Dartmouth basketball team votes to unionize, rattling college sports

Members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted Tuesday to become the first collegiate players to form a union, a move with the potential to shift the balance of power in a multibillion-dollar sports industry.

Officials across college sports and its main governing body, the NCAA, have warned that the labor rights and protections unlocked by treating student athletes as workers pose such an existential threat to the system that it warrants congressional intervention.

The team’s 13-2 vote to join SEIU Local 560 is a massive achievement for the long-percolating campaign to upend college sports, and one that could motivate others to follow suit.

"It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members," teammates Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, who helped lead the organizing effort, said in a statement Tuesday. "It’s time for the age of amateurism to end."

Dartmouth administrators strenuously objected to the decision by federal labor officials in February to hold an election in the first place, arguing that players are not school employees and thus ineligible to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act.

But leaders of the Dartmouth unionization push have said they were inspired by other campus labor activism, including at the student dining hall where one member of the basketball team also worked. Colleges and universities in recent years have been a hotbed of unionization, in part because of the NLRB’s labor-friendly shift under President Joe Biden.

Though the ballots were counted, it could be months — or potentially years — before any contract is negotiated as Dartmouth pursues legal challenges. In a statment, the college said that it has "deep respect" for its on-campus unions while casting the basketball team's as delegitimate because they are "not in any way employed by Dartmouth."

"For Ivy League students who are varsity athletes, academics are of primary importance, and athletic pursuit is part of the educational experience. Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate. We, therefore, do not believe unionization is appropriate."

In a last-ditch attempt to get the National Labor Relations Board to freeze the election, attorneys for Dartmouth last week cited the possibility of protracted litigation, during which time the team’s roster would change substantially from the group that voted to unionize.

The Dartmouth vote arrived almost exactly a decade after college sports' last serious unionization effort, which involved the Northwestern University football team. In that case, the NLRB held an election but the votes were never tallied, and the agency’s board ultimately dismissed the matter on jurisdictional grounds.

At the time, the board highlighted the complicating factor that Northwestern was the sole private institution competing in the Big Ten conference against public universities, whose workers are covered by their respective state laws rather than the NLRA.

In contrast, Dartmouth competes in the all-private Ivy League. However unlike Northwestern’s football team and most other high-level college programs, the Ivy League does not offer athletic scholarships, though players can receive other forms of financial aid.