College Athletes: One Step Closer

By DON ROLLINS

It’s not every day a staid and storied financial magazine declares for workers’ rights. Such blueblood publications trend conservative by any definition — mostly beholden to subscribers, advertisers, and corporate investors far more interested in minimizing overhead than maximizing laborers’ paychecks.

But as we autopsy the recent Supreme Court decision to compensate student athletes as something closer to unionized laborers, we can add to the list of influences a most unlikely Big Media ally: Forbes magazine.

You read that correctly.

Starting in January and continuing through the June 21 ruling, Forbes’ senior contributor Marc Edelman assumed the role of an old school union shop boss, alternately appealing to logic and sense of fairness for workers that each sport, each season generates billions for their schools.

Fairly railing against the commodification of collegiate athletes by the universities scrawled on their chests and backs, Edelman makes his case with a paraphrased chestnut from 1600s English philosopher John Locke: “One should have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, and not just the opportunity to compete to someday have that right.”

Although three and a half centuries apart, both Edelman and Locke might have been smiling in May as two US senators and three US representatives introduced the College Athlete Right to Organize Act — the legislation allowing student athletes to collectively bargain in return for their services and sacrifices.

Even better, they must’ve been laughing out loud to learn a rarely unanimous Court upheld a lower jurisdiction sanctioning any athletes to trade on their name or images; effectively rewriting the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to define educational institutions as employers, and all students receiving direct aid as employees.

The nuts and bolts of the change include charging each athletic conference with creating its own bargaining units per NLRA standards, even in the 28 states infamously designated as “right-to-work.” (Related, the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO and Advancement for Blacks in Sport have endorsed the bill’s passage.)

Such support, coupled with that from unexpected quarters such as Forbes, spelled the beginning of the end for the NCAA’s case against compensation. The business as usual — what The Guardian’s

Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva and Johanna Mellis have termed the “plantation dynamics” of the National Collegiate Athletic Association - are no more.

The scope of this decision can’t be fully appreciated apart from its context: Established in 1906 under a different name, the NCAA immediately set to work insulating universities and their athletics staffs from as many standard labor practices as possible. Abuse was meted out in the name of “voluntary participation” or “free degrees.” Athletes were and still are unpaid tribal gladiators nearly powerless to improve their working conditions, including the risks and costs of long-term injuries.

Key as financial compensation is to reversing this oppressive past, the Court’s legal remedies to the NCAA’s longstanding exploitation may be but the beginning: In the cited article from The Guardian, the authors interviewed more than a dozen college athletes regarding the cultures of their particular sports. Their responses betrayed realities common across their sports of choice: sexual assault and harassment; physical abuse; mental abuse; racial discrimination; gender and gender identity discrimination; unreasonable practice/travel schedules; lack of sleep and study time.

Perhaps the best summary of how collective bargaining could make a difference with all this comes from former college softball player Hillary Dole, one of the athletes quoted in with a union, athletes would have a line of defense against universities that are exploiting their talent for their own financial gain. Athletes would no longer be treated as disposable and replaceable elements in the face of mistreatment, corruption and abuse. Athletes would no longer have to choose between speaking up about abuse and their athletic career.”

With the Court’s ruling on the matter, Dole’s vision of universal compensation has come a step closer. Yes, that new reality would be about a sports related social contract, but it’s more than that. Its also about parity and as Hillary Dole reminds us, simple safety and respect.

It shouldn’t have taken the highest court in the land to convince us this is the right path, but at least there’s no turning back now that we’ve found it.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2021

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