Last Thursday, the NCAA, Pac-12 and University of Southern California dismissed labor officials’ contention that scholarship athletes are employees, saying it is “frivolous and without foundation in law or fact.” The assertion came in the form of three answers to NLRB regional director Mori Rubin’s May 18 complaint addressing USC football players and men’s and women’s basketball players.
The answers offered blanket, and largely non-descriptive, denials; it also listed defenses the three respondents will elaborate on in future filings. Their main point? The NLRB lacks jurisdiction since the athletes aren’t employees, so it’s not a labor law matter.
The basis for the argument relies on the NLRB’s 2015 decision to not exercise jurisdiction over whether Northwestern football players were employees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). A year earlier, NLRB regional director Peter Sung Ohr found that Northwestern football players were employees. Wildcats players provided a service—playing football games—for the benefit of a university that paid them scholarships, Ohr stressed (for more detail, read The Collegiate-Athlete Employee).
But when the five-member NLRB board in Washington D.C. took up the question, it punted. The board found that to rule on Northwestern players “would not serve to promote stability in labor relations.” It suggested the larger question of whether college athletes are employees would be better addressed by Congress and other decision-makers.
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