NLRB Fumbles


The Wall Street Journal Editorial Staff comments on the NLRB decision to classify college football players as employees for the purposes of union organizing.  Reviewing the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation’s Brown  Decision from 2004, the staff makes the case against this move.

The United Steelworkers don’t leap to mind when one thinks of college quarterbacks, but that may soon change at Northwestern University and other schools of supposedly higher learning. On Wednesday the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the Big Ten school’s football players are employees who can be represented by the union.

According to the NLRB’s Peter Sung Ohr, college players aren’t student athletes who get an academic scholarship in return for competing in a sport. They are “employees” and thus eligible to have a union collectively bargain with their university employer. Mr. Ohr explains that college players spend 40-50 hours a week at their sport during the season, often more than on class work, and that they are essentially paid for their work via a scholarship that covers tuition, fees and room and board worth about $61,000 a year.

Mr. Ohr—one gets the impression he was easily persuaded—also notes that players are subject to “special rules” such as being “required to live in on-campus dormitories” during their freshman and sophomore years. Other school demands include limits on their use of  Facebook  FB +2.35%     and  Twitter,  TWTR -1.10%     and the risk of losing scholarships if they break school rules or violate the alcohol and drug policy. The horror. The horror.

Meanwhile, a Northwestern Steelworkers squad could provide some fascinating collective bargaining issues. The players who signed the petition in support of the union say they want more money, better protection against injury and the ability to transfer to other schools more easily.

Whatever their demands, unionization will further complicate the governance of college sports. Athletics will become even more of a job and less of a normal college experience. Players in the glamour sports may have more leverage, but lesser athletes may suffer as costs rise. Don’t look for the football players to give up their gourmet training tables in solidarity with the geeks majoring in pre-med. But speaking personally, we might have demanded no wind sprints at the end of practice. On the other hand, we might run sprints to avoid paying steelworker dues.

The larger legal issue here is that as union membership declines, Big Labor is trying to use government power to redefine the traditional employer-employee relationship and expand the field for organizing. Politicians have done this by forcing individual home-care workers helping Medicare patients to join a union. And in 2004 graduate students at Brown University tried to organize because they said they had to teach as well as study.

The Bush Administration NLRB rightly ruled that this “employment” was part of their graduate education, which is the precedent the labor board should follow. But the Obama NLRB is a union-first operation. Northwestern says it will appeal to the full NLRB in Washington. Given the current makeup of the board, we wouldn’t count on a Hail Mary.

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