Dartmouth Players’ Vote Poised to Spark Ivy League Union Wave

The Dartmouth College men’s basketball team’s historic vote to unionize this week has the potential to be a tipping point in college athletics after years of upheaval over players’ pay and working conditions.

The team voted 13-2 to be represented by the Service Employees International Union March 5 in a move that’s likely to spur unionization efforts at other Ivy League schools, legal and athletic observers say.

“I think we’re going to see more, for sure,” said Mit Winter, a sports attorney at Kennyhertz Perry. “It’ll most likely happen in the Ivy League first because the Dartmouth players have blazed the trail for them.”

Cade Haskins, a junior forward and spokesperson for the team, told reporters that he’s already been in contact with athletes at other schools both within and outside the Ivy League.

“I think this is just the start,” he said after voting. “There’s going to be a domino effect of other cases like ours across the country.”

The Dartmouth election followed months of litigation around whether the athletes should be considered employees of the college under the National Labor Relations Act, culminating in a Feb. 5 decision from a National Labor Relations Board official that they are. The board later denied Dartmouth’s bid to pause the union vote while the college appeals that ruling.

The Dartmouth ruling and vote was a blow to to the NCAA, which has been fighting a multi-pronged legal battle on various attempts to give athletes more labor and employment rights.

Classification of college athletes as employees would force college sports leaders to share revenue with players and abide by a host of federal laws dictating workplace rights.

Union Hotbed

To some outside observers, Dartmouth seems like an odd venue for this legal battle, being removed from the flashing lights and multi-million dollar budgets of athletic departments at larger schools that tend to draw criticism for making millions off the backs of unpaid athletes.

The basketball team this year came in last place in the Ivy League conference, where athletes don’t earn scholarships or deals for their name, image, and likeness.

But Patricia Anderson, a professor of economics at Dartmouth, said these factors may actually contribute to union activity rather than hinder it.

Players who aren’t seeing better conditions under the NCAA’s current NIL rules—like those at Ivy League institutions—are more likely to turn to organized labor, she said.

“The big-time athletes, who we thought five years ago would be the ones wanting to get paid, are getting paid now. So it’s not clear that unionization helps them,” Anderson said. “But the athletes who aren’t getting those deals, like Ivy League or women’s teams, might be more motivated to organize and get a portion of the pie.”

Dartmouth player Romeo Mythril said that because team members don’t receive scholarships or NIL deals, many of them have to find extra jobs to cover expenses.

“It’s very tough juggling all those things at once,” he said. “To try to engage in the Dartmouth community, which some people would say is the most valuable part, gets difficult when you’re traveling every weekend, working on evenings, and then studying the rest of the time.”

These elite institutions have also been a hotbed of union activity for the past two years amid a resurgence of organizing among graduate and undergraduate workers.

At Dartmouth, undergraduate students in the dining hall voted in April 2022 to organize with SEIU Local 560—the same union now representing the basketball players.

Haskins, who also works in the dining hall, said he was inspired by seeing the impact that collective bargaining could have on working conditions. Staff got increased wages, paid time off, and sick leave after their new contract was signed.

Jason Mann, a third-year PhD student at Dartmouth, helped organize the graduate students with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America last year.

“In higher ed there’s a common practice of misclassifying our labor, obscuring the profit we generate through our work, and denying us access to what we deserve,” he said. “These universities have built this wealth by underpaying and undervaluing people for so long and this explosion of union activity is a direct result of that.”

Long Legal Road

But the Dartmouth basketball case is far from finished, and unionization efforts at other schools will likely face similar legal challenges.

The college’s request for review of the NLRB regional director’s decision, submitted just hours after votes had been cast, and the addition of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius attorneys on its legal team both indicate the school is in it for the long haul.

The Morgan Lewis attorneys on Dartmouth’s case are also representing the University of Southern California in an unfair labor practice case centered around the employment status of its basketball and football players.

Dartmouth spokesperson Jana Barnello said after the election March 5 that the college maintains the athletes aren’t employees.

“Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate,” Barnello said. “We, therefore, do not believe unionization is appropriate.”

The college argues that its players can’t be considered employees because they aren’t directly compensated for their labor. However, the NLRB regional director said that the athletes were paid in the form of free gear, travel, and game tickets.

While Winter said he believes the full board will uphold the decision, a case involving players on athletic scholarships would be more persuasive. The stronger case for considering college athletes to be employees, he said, could be the one before an NLRB administrative law judge involving the NCAA, USC, and the Pac-12 Conference.

NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo contends that the three entities jointly violated federal labor law by failing to treat the university’s football and basketball players as employees.

“The men’s and women’s basketball players and football players, besides the walk-ons, are receiving full athletic scholarships, and no one is going to argue that’s not monetary compensation” Winter said, referring the USC case. “But is the lack of scholarships in the Dartmouth case going to be a big enough factor to have the regional directors decision overturned? We’ll have to see.”

But Haskins said his freshman teammates were committed to carrying on the union efforts even after most of the original unit members have graduated.

“They know what they’re getting into and they’re just as excited as we are,” he said.