On February 18, 2025, Nationwide Labor Relations Board Performing Normal Counsel William Cowen rescinded a September 2021 memorandum through which former Board Normal Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo declared faculty athletes needs to be thought-about workers below the Nationwide Labor Relations Act. This was one in every of many memoranda he rescinded that had been issued by his Biden-administration predecessor.
Performing Normal Counsel Cowen’s withdrawal of the memorandum is the most recent in a collection of defeats for pro-employee advocates who had hoped to designate collegiate student-athletes as “workers” below the Act.
The primary was the December 2024 withdrawal of an unfair labor observe cost filed by the Nationwide Faculty Gamers Affiliation (NCPA) in opposition to the NCAA, the Pac-12 Convention, and a personal college within the Los Angeles space. The NCPA’s government director acknowledged the cost had been withdrawn contemplating the rise of “title, picture, and likeness” (NIL) funds to gamers, in addition to the shift in perspective on the topic below the brand new Trump Administration.
The second blow to proponents of the idea that student-athletes be deemed “workers” was the January 2025 choice by Service Workers Worldwide Union (SEIU), Native 560 to withdraw its petition to signify an Ivy League college’s males’s basketball gamers. In February 2024, a Regional Director for the Board took the historic step of figuring out that the college’s males’s basketball gamers needs to be thought-about workers below the Act. The case was filed in September 2023 in spite of everything 15 members of the lads’s basketball crew signed a petition to affix Native 560 of the SEIU. On the time, the Regional Director decided the college’s degree of management over the gamers was adequate to qualify the gamers as workers below Part 2(3) of the Act. The Board discovered that conventional “crew” actions, together with the college’s capability to regulate the gamers’ educational schedules and the crew’s regimented schedules for dwelling and away video games, weighed closely in favor of an employment relationship. With the petition withdrawn for now, the college’s basketball gamers will stay non-unionized.
Given these developments, the window for student-athletes being deemed workers below the Act seems to be closed in the intervening time. With the uncertainty surrounding NIL and different points round collegiate athletics, this space of regulation will must be monitored for added developments. Within the interim, personal collegiate establishments needs to be conscious that they might face costs or petitions filed with the Board. Such filings should be handled severely in gentle of the Regional Director choice mentioned above.
Jackson Lewis’ Training and Collegiate Sports activities Group is accessible to help universities, conferences, and different stakeholders in coping with issues earlier than the Board or in any other case involving the suitable classification of student-athletes.
