LOS ANGELES — At the heart of a USC lawyer’s opening statement in December, in an ongoing fight against the National Labor Relations Board’s effort to prove student-athletes are employees, was a reference to a precedent set a decade earlier.
Ultimately, in a landmark push to grant Northwestern football players employee status back in 2015, the NLRB declined to assert jurisdiction. In one simple decision, the board shut down more than a year of legal battles – including a regional director’s ruling in favor of the employee designation. And thus, the USC lawyer professed a decade later: this case was a “square peg in a round hole.”
Precedent is out the window, now.
On Monday, Laura Sacks, the NLRB’s regional director in Boston, ruled that members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team were employees of the university and therefore could vote on union representation. It’s a landmark decision after players filed a petition to unionize in September – the first legal stamp on NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo’s Sept. 2021 position that certain college athletes were employees under the National Labor Relations Act. And it provides a clear path forward for the NLRB’s fight on a different front: an ongoing hearing attempting to prove USC football and basketball players are employees of both the university, the Pac-12 and the NCAA.
The Dartmouth decision was a “good omen” for the USC case, said Ramogi Huma, director of the National College Players Association, who first filed a complaint against USC over the designation of “student-athletes” in 2022.
“This push, we’re 2 for 2,” Huma said, referring to Dartmouth and the NLRB regional director’s decision in the Northwestern case. “And we’re soon going to be 3 for 3.”
It’s a multi-pronged effort that continues to poke holes in the NCAA’s longstanding definition of amateurism, setting up a distant future when athletes could bargain and negotiate everything from…
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