Men’s basketball players at Ivy League school Dartmouth College in New Hampshire voted Tuesday to unionize, in what could be a transformative moment for American college sports.
The team voted 13-2 to join an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, which petitioned to represent the players last year, according to a National Labor Relations Board tally.
The vote was part of a broader effort to remove restrictions on student-athlete compensation, such as prohibiting athletes from profiting from the commercial use of their name, image and likeness.
According to a 2020 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, athletics generates approximately $8.5 billion in revenue for top schools each year, less than 7% of which is distributed to athletes in the form of scholarships and stipends.
Dartmouth and the union did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Dartmouth said last week it planned to challenge the election results and ask the labor board to withhold election ballots while it determines whether players are eligible to vote.
In a ruling last month, a regional director of the labor board said basketball players are employees of Dartmouth because the school’s basketball program generates publicity, alumni involvement and financial donations and the school controls what the players do. The work done by the.
The ruling allows them to vote on forming a union.
Forming a union would allow Dartmouth basketball players to collectively bargain with the school over pay and working conditions, such as practice schedules, travel policies and coaches’ discipline. It could also spur student-athletes at other schools across the country to unionize.
The election-ready decision is the first since Labor Council general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo in 2021 arguing that many college athletes should be classified as school employees. The memo focuses on athletes who receive scholarships as a form of compensation. Dartmouth and other Ivy League schools do not award athletic scholarships.
Abruzzo, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said at the time that her office would file complaints against colleges that interfered with players’ organizing efforts. The general counsel acts as prosecutor, bringing cases to the five-member labor board, whose decisions can be appealed to a federal appeals court.
Last May, USC and the NCAA, the governing body of college sports, were hit with a complaint from Abruzzo’s office claiming they did not treat student-athletes as school employees, thereby preventing them from unionizing. The case is ongoing.
The five-member labor committee, which currently has a Democratic majority and has one vacancy, has never directly discussed whether college athletes can be considered school employees.
In 2014, football players at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, became the first college athletes to vote in a union election, but the ballots were withheld as the school filed a legal challenge.
The board ultimately ruled that it could not decide whether players were eligible to join the union because doing so would affect all of Northwestern’s rival schools, including many public universities. The Commission’s enforcement powers extend only to private employers.
In Dartmouth’s case, this may not be an issue because the Ivy League is comprised solely of private schools and rarely competes with public universities.
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