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HANOVER, NH (AP) — The Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize Tuesday in an unprecedented step toward forming the first college athletes union and another attack on the NCAA’s deteriorating amateur business model.
In an election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board at the school’s Human Resources offices, players voted 13-2 to join Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, which already represents some Dartmouth workers. All the players on the squad participated.
“Today is a great day for our team,” players Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil said in a statement. “We stuck together all season and won this election. It is evident that we, as students, can also be university workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past. “It’s time for the era of amateurism to end.”
The school has five business days to file an objection with the NLRB and could also take the matter to federal court. That could delay negotiations on a collective bargaining agreement until long after the current members of the basketball team have graduated.
Dartmouth rejected the decision, again, in a statement, saying it supported the five unions it negotiates with on campus, including SEIU Local 560.
“However, in this isolated circumstance, students on the men’s basketball team are not employed in any capacity by Dartmouth,” the school said. “For Ivy League students who are college athletes, academics are of primary importance and athletic activity is part of the educational experience. Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is both unprecedented and inaccurate. Therefore Therefore, we do not believe that unionization is appropriate.
Although the NCAA has long maintained that its players are “student-athletes” who went to school primarily to study, college sports have become a multi-billion dollar industry which generously rewarded coaches and schools while players remained unpaid amateurs.
Recent court decisions have undermined that framework, and players are now allowed to profit from their name, image and likeness and earn a still-limited stipend for living expenses beyond the cost of attendance. An NLRB’s decision last month that the Big Green players are school employees.with the right to form a union, threatens to alter the amateur model.
“We will continue to talk with other athletes at Dartmouth and across the Ivy League about forming unions and working together to advocate for the rights and well-being of athletes,” Haskins and Myrthil said.
A college athletes union would be unprecedented in American sports. A previous The attempt to unionize the Northwestern football team failed. because Wildcats teams play in the Big Ten, which includes public schools that are not under the jurisdiction of the NLRB.
That’s why one of the NCAA’s biggest threats doesn’t come from one of the deep-pocketed football programs like Alabama or Michigan, which are largely indistinguishable from professional sports teams. Instead, it’s the academically oriented Ivy League, where players don’t receive athletic scholarships, teams play in sparsely filled gyms and games are streamed online rather than broadcast on television.
Myrthil and Haskins have said They would like to form an Ivy League Players Association that would include athletes from other sports on campus and other schools in the conference. They said they understood the change might come too late to benefit them and their current teammates.
The team includes four seniors, five juniors, three sophomores and three freshmen.
“We have teammates here who we all love and support,” Myrthil said after playing at Harvard last month in the Big Green’s first game after the NLRB official’s ruling. “And whoever comes into the Dartmouth family is part of our family. We will support them as much as we can.”
Mary Kay Henry, international president of SEIU, said the players “will go down as one of the greatest basketball teams in all of history.”
“The Ivy League is where the whole outrageous near-free labor model in college sports was born and that’s where it’s going to die,” he said.
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Jimmy Golen covers sports and law for The Associated Press.
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