Northwestern U. Football Players Can Unionize, Labor Board Rules
The UW chapter of the AAUP has been very supportive of the working rights of non-tenured faculty. The argument has been that these faculty function as workers and therefore need the protection of a union.
While I wish that need did not exist, I have come to support the AAUP opinion for two reasons. The first is that I have not heard a good alternative. The second is the apparent success of unions at our state colleges in finding ways to combine working rights of faculty with good principles of academic governance.
In the same spirit, I think the AAUP should express its support of the efforts of football players at Northwestern University to form a union now that the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled in favor of the formation of a union by football players at Northwestern.
Northwestern University is taking the somewhat odd position that football players are students and therefore not entitled to organize as a union . “Northwestern believes strongly that our student-athletes are not employees, but students.” “Unionization and collective bargaining are not the appropriate methods to address the concerns raised by student-athletes.” This position is odd in a University where one would expect the concept of organizing workers to be very close to any concept of academic freedoms. Northwestern, how3ver, is basing their claim on court ruling for Brown University that involved graduate students. The finding argued that graduate students can not be considered employees because their relationship with their universities is primarily educational. While Brown and Northwestern are among academically elite private schools, how can the idea of student atheletes be taken seriously when one study claims 10% or more athletes graduate illiterate!
The only way Northwestern’s argument makes sense is if we accept the premise that football programs are themselves academic programs. Based on the experiences of THE Ave author Anthony, a former Huskie, this argument seems absurd for the UW. It seems to me that such a premise here at the University of Washington would necessitate major changes the way our program is run. As an academic program, presumably students (as opposed to player/employees) would be expected to receive grades and the program itself would be subject to academic review, presumably including review by the faculty Senate.
Of course UW students do have a variety of jobs on campus. Those jobs are limited to part-time employment and must be less than 20 hours per a week. That limit is supposedly to recognize the r4eal s students have to study. If playing football is part time employment , then why are they allowed to work far more hours than other student employees? If playing football is an academic activity , then why aren’t the players given academic credit?
In his ruling, Peter Sung Ohr, regional director of the NLRB’s Chicago office, noted: “The players spend 50 to 60 hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training camp prior to the start of the academic year and an additional 40 to 50 hours per week on those duties during the three or four month football season,” the NLRB ruling said. “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies.”
Meanwhile, as Anthony has written here, college football and basketball are so obviously racial that any unbiased person ought to be disturbed by the image of crowds of Euro-Americans, some of whom may even be students yelling and screaming for there favorite negro players. These basketball and football “student athletes” are overwhelmingly African-Americans from the communities in the US most desperately in need of higher education. It is pretty bizarre to see the NCAA as a force to push that education. David Zarin in The Nation quotes Dr. Harry Edwards calling pay for athletes “the civil rights movement in sports of our time” and Bill Maher as tweeting “March Madness is a stirring reminder of what America was founded on: making tons of money off the labor of unpaid black people.”
Readmore at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read about Anthony Washington’s experiences as a “student/athelete” at UW.