‘Scary and disheartening’: Dartmouth players explain how the Union Plan came about

Members of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team gathered at the stately Hanover Inn near campus on a gloomy, drizzly Tuesday and walked to a small office building where they smiled for a group photo. They then went to a conference room on the second floor and held a vote that had been six months – or rather, many years – in the making.

When the yellow sheets of paper were counted and certified about an hour later, the basketball players had accomplished something no other college athlete had done.

By a vote of 13-2, they had formed a union.

“It’s definitely becoming more real,” Cade Haskins, a junior on the basketball team and leader of the effort, told a dozen reporters after the vote. “We know this could potentially make history. That wasn’t the reason we did it, but doing that can be scary and intimidating.”

Haskins expressed hope that his peers in the Ivy League and the rest of the country would soon be recognized as employees under federal labor law — a classification that has been a red line for college athletic leaders who would be forced to sell their revenues directly to athletes to share.

But at a time when the amateur model of college sports is buckling under the pressure of antitrust lawsuits, unfair labor challenges and declining support in Congress, it’s unclear whether Tuesday’s election will be remembered as a signature moment or as a footnote.

There is no visible movement to organize by other Dartmouth teams. And a reminder that the case is far from final came just before the vote: Dartmouth last month appealed a regional director’s decision to classify the players as employees to the full National Labor Relations Board, which has sole jurisdiction about private employers.

(Nearly a decade ago, a regional director granted Northwestern’s football team the right to vote to form a union, but when the board refused to assert jurisdiction in the case, the seized votes were destroyed before they could be counted. .)

Dartmouth could ultimately take the board’s decision to a federal appeals court, meaning the case may not be resolved until the current players graduate.

In a statement, the college called the union vote inappropriate: “Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate.”

Also on Tuesday, a House subcommittee announced a hearing next week titled “Protecting Student-Athletes from NLRB Misclassification.”

When asked how far the Dartmouth players were from the finish, Haskins said, “We’re closer than we started.”

The vote is the latest flex for the organized labor movement, whose nationwide activity — and popularity — has, with the support of the Biden administration, soared to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Yet Dartmouth is a somewhat unlikely center of activism. It does not have a rich history of rabble-rousing like the University of California, Berkeley. The war in Gaza has not thrown the campus into as much turmoil as it has at other Ivy League schools. Located in a remote location, the school has the smallest enrollment in the Ivy League (4,556 students), giving organizers limited oxygen in a place whose independent streak is steeped in the state motto: Live Free or Die.

Still, the basketball team is only the latest Dartmouth group to organize in the past two years, following student workers, graduate student workers and library workers. The dormitory housing counselors are in the process of forming a union.

“There has been a whirlwind of labor activity in this small, rural town in recent years,” said Marc Dixon, chairman of the Department of Sociology, who studies labor issues. “The pace was really wild.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this local flurry of activity was rooted in the coronavirus pandemic.

When Dartmouth students returned to campus on a hybrid schedule in the fall of 2020, students who worked at the two campus restaurants felt stuck. They needed $11-an-hour jobs, but also felt particularly vulnerable to the virus.

Around the time food service workers began organizing, their efforts gained momentum: Dartmouth announced in the fall of 2021 that its endowment had generated a whopping 46 percent return in the previous fiscal year, amounting to $8 billion . (Dartmouth said at the time it would raise its minimum wage from $7.75 to $11.50.)

About six months later, food service workers had voted to unionize.

When negotiations with the council lagged behind, workers voted to strike in February 2023. Dartmouth immediately relented — boosting food service workers’ wages to $21 an hour, along with agreeing to Covid-19 sick leave and overtime for night shifts.

“As a freshman you’re not in a position to get a research job,” said Ian Scott, a senior who worked in the dishwashing area of ​​a campus cafe and was an organizer. “The dining service is the place you go when you can’t be picky. Many of the people who work there were – and still are – low-income people of color who need help.”

Watching this play was Haskins, who worked in a dining hall. He also plays basketball. (About half of the team members have a job at the school.)

Haskins, a junior from Minneapolis majoring in policy, philosophy and economics, had befriended Walter Palmer, a former Dartmouth player who works in the alumni office. Palmer, who remains the most recent Dartmouth player drafted by the NBA in 1990, helped form the first players’ union in Europe and has also worked for the NBA Players Association. He connected the players with the local Service Employees International Union – and other influential figures such as Tony Clark, the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Plans were quickly made to take their case to the NLRB in September, after the three freshmen on this year’s team arrived. (Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, a junior from Solna, Sweden, studying computer science, were seen as ideal leaders because they wouldn’t graduate until next year.)

“We took an oath to organize the unorganized, but it doesn’t really say what that means,” said Chris Peck, a painter who is the longtime president of Local 560. “College athletes – where does that fit? You assume that they come from money and that they have the world by the tail. Then you hear that in addition to practicing and studying, they also have a job. It was a similar story to the restaurant workers.”

However, this case does not fit neatly into a box.

Dartmouth, like the rest of the Ivy League schools, does not offer athletic scholarships, only need-based financial aid. And the basketball team hasn’t reaped tens of millions like Kansas or Kentucky. In fact, it is subsidized by Dartmouth, which has suffered more than $3.2 million in losses operating the program over the past five years, according to testimony at the hearing. (Distributions from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the Ivy League television contract with ESPN are categorized as athletic department revenue.)

In granting employee status to the players, the regional director who handled the case, Laura A. Sacks, ruled that the six pairs of basketball shoes (valued at $200 each) given to players each season and the two to four tickets that players receive each season, The game for their family and friends served as compensation and thus placed the players under the control of the college.

She also ruled that another form of compensation is access to the “early read” admissions process because of their value as basketball players.

These are some of the issues that Dartmouth, which recently hired the same attorneys representing the University of Southern California in an NLRB case alleging that football and men’s basketball players are employees, is addressing in its appeal to the entire management. The law firm Morgan Lewis also represents SpaceX, Amazon and Trader Joe’s, companies that have challenged the NLRB’s authority

While there appears to be general support for the basketball players, there does not appear to be a widespread eagerness on campus to take on the hard work of organizing athletes in many of the other 33 sports that Dartmouth sponsors.

New rules allowing athletes to earn money from endorsements have prompted them to reflect on their circumstances, a member of the men’s hockey team said.

“I think the guys are comfortable with the way things are going,” said the player, who asked not to be identified because he had not been cleared by Dartmouth to speak to the news media. “We are going to play hockey and go to a school that we are super excited about. It’s a choice we make to come here, and so you accept the pros and cons.”

He also noted that the team is having its best season in almost a decade.

That’s not the case with the men’s basketball team, which is coming off a disappointing season and sits in last place in the Ivy League. But when the Big Green staged a spirited rally to beat Harvard on Tuesday night, they were able to end their 6-21 season with a smile — and a second win on the day.