The Journal. - Why an Ivy League Basketball Team Voted to Unionize

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

This week the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize, setting up a fight with the school over whether its athletes are students or employees. WSJ’s Laine Higgins talks about how this move upends decades of NCAA precedent and could change college sports forever. Further Listening: - A League of Champions Implodes  - A Tipping Point for Paying College Athletes?  Further Reading: - Dartmouth Basketball Players Vote to Unionize in New Challenge to NCAA’s Amateurism Model  - Dartmouth Men’s Basketball Team Makes Latest Bid for Unionization by College Athletes  - College Sports Powers Stall Bid to Share Revenue With Athletes in California  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is March, which means it's March Madness. Indeed. Are you into that? Oh, absolutely. I mean, March Madness is arguably the best postseason tournament that exists in all of sports. I mean, college basketball is delightfully nutty, and that's why March Madness is so wonderful. Where does Dartmouth rank? Near the bottom, if not at the bottom.

They haven't had a winning record since the 1998-99 season, and I believe this year they've finished the regular season, and they won six total games. Out of how many? 27. Dartmouth's basketball team may be close to last in their conference, but this week they became the first college athletes to do something monumental. Unionize.

It's the dawn of a new day at Dartmouth. After the men's basketball team voted 13-2 to become part of a union. Our colleague Lane Higgins covers college sports, and we spoke with her about this vote at Dartmouth. It was a pretty overwhelming yes from the Dartmouth basketball team. What's their goal? To be paid, I think, is part of it. Another is to have their voice heard. A lot of athletes complain about feeling like their lives are controlled by their sport. And, you know, they sign up for this. They do it willingly. They love their sports. But to a degree,

it feels like they have no say in certain big picture issues, like how much your health care costs are or, you know, maybe your practice schedule prevents you from having a part-time job. And I think that's the biggest piece that these athletes want is they want a seat at the table. But Dartmouth College is fighting back and trying to stop the union. It says these athletes are not employees. They are students. What are the stakes for college sports? They're high. If you fundamentally change the definition of college sports to allow the universities to pay athletes directly, that's a bedrock principle that you're undoing. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Kate Linebaugh. It's Friday, March 8th. Coming up on the show, the Dartmouth basketball team's new union and how it could change college sports forever. Sacks in economy class, now extended to flights within Canada and the U.S. Cheers to taking off this summer. More details at AirCanada.com. Dartmouth is a private college in the Ivy League. It's in New Hampshire. And recently, there's been a wave of labor organizing there. Graduate students formed a union last year, and so did the student workers in the dining hall.

And, you know, they immediately collectively bargained, and in so doing, they won raises. And one of the people that happens to be in this dining students worker union is a guy named Cade Haskins, who is also a member of the basketball team. At Dartmouth, like at all the Ivy League schools, there are no athletic scholarships, which means athletes have their schoolwork, their sports, and sometimes a part-time job, like Cade Haskins. And last summer, Haskins got to talking

with his basketball teammates about unionizing. And they get to talking about this, and they're sort of thinking, hmm, all right, well, we saw how this really helped the dining workers, and, you know, we work our butts off in basketball, and we're sort of aware of the bigger tides that are changing college athletics right now. Like, what if we formed a union? What would that look like? Then in September, they signed interest cards with the Service Employees International Union, the local chapter of that. And that's sort of what got this ball rolling. What were they looking for? Why did they want to unionize?

The biggest thing is they wanted a wage. Their argument was that a lot of us, because we don't have athletic scholarships, are working part-time jobs on top of our studies and on top of our athletic commitments, which are very time consuming. And we're doing that so we can try to afford to go here and afford to have some money to spend and just be students. When we start thinking about paying athletes, are we talking about minimum wages or like bigger paychecks? TBD. No one has quite figured out what that looks like. The Dartmouth athletes have also discussed improving working conditions and health care coverage, especially for on-court injuries.

But for decades, the NCAA, the group that governs all college sports, has resisted demands that student athletes be treated as employees. student-athletes be treated as employees. The bedrock principle that the NCAA has clung to for over 100 years is that athletes are amateurs, and amateurs means unpaid. And that's what would fundamentally change if you are in a union, is that it would be a direct wage that's coming from the university to the athlete. Lane dates the fight all the way back to the 1950s, when a college football player in Colorado died from a head injury. He was on a scholarship, so his widow sued the NCAA came up with the term student-athlete

because they wanted to emphasize that these are not workers. And it's interesting because the NCAA president at the time, Walter Byers, came to regret the fact that he made that term and the fact that the NCAA was taking that stance. And he likened the whole system of college athletics to plantation systems and slavery. Whoa. And I attribute that to, quite frankly, to the neo-plantation mentality that exists on the campuses of our country and in the conference offices and in the NCAA. So he kind of had a huge reversal in terms of his personal view on college athletics.

But, you know, the lasting legacy was something that stuck. And that lasting legacy is this term, student-athletes? Yes, it's a union-busting, anti-labor term, basically. And it's one that is funny because I think a lot of student-athletes don't know that. They wear it as a badge of honor. And to be a student-athlete is something that a lot of people proudly call themselves. Like, it's not something that's necessarily a dirty word, but it is something that has a charged history that I think a lot of athletes aren't aware of.

I think a lot of athletes aren't aware of. Since the time of Walter Byers, college sports have only gotten bigger, bringing in more money to the schools and to the NCAA. College athletics is a multi-billion dollar business. Every year, the NCAA is probably getting a billion dollars in revenue from March Madness alone. And that says nothing of all of the other income that the schools are generating from their other sports, from holding events on campus, etc. And at the top level, I believe that the richest schools like Texas, Alabama, Ohio State, they spend north of $250 million on their athletic programs every year. And they're usually bringing in about that much. Even though Dartmouth Athletics isn't bringing in the big bucks, the school is still trying to stop the union.

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Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. How has Dartmouth responded to this unionization effort? Not kindly. Before the vote even happened, they tried to block it from happening. They were ultimately not successful, but, you know, there were some questions up until the morning of the vote of whether or not it was going to go forward because of that. And the day that it happened, they immediately said, okay, we're going to appeal this and challenge it,

and we're gonna fight this tooth and nail. Dartmouth's fight is partly with the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board. Two years ago, the agency's general counsel wrote a memo that all but invited student athletes to unionize. And last month, an NLRB regional director said that the Dartmouth basketball players are employees and the union vote could proceed. Dartmouth disagreed.

Their legal argument is that the athletes should never have been classified as employees. You know, Dartmouth is not a school that has this incredibly lucrative broadcast contract that can fund millions of dollars worth of athletics. So if all of a sudden the athletics just got a ton more expensive because you're owing wages to players, that's going to prompt some hard decisions about funding and, you know, where you get that money from and how this all works. A Dartmouth spokeswoman said that the students on the men's basketball team are not in any way employed by the school. Quote, classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate. How far do you think Dartmouth is willing to take this fight? That's a great question.

I would not be surprised if they fight it all the way up to the top, to the Supreme Court. What are the ramifications of this? Like, does it open the door for all student-athletes to organize? Not quite. It opens the door for any team at any private school. And obviously, the NCAA is made up of over a thousand public and private institutions. And the state labor laws everywhere will sort of dictate how far this spreads. But in theory, if this unionization effort does withstand legal challenges, which will likely continue for several years now,

does withstand legal challenges, which will likely continue for several years now, then any student, like a lacrosse team at, you know, a tiny private college in Connecticut, could decide that they want to unionize and bargain for their playing and working conditions. There have been efforts to unionize college athletes elsewhere. About a decade ago at Northwestern University, the football team petitioned the NLRB to try to form a union. But the NLRB only protects the rights of private sector workers. And while Northwestern is a private school, some schools in its conference are public. So the NLRB denied the request. Currently, the NLRB is considering a case in California that could have far-reaching consequences for athletes at both private and public colleges. What do universities say about how paying their players would change the way they run their athletics program, Or what's their argument against it?

Athletic departments see this primarily as a financial threat. Because if you flip a switch overnight and all of a sudden, all 600, 700, 800 athletes are owed minimum wage, which if you do the math, you know, 52 weeks a year, 20 hours a week, roughly, that's a lot of money that you're all of a sudden on the hook for. And yes, these athletic departments are taking in a lot of money, but the model is such that they're spending it all right now. So it's not like they have this pool where they could just flip the switch and give this money to the students. It has to come from somewhere.

And that prompts some tough decisions. Do you have one less assistant coach on a team? Do you cut a program wholesale? And that's the biggest concern that these athletic departments have raised is that in order to fund basketball and football and the biggest sports, it might mean losing some of the smaller ones. So the teams that are the most vulnerable to being cut are men's teams in Olympic sports, like track, soccer, swimming. Men's fencing. Yes. And the problem then is there's a bigger upshot of that. If there's less opportunities at the college level, that potentially hurts the Olympic movement because in the U.S. there's not a ministry of sport. The biggest training ground is the NCAA system.

the NCAA system. What could this mean for the NCAA? The best metaphor I've heard for it is, think of this like a big game of Jenga, and the NCAA is this Jenga tower. This case at Dartmouth is one of those, you know, wooden slats. Where in your Jenga tower is the Dartmouth unionization? Is it bottom half? It's hard to say. I think it's, this one seems like it's pretty small. Like, I don't think this is going to bring it all down, but I think this shakes it enough. This is like one of those pieces where two turns later, it all falls over. And what does it mean that this like perennial loser basketball team could change college sports forever? It's pretty incredible when you think about it. And that this team, you don't have to win games to be, I guess, a major mover and shaker in history. And I think part of the reason why this team is one of the ones that stepped up and did it is because they don't have these grand ambitions of winning a national championship.

I think these players are realistic about what they have. And it should be concerning for the NCAA in that you have a team that's not making boatloads of money. That's the one that's stepping up and saying, we want to be athletes and we also want to be employees. That's the one that's stepping up and saying, we want to be athletes and we also want to be employees. Because if the smallest little David is going to be saying that, then you bet that the Goliaths are going to be scratching their head saying, wait a second, but we do way more than they do. And how come we're not employees? So it's a pretty powerful message. This episode has been updated. A previous version incorrectly called Dartmouth College, Dartmouth University. That's all for today, Friday, March 8th.

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Annie Baxter, Catherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Victoria Dominguez, Pia Godkari, Rachel Humphries, Brian Knudsen, Matt Kwong, Annie Minoff, Jessica Mendoza, Our engineers are Our theme music Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week by Catherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapak, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Najwa Jamal and Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening.

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