On Tuesday, Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team voted 13-2 to join Service Employees International Union Local 560, which already represents more than 500 workers on the Hanover, New Hampshire, campus. The on-campus election was supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.
Unionizing would allow the players to negotiate a salary, health care benefits, and working conditions, such as practice hours. The Associated Press described the vote as “another blow to the NCAA’s deteriorating amateur business model,” which is facing multiple class-action lawsuits relating to compensation for student athletes.
In 2021, the NCAA, under pressure, approved an interim policy to allow college athletes to get paid for the use of their name, image, and likeness. The announcement came a little over a week after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision in the case NCAA v. Alston, ruled that the association cannot limit education-related benefits—such as computers, graduate scholarships, study abroad, and internships—that colleges offer athletes. The ruling did not address the issue of whether players could be paid directly by schools.
CBS News reported that conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised concerns regarding antitrust laws in his opinion. "The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA's business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America," Kavanaugh wrote.
What the Dartmouth basketball players did was pass the ball forward following these earlier dents in the NCAA’s armor. After the union vote, basketball player representatives Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil released a statement that read:
Today is a big day for our team. We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past. It’s time for the age of amateurism to end.
They called on the Board of Trustees and President Sian Beilock to “work together to create a less exploitative business for college sports.”
“Over the next few months, we will continue to talk to other athletes at Dartmouth and throughout the Ivy League about forming unions and working together to advocate for athletes’ rights and well-being,” they said.
Ivy League schools do not provide athletic scholarships, only need based financial aid. The Associated Press reported that Haskins is already a member of the SEIU local because he works a shift as a dining hall employee, and Solna has a part-time job at the gym.
Chris Peck, a painter who is the president of Local 560, told The New York Times: “College athletes … You assume they come from money and they’ve got the world by the tail. Then you hear that they’re working jobs on top of going to practice and studying.”
Dartmouth has fought the unionization effort every step of the way since September 2023, when the team members filed a petition to the NLRB to unionize. But the NLRB, thanks to President Joe Biden, has now become markedly pro-union. In Sept. 2021, NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memorandum that says she considers college athletes as employees of their schools under the National Labor Relations Act. Her deputy, Peter Sung Ohr, was the regional director who ruled a decade ago that Northwestern football players were employees and entitled to form a union, The Washington Post reported.
Northwestern’s football team actually took a vote on unionization in 2014, but the results were never released after the NLRB dismissed the players’ petition more than a year later. The Associated Press reported that the unionization bid failed because Northwestern’s opponents in the Big Ten were public schools that don’t fall under the NLRB’s jurisdiction. But there was no such problem with Dartmouth because all eight schools in the Ivy League are private.
Football and basketball players at the University of Southern California, a private institution which is joining the Big Ten conference in August, have a separate ongoing case with the NLRB about whether they can be considered employees of their school and eligible to unionize. A favorable decision could extend to public as well as private schools.
On Feb. 5, Laura Sacks, the Boston-based regional director for the NLRB, ruled that the Dartmouth basketball players are the school’s employees and can vote on whether to join a union. Reuters reported:
Sacks said Dartmouth's basketball program generates publicity, alumni engagement and financial donations and that the school controls the work performed by players, making them its employees under U.S. labor law.
"While students at Dartmouth take part in many extracurricular activities, major media outlets do not pay for the right to broadcast and distribute video of the vast majority of those activities," Sacks wrote in a 26-page ruling.
That paved the way for the union vote. Dartmouth filed an appeal on Tuesday to the NLRB’s four-member national board of the initial ruling that the athletes are employees of the school and can collectively bargain over working conditions.
Dartmouth issued a statement that the school has always negotiated “in good faith” with the five unions representing more than 1,500 employees, including SEIU Local 560. But added:
The students on the men’s basketball team are not in any way employed by Dartmouth. For Ivy League students who are varsity athletes, academics are of primary importance, and athletic pursuit is part of the educational experience. Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate. We, therefore, do not believe unionization is appropriate.
The NCAA also issued a statement opposing the unionization of student athletes:
The NCAA is making changes to deliver more benefits to student-athletes including guaranteed health care and guaranteed scholarships, but the NCAA and student-athletes from all three divisions agree college athletes should not be forced into an employment model.
The Association believes change in college sports is long overdue and is pursuing significant reforms. However, there are some issues the NCAA cannot address alone and the Association looks forward to working with Congress to make needed chances in the best interest of all student-athletes.
Last month, NCAA President Charlie Baker told reporters it could take a long time for the NLRB appeals process to play out and indicated that even then Dartmouth could take the case to federal court, The Washington Post reported. Baker said he would prefer that Congress rule that college athletes cannot be employees. The Republican-led House wasted no time Tuesday to schedule a hearing on "Safeguarding student-athletes from NLRB misclassification."
Still, the Dartmouth basketball players are garnering strong support from a resurgent labor movement. Under President Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU has played a key role in the effort by Starbucks workers to unionize and in the “Fight for $15” campaign to raise the minimum wage. She issued this statement in support of the Dartmouth basketball players:
These young men will go down as one of the greatest basketball teams in all of history. The Ivy League is where the whole scandalous model of nearly free labor in college sports was born and that is where it is going to die. But this victory is about way more than sports, it’s about people who need a union getting one.
And there was support from professional athletes. Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, applauded the Dartmouth players "for their courage and leadership in the movement to establish and advance the rights of college athletes.”
He added: "By voting to unionize, these athletes have an unprecedented seat at the table and a powerful voice with which to negotiate for rights and benefits that have been ignored for far too long.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in a post on X, congratulated the Dartmouth basketball team: