NEWS

Should college athletes have unions?

Mark Alesia
IndyStar
Kain Colter and Ramogi Huma of the College Athletes Players Association after a speech Monday at the Indiana AFL-CIO convention.

Kain Colter took a class at Northwestern University called "History of the Modern Worker." It made him think. That's what college is supposed to do.

Except Colter's thought — that the school's football players needed a union — was subversive, striking hard at the power structure of big-money college sports. Northwestern and the NCAA battled it every step of the way. Colter almost made it a reality.

After Northwestern's players won a historic ruling in 2014 from a regional official of the National Labor Relations Board, who decided they were employees of the university, the NLRB effectively killed the union effort last August.

Colter, a former quarterback at Northwestern, and Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA linebacker and head of the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA), are undeterred. They brought their message of unionizing college athletes to Indianapolis, backyard of the NCAA, on Monday. They found a receptive crowd at the state AFL-CIO convention.

“NCAA sports is financially rich," Huma said, "and morally bankrupt.”

Colter and Huma said they are working at other schools to organize players. CAPA's argument is that history has shown college athletes that they can't rely on the NCAA, and players need a union to ensure equitable treatment on issues such as medical insurance, concussions and compensation.

The NCAA says it has made great progress on reforms and that the athletes are students, not employees. A union, it says, is the wrong way to bring about change and it risks instability to college sports.

"While there certainly are improvements to be made to the college model of sports," a 2014 NCAA statement said, "transforming the relationship between students and their university to an employment relationship is not the answer.”

The regional NLRB official who ruled that they were employees based the decision on the hours players had to spend on football and the huge amount of money involved.

Huma portrayed college athletes as a segment of the population barred from enjoying the same rights as everyone else. Ohio and Michigan have laws specifically prohibiting college athletes from unionizing. Meanwhile, CAPA notes, coaches routinely sign seven-figure contracts.

"This Jim Crow push isn't motivated by race," Huma told the crowd of about 200. "This push to exclude players from equal protection is motivated by the color green. Money."

Huma said NCAA officials have refused to discuss the issues with his group, except for one meeting with an NCAA medical officer.

"We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here," Huma said. "We're saying this is the appropriate model. It's a proven, tried and tested model. Pro sports in America all have unions — except for the NCAA, which is also a pro sport (organization)."

The state AFL-CIO passed a resolution that said the protections of labor and antitrust law should extend to everyone, including college athletes.

But change comes slowly in college sports.

"Our resolve has never been stronger," Colter said. "The door isn't shut. So right now, we want to keep going full steam ahead, and just keep fighting. And eventually the system will fall down and reform will come."

Contact Mark Alesia at (317) 444-6311 and follow him on Twitter: @markalesia.