College Athletes and the Invention of “Employees”
In case you missed it, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize earlier this month — one of the madder things to happen this March — becoming the first college sports team in the United States to join a union. This came after the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the players were in fact “employees.”
Obviously, this is a big development, but it’s the kind of thing that matters more symbolically than it does in practice. Dartmouth has appealed the certification of the vote to the full NLRB, and even if the Board does certify, it can be a long way between union certification and an actual agreement with a hostile employer. And even if the effort does succeed, it is so far only limited to Dartmouth,* and only limited to the men’s basketball team. I don’t say this to dampen any excitement about the news, but to point out that it’s rather limited in scope.
*Dartmouth athletes are also in a somewhat unusual position because, unlike virtually every other Division I school in the country, Ivy League schools do not offer athletic scholarships, meaning they are possibly going to be classified differently than college athletes at other schools would be.
Still, it seems to reflect a growing realization around college sports that these athletes ARE employees. The nonsense about “student-athletes” and “amateurism” is harder and harder to justify in a post-transfer portal, post-NIL world, where top college athletes are earning millions of dollars. And more and more people seem to be realizing that the current status quo — where players CAN earn money, but are not employees; where they can switch schools, but not sign contracts — is not really tenable. Many coaches are leaving the sport altogether, either retiring or even taking lower positions in the pros, because they don’t want to navigate this new world.
It’s easy to dismiss this as coaches being unable to keep up with the times, or even having a problem with their players getting paid. In a recent interview on The Rich Eisen Show, Jay Bilas said, “You’re hearing it as an excuse… If players getting paid is so difficult for you to wrap your head around, then go.” And certainly there ARE coaches this seems to describe, who truly resent the idea that anyone besides them might make money from the game (ahem, Dabo Swinney)... but I think in some ways this is unfair. The current situation IS legitimately a mess of conflicting rules, with no accountability, consistency, or stability, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a coach to be peeved about this. Players SHOULD be paid, but should it be a coach’s job to make sure all his players have sponsorship deals with State Farm?
One obvious solution is to just give up all the claptrap about college athletes being “amateurs” and finally treat them like employees. In that same interview, Bilas said as much, saying: “The solution is simple, and the NCAA and the member institutions just don’t want to do it. The solution is: Sign the players to contracts. They’re employees.”
In theory, this sounds great. After all, recognizing that college athletes are employees is the first step towards unionization and fair compensation. But at the risk of contradicting myself, it makes me a little wary.
For one, there are a lot of complications that come with unionizing college athletes. To start with, who is even their employer? The Dartmouth players are affiliating with the SEIU local that already represents other Dartmouth employees: security guards, custodians, etc. But presumably athletes would not only want to negotiate with Dartmouth, but with the Ivy League, or even the NCAA.
Also, should the bargaining unit even be dictated by school, as opposed to sport? It’s not like players on the Rangers and Knicks are in the same union just because they play in the same building and are owned by the same guy. And how feasible is it to unionize college sports school by school? In every pro sport that I’m aware of, unions were formed by players from multiple teams coming together, not by each team unionizing on its own. There’s also the inherent issue that college athletes are not long-term employees** — they are supposed to graduate after four years — which makes developing a union in the first place quite difficult, since the workers turn over so much.
**Of course, this raises yet another question: If college athletes are employees, do they necessarily have to be students? After all, most employees at a college are not also students at that college, and a school’s relationship to its students is fundamentally different than its relationship to its employees.
None of these things are deal-breakers, necessarily, but it shows that unionizing college athletes is likely to be more difficult than unionizing a standard workplace — which is already quite difficult! At the same time, I don’t see any way to treat college athletes as “employees” without some kind collective-bargaining agreement in place. Otherwise, you’re in the same position as the status quo, with ambiguous rules that vary from school to school and player to player.
What we’re seeing, really, are the limitations inherent in that “employees” designation. I think that’s why this whole thing makes me so uneasy. After all, one of the foundational premises of socialism is that being an employee sucks! Usually this is put in slightly more ornate terms. From one of Karl Marx’s early lectures:
“We thus see that… the interests of capitals and the interests of wage-labor are diametrically opposed to each other… To say that ‘the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital,’ means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”
In other words, basically: Being an employee sucks! You are condemned to work endlessly for the enrichment of someone else, who also sets the terms and manner of your employment, invariably in such a way as to further his own enrichment. Your only way out is to hope to be one of the lucky few who earns enough crumbs that you can buy your way out of the status of wage-labor/employee, and eventually become an owner yourself… in which case you can exploit OTHER workers.
Unions can ameliorate this, but they cannot resolve this fundamental tension, which is why socialists call for something more than just “capitalism with strong unions.”*** Not to mention all the aforementioned obstacles to “strong unions” in the first place…
***For today at least, I’m not going to get into deeper philosophical questions about how socialists ought to relate to the labor movement in general, or whether there is a point at which unions can become so strong that “capitalism” would inherently give way to “socialism” — suffice to say for now that unions alone are not sufficient.
So watching college athletics simply reinvent wage labor has been a little depressing. We’ve all grown inured to talk about “amateurism” as the NCAA has used it to justify not paying players. But, as I’ve written before, I think we will miss it when it’s gone. Amateurism, at least in its ideal form, values egalitarianism and the development of the athlete in a way you are not likely to see when college sports embrace the “employees” framework.
To take just one potential conflict: Amateurs can’t get laid off, but employees who do not generate profit for their employer don’t last long. You have to wonder what the future holds for non-revenue sports, or smaller schools that will never see much income from sports at all in a world where athletes are “employees.” It’s fun to imagine, say, the Alabama football team bargaining for some of Nick Saban’s money; it’s a little less fun to imagine, say, Syracuse threatening to cut its volleyball team if the basketball players get a raise.
Again, none of this is to say that the current system is workable, or even preferable to the employee framework. But it’s just sad that this is the best we can do. The last few years have seen major strides taken by college athletes, and a growing recognition that barring them from getting paid is unjust. And yet all that awaits them is the same capitalist meat-grinder as the rest of us. Get a job, cash your check, be happy…
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The nature of capitalism is to force everyone into this “employee” designation. It was never realistic to expect college athletes to be the exception, and if it’s what finally gets them paid, then mazel tov. But we shouldn’t confuse it with success — we ought to be dreaming bigger…