reasoned, the players’ scholarships are payment for athletic services rendered not financial aid to attend college. Thus, the players are university employees.
Statements like that by Senator Alexander also ignore the players’ goals, which are not shorter practices or bigger dorm rooms, but rather, more generous health insurance and scholarships that are guaranteed for four years, not just one, and that cover the full cost of attending college, such as costs associated with personal items, a winter coat, or a trip home at Christmastime.
To be sure, it is unclear whether unionization is the best, or even the most likely, means of achieving the players’ goals. One thing is clear, though. Anti-union overstatements and apocalyptic predictions are unhelpful. Only a sincere effort by universities to address the players’ concerns will save college sports. Public awareness of the legitimacy of those concerns will encourage universities to make that effort.
