Picket Line at the Study Hall Part 3

Should this ruling from the National Labor Relations Board stand, "student-athletes" around the country who receive scholarships from the university where they play their sport will wind up redefined as university employees, and thus allowed to unionize.

Although different groups of players might seek different things, the Northwestern University players who filed the complaint with the NLRB do not, at this time, seem to want to be paid for their work on a professional athletic scale. After all, their contention is that the scholarships they receive already constitute payment for their services.

The hinge pin for their complaint is the reality that scholarships are renewable season-by-season, at the coach's discretion. They have been admitted to the university they attend and receive a scholarship, and in return they are expected to play the sport in which they have been recruited. Should they not play or practice in a manner acceptable to the coach, their scholarship will not be renewed, and the chances of them remaining enrolled in the university drop dramatically. This, the Chicago-area office of the NLRB ruled, means the university employs them.

As the columnist at the second link notes, the National Collegiate Athletic Association will fight this move from helmet to cleats. Should they be forced to give up the fiction that most of the athletes at high-level competitors in most of the revenue-producing sports are students in the same way that I am an athlete, many other fictions will follow into the sunset, along with many dollars. Since the NCAA will spend a significant number of those dollars opposing all of this, their chances of prevailing are pretty good.

Their chances of being something other than a slimy cartel that makes money off the skills of kids who are unlikely to see too much of that money for themselves are the usual pair of slim and none, with the usual caveat that slim has departed these environs.