NLRB Rejects Northwestern Football Players and the Right to Unionize
By John K. Wilson

This National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling overturning a decision last year by a Chicago district official that had supported the right of Northwestern’s football players to unionize. The NLRB ruled that the case “would not promote stability in labor relations.” They wrote, “Our decision is primarily premised on a finding” that the NCAA and conference exert control over individual teams, and most college football teams are public colleges not covered by the NLRB.

By that kind of logic, all private college faculty could be denied the right to unionize on the grounds that most college professors work in public colleges. And even though the NCAA has enormous power over athletic programs, there are plenty of issues that could be negotiated. The Northwestern players declared that they were not seeking to get paid salaries for their work, something which the NCAA bans.

The NLRB cited “the absence of any controlling precedent” as the reason for their ruling, which did not prohibit campus athletic unions in the future, but simply refused to enforce them as required at this time. The NLRB ruled that “recent changes, as well as calls for additional reforms” indicated that “the situation of scholarship players may well change in the near future.” That may be true, but how many unions could be shut down on the grounds that the employer promised to makes some things better in the future?

The NLRB’s misguided decision follows a long line of anti-union rulings afflicting academia, most notably the Yeshiva case in 1980, where the Supreme Court ruled tenured professors could be “managers” and therefore the university was allowed to ban a union. As a result of Yeshiva, faculty unionizing at private colleges has been largely destroyed in recent decades. What’s missing in these debates is the fundamental right to unionize that’s part of the First Amendment right of assembly. Just as academic freedom should be protected at private colleges even if the courts don’t enforce it, so too should be the right to unionize.

Every single college should have an established policy protecting the rights of anyone at the college to unionize, just as they should protect freedom of speech and academic freedom. And even in those repressive states that ban the right to unionize at public colleges, colleges always have the power to voluntarily recognize a union, or a union-like association of employees.

Northwestern is free to oppose a union, and to persuade their students that benign paternalism is preferable. But they shouldn’t suppress the rights of their students or employees, even when they imagine it to be for their own good.