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 an hour later, the basketball players had accomplished something no other student-athlete had.
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 anti-monopoly lawsuits, unfair labor disputes and waning support in Congress, it is unclear whether Tuesday’s election will go down in history as a milestone or a footnote.
There has been no visible movement to organize other Dartmouth teams. And a reminder that the matter is far from final came just before the vote: Dartmouth last month filed an appeal of a regional director’s decision to classify the players as employees with the full National Labor Relations Board, which has jurisdiction only over 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 matter, the impounded 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 Misclassification by the NLRB.”
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 hub of activism. It doesn’t have a rich history of rioting like the University of California, Berkeley. The war in Gaza hasn’t roiled the campus as it has other Ivy League schools. The school is in a remote location and has the smallest enrollment in the Ivy League (4,556 students), giving organizers limited breathing room in a place whose independent streak is imbued with the state motto: Live Free or Die.
Still, the basketball team is just the latest Dartmouth group to organize in the past two years, following student workers, graduate student workers, and library workers. The dormitory’s resident advisors 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.”
It is perhaps unsurprising that this local surge of activity has its roots 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 returned a whopping 46 percent over the previous fiscal year, to $8 billion. (Dartmouth said at the time that it would raise its minimum wage from $7.75 to $11.50.)
About six months later, the hospitality workers voted to unionize.
When negotiations with the college lagged, workers voted to strike in February 2023. Dartmouth immediately relented—raising food service workers’ wages to $21 an hour, along with agreeing to sick leave for Covid-19 and overtime for late-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 hall wait staff is where you go when you can’t be picky. A lot 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 to be drafted by the NBA in 1990, helped form the first players’ union in Europe and has also worked for the NBA Players Association, connecting 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 employees.”
However, this case does not simply fit 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 made tens of millions like Kansas or Kentucky. In fact, it is subsidized by Dartmouth, which has incurred more than $3.2 million in losses running 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’s television contract with ESPN are categorized as athletic department revenue.)
In granting the players employee status, the regional director handling 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 players receive to each game for their family and friends serve as compensation and place the players under the supervision of the university.
She also ruled that another form of compensation is access to the “early read” admissions process because of their value as basketball players.
Those are some of the issues that Dartmouth, which recently hired the same lawyers who represented the University of Southern California in an NLRB case that argued that men’s and women’s football and basketball players are employees, is pushing back against in its appeal to the full board. 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 widespread eagerness on campus to take on the hard work of organizing athletes in many of the other 33 sports Dartmouth sponsors.
New rules allowing athletes to earn money from endorsements have made them think about 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 was not authorized by Dartmouth to speak to the news media. “We’re going to play hockey and go to a school that we’re 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 nearly a decade.
That’s not the case for the men’s basketball team, which is coming off a disappointing season and is in last place in the Ivy League. But when the Big Green mounted 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 of the day.
