The Dartmouth men’s basketball team last week abruptly dropped its attempt to unionize in order to avoid a potentially damaging precedent from a National Labor Relations Board that soon will be controlled by Republicans.
As reported by Jimmy Golen of The Associated Press, Service Employees International Union Local 560 filed a request to withdraw the NLRB petition rather than take its chances with an unfriendly labor board likely to take over in the new presidential administration. The board’s regional director approved the request Tuesday.
“While our strategy is shifting, we will continue to advocate for just compensation, adequate health coverage, and safe working conditions for varsity athletes at Dartmouth,” local president Chris Peck said in a statement that called collective bargaining “the only viable pathway to address issues” facing college athletics today.
Although the NCAA considers players “student-athletes,” the Dartmouth players petitioned the labor board in 2023 for the right to unionize, saying the New Hampshire school exercised so much control over their schedules and working conditions that they met the legal definition of employees, per Golen's reporting. A regional official agreed, and the team voted 13-2 in March to join SEIU Local 560, which already represents some Dartmouth workers.
A college athletes union would be unprecedented in American sports. A previous attempt to unionize the Northwestern football team failed because opponents in the Big Ten Conference include public schools that aren’t under the jurisdiction of the NLRB. A separate NLRB complaint is asking that football and basketball players at Southern California be deemed employees of their school, the Pac-12 conference and the NCAA.
From AB: What Changed Between the NLRB's Northwestern and DartmouthUnionization Cases?
Dartmouth said it would refuse to bargain with its players, a strategy designed to force the case into federal court. The players would need favorable decisions from an NLRB that currently has two openings that will be filled by President-elect Donald Trump after his Jan. 20 inauguration.
“By filing a request to withdraw our petition today, we seek to preserve the precedent set by this exceptional group of young people on the men’s varsity basketball team,” Peck said. “They have pushed the conversation on employment and collective bargaining in college sports forward and made history by being classified as employees, winning their union election 13-2, and becoming the first certified bargaining unit of college athletes in the country.”
In a statement, the school maintained that the decision to classify the players as employees was “incorrect and not supported by legal precedent.”
“Dartmouth has built productive relationships with the unions that are part of our campus community and have deep respect for our 1,500 union colleagues. In this isolated instance, however, we did not believe unionization was appropriate,” the school said. “We will continue to support our men’s basketball team and all our students in their athletic endeavors which complement and enhance their academic experience at Dartmouth.”
