As blog readers will know, the Regents on Wednesday carefully divided
up the revenue pie that UCLA will earn from moving to the Big Ten. They gave
some to Berkeley and insisted on UCLA spending some of it in very detailed
ways. We noted that what emerged was an exercise in micro-management.*
But there is one unknown in all of this pie division. How much
will go to players? For years, college athletes in the big revenue sports have
pushed for some kind of payment for their services, given the vast sums that are entailed in TV and media rights. The Supreme Court opened
the door to college athletes being able to cash in on their name-image-likeness.
Now the NLRB seems to be moving towards declaring that such athletes are “employees”
entitled to collective bargaining for pay, at least in the private sector. From
Bloomberg:
The US National Labor Relations
Board’s general counsel office has determined for the first time that the
National Collegiate Athletic Association is violating the law by failing to
treat student basketball and football players as employees, opening a potential
path to let them unionize.
Prosecutors for the federal agency reached the same conclusion about the Pac-12
Conference and the University of Southern California, that each was legally an
employer of the athletes, NLRB press secretary Kayla Blado said Thursday. Absent a
settlement, the NLRB’s Los Angeles regional director will issue a complaint
against the organizations on behalf of the labor board’s general counsel, she
wrote in an email.
“Gaining employee status and the right to organize
is an important part in ending NCAA sports’ business practices that illegally
exploit college athletes’ labor,” said Ramogi Huma, the executive director of
the National College Players Association, the advocacy group that brought the
case to the NLRB. “We are working to make sure college athletes are treated
fairly in both the education and business aspects of college sports,” Huma said
in a statement.
A Pac-12 Conference spokesperson declined to comment,
and representatives of the NCAA and USC didn’t immediately respond to requests
for comment.
The NCAA’s treatment of players, who play sports
that generate billions of dollars in revenue, has come under intensifying
criticism in recent years. The US Supreme Court last year ruled unanimously
against the NCAA in a case student athletes brought against the organization to
allow them to profit from their appearance and performance…
Full story at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-15/ncaa-violated-athletes-labor-rights-us-labor-officials-say
What about UCLA, which is
a public institution unlike USC? As it turns out, the original filing by the
Players included UCLA but it was withdrawn, presumably because of the public-private
mix of UCLA, NCAA, and Pac-12 which presents legal complications.**
UCLA is covered by a
state statute, the Higher Education Employer-Employee
Relations Act, which is administered by the Public Employment Relations Board.
The state statute copies much of its language and framework from the
private-sector statute that governs the NLRB. PERB isn’t required to follow
NLRB precedent, but it might well do so in this case. Were that to
happen, the revenue pie might end up being divided in ways not contemplated by the
Regents, with more than nutritious breakfasts going to the student-athletes.
The times, they are a'changing.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-regents-big-ten-decision-not-good.html;
https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-big-ten-decision-at-regents.html.
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