Last spring, there were bold headlines about the Dartmouth College basketball team voting to form a labor union and the National Labor Relations Board deciding players were employees entitled to unionize.
But as 2025 dawns, the players have thrown in the towel on this. Why? Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College and sports consultant, joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio to explain.
David Branccacio: This turn of events at Dartmouth is in anticipation of something that hasn’t happened yet. The Service Employees [International] Union there seems to have little doubt the NLRB will pull a switcheroo. I mean, I guess that’s about the change of presidential administrations.
Andrew Zimbalist: Once the regional National Relations Board in New Hampshire said that the basketball players at Dartmouth were employees, that gave them the right to unionize, and they voted 11-2 to unionize. And then Dartmouth University said that they would not recognize the union and challenged it, so it was going to go to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington. And with Trump controlling that board, it seems very unlikely to the SEIU that they would win. So rather than have the precedent that was set by the regional National Relations Board, they decided to just withdraw it. And I suspect they’re thinking that maybe in four years, there’ll be a new National Labor Relations Board that would be more amenable to a unionization of college athletes.
Brancaccio: All right, so that’s a key thing — it was a point of strategy about not setting a precedent during these four years. Now, Dartmouth and the union, therefore, never did actually bargain on a contract.
Zimbalist: That’s correct. Dartmouth never recognized the union. They were challenging the decision of the regional board that said that student athletes — in particular, the student athletes on the Dartmouth basketball team — were employees. Dartmouth University has made the argument, as virtually all universities have made and the NCAA have made, is that student athletes are primarily students, and the relationship between the athlete and the university should be one about education — not a commercial relationship. There’s an oddity here, which is that Dartmouth, of course, is part of the Ivy League. The Ivy League doesn’t produce big bucks like the Big 10 does or the SEC does. And in fact, the basketball team at Dartmouth loses probably over a million dollars a year. And so for the students to unionize in that context on the grounds that there’s some economic exploitation going on is anomalous.
