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“The only way things will change is if the players leverage their value to implement their interests. The only way this changes is the creation of a college football player’s association.” That’s what one former player told us about how to solve the problem of exploitation in college football in our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game.
Since we had that conversation, members of the men’s basketball team at Dartmouth College have followed the exhortation of National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo in her September 2021 memo to petition to form a union, and on Tuesday they voted to by a count of 13-2 in an election held on the school’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire. While there likely remains a long and murky road ahead before the question of Dartmouth basketball’s unionization bid is resolved – including a potential appeal to federal court – what remains apparent is that college athletes require unionization to defend their working conditions and that they clearly want it.
College athletes, particularly football players, require unionization because their work is subject to coercion and exploitation that profoundly undermine the fiction that their labor is predicated on consent. Although it is unclear exactly what a union would look like, whether it follows a large Sag-Aftra model or is more localized, unionization would allow college athletes to have more control over their working conditions and a mechanism to leverage their tremendous potential power – recall that in 2015, football players at the University of Missouri were able to force the resignation of the institution’s president just by threatening of withholding labor for a single game – to improve those conditions. At minimum, the process of collective bargaining would give athletes the agency to make their own choices over the working conditions and compensation they can live with. As another player told us in the book, “I hope athletes … realize that if we don’t come together in this time, nobody’s going to see anything and they’re going to perfect the system.”
So, what are the conditions in college football that need to be improved through unionization, and what do players have to say about it?
It should be a surprise to no one that the question of compensation is at the top of the list. In fact, 67% of Americans polled on the question agree that college athletes deserve some form of compensation. Most current discourse focuses on the issue of name, image and likeness (NIL), in which players can make money from areas such as public appearances and adverts. And yet, what the entire NIL discussion essentially evades is the fact that universities themselves continue not to pay their players directly, despite the revenue they generate. In 2021-22, 42 athletic departments generated more than $100m in revenue, with 19 pulling in more than $150m, and five more than $199m.
Unionization would allow players the opportunity to bargain for a share of that revenue as salary, something players we spoke to for the book felt strongly they deserved. One former player told us, “All I’m getting at this point is a degree while all the coaches and the university is getting everything from me.” Another said, “If you’re gonna generate revenue, part of that revenue should go to the labor force.” A third was even more forceful: “I feel like playing college football is more so enslavement at that point in time, like, you had no life to yourself, you had no summer, you had no time off.”
Of course, according to universities, they do provide compensation for players in the form of scholarships. However, even if we were to accept this premise on its face, the problem is that the education received by most campus athletic workers is a debased form of that which is offered to their peers because it is simply not possible to fully realize a university education for athletes who not only must schedule courses around practice time, and miss out on summer internships but actually must miss class itself for travel. Indeed, players are often steered towards putatively ‘easier’ subjects by athletic departments in a practice known as clustering. And, none of this accounts for the basic fact of fatigue caused by an often 40-plus hour workweek. For all these reasons, it is difficult to deny that if academics are the compensation, then athletes are being subjected to a form of wage theft.
In interviews for the book, one former player told us, “You pretty much have to fight against the entire athletic/academic wing to get a degree with any kind of weight.” Another explained, “The academic advisors would funnel you into a major that was very low time investment … there was definitely some thought that players were not expected to work very hard in those degree programs and still get their Cs that get degrees. And so that really hurts players in the long run, right?” Unionization has the potential to address these issues by protecting players’ academic rights and offering recourse to a grievance process if the university violates them. It may also allow players to negotiate lifetime scholarships so that they can have a more robust educational experience post-athletics.
It is impossible to adequately describe the exploitative aspects of college sport without underlining their plantation dynamics, particularly in a moment where even the most mild racial justice initiatives are facing existential assaults. At the college football and basketball programs with the largest revenues, most of the athletes are Black. But they experience both the extraction of the money they produce – in what has been called a $1.2bn to $1.4bn racial transfer of wealth – and the microaggression of being made to feel that they do not belong.
One former player we spoke to for the book explained, “For me, as a Black man, it’s especially fucked up because I see me and my brothers grindin’ every day for other people. Those other people are mostly white. I gotta say it. They are white. White head coach, white university president, white athletic director, bunch of white guys on TV. I bet the CEOs of sponsors are all white. Man, it’s a whole system created to make money off the backs of us brothers.” Another player added: “There were professors that we knew not to take (courses with) and might take some cultural things completely wrong, because they don’t interact with Black people.”
Questions like these of racial justice can be addressed through unionization both by redirecting revenue from white coaches and administrators to the players who produce it and through the enshrinement of DEI policies in a collective bargaining agreement.
No issue in college sport is more urgent or universal than health and safety as athletes suffer the potential for serious and debilitating injury. Yet, in the current model, universities often do not pay for the health insurance of players, who are expected to be on their parents’ plans, and certainly do not cover the long-term costs of injury once college is over. One former player told us of former NFL teammates: “These men have spent so much money on their physical and mental ailments that they need help paying rent. There’s probably going to be a lot of college athletes in a similar situation.”
Likewise, players also suffer from conflict of interest because team medical officials are more beholden to the coaches than the players. Thus, one former player told us: “A lot of time the medical staff I would say is on the coach’s side. Because … something goes wrong and the university is gonna start cleaning house. It will start with the coach, it may start with the medical staff if you have a high number of guys injured.” Again, this is a key area in which unionization can intervene to improve the conditions for athletes. Players can bargain for improved health insurance and to be seen by physicians who are approved by the union.
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Athletes want to unionize. A 2023 survey of 512 US college athletes found that 62% favored unionization, with that number increasing to 67% at the elite Power Five level.
Of course, unionization is no panacea. The union is only as strong as its members’ willingness to engage in labor action. UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin told us that “a weak college athlete union could be worse than the athlete economic empowerment trajectory we are currently on.”
Still, he adds, “I think all college athletes should have the right to form a union and those with the powerful leadership and unique sources of leverage stand to benefit, but it should be on a case by case basis. In the Dartmouth men’s basketball case, they do not currently have scholarships, stipends, educated themselves on unions, and are allied with a powerful union (SEIU), so unionizing makes a lot of sense in their case.”
As Griffin suggests, and as Missouri proved, if the will is there, so too is the potential for unions to transform power dynamics and working conditions in college sport.
Dartmouth College offers the first crucial step in this process.
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game and co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.
