BOSTON — The Dartmouth men’s basketball team dropped its attempt to form a union Tuesday, voluntarily ending a push to become the first college sports team to unionize in order to avoid a potentially damaging precedent from a National Labor Relations Board that soon will be controlled by Republicans.
Service Employees International Union Local 560 filed a request to withdraw the NLRB petition rather than take its chances with an unfriendly labor board likely to take over in the new presidential administration. The board’s regional director approved the request later Tuesday.
“While our strategy is shifting, we will continue to advocate for just compensation, adequate health coverage, and safe working conditions for varsity athletes at Dartmouth,” SEIU Local 560 president Chris Peck said in a statement that called collective bargaining “the only viable pathway to address issues” facing college athletics today.
Although the NCAA considers players “student-athletes,” the Dartmouth players petitioned the labor board in 2023 for the right to unionize, saying the New Hampshire school exercised so much control over their schedules and working conditions that they met the legal definition of employees. A regional official agreed, and the team voted 13-2 in March to join SEIU Local 560, which already represents some Dartmouth workers.
The school said it would refuse to bargain with the players, a strategy designed to force the case into federal court. Before sitting down at the bargaining table, the players would need favorable decisions from an NLRB that currently has two openings that will be filled by President-elect Donald Trump after his Jan. 20 inauguration.
In a statement, the school maintained that the decision to classify the players as employees was “incorrect and not supported by legal precedent.”
“Dartmouth has built productive relationships with the unions that are part of our campus community and have deep respect for our 1,500 union colleagues. In this isolated instance, however, we did not believe unionization was appropriate,” the school said. “We will continue to support our men’s basketball team and all our students in their athletic endeavors which complement and enhance their academic experience at Dartmouth.”
Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, the two Dartmouth players who initiated the union effort, did not immediately respond to text messages from The Associated Press seeking comment. But the union praised them for their efforts.
“By filing a request to withdraw our petition today, we seek to preserve the precedent set by this exceptional group of young people on the men’s varsity basketball team,” Peck said. “They have pushed the conversation on employment and collective bargaining in college sports forward and made history by being classified as employees, winning their union election 13-2, and becoming the first certified bargaining unit of college athletes in the country.”
The Dartmouth case threatened to upend the NCAA’s amateur model, in which players remain unpaid even as college sports have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry that richly rewards coaches and schools.
Recent court decisions have chipped away at that framework, with players now allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness and earn a still-limited stipend for living expenses beyond the cost of attendance. The NCAA has been lobbying Congress to preserve the amateur model, an approach that becomes more likely with Republican control.
Both sides agree that the current paradigm is in jeopardy.
A college athletes union would be unprecedented in American sports. A previous attempt to unionize the Northwestern football team failed because opponents in the Big Ten Conference include public schools that aren’t under the jurisdiction of the NLRB. A separate NLRB complaint is asking that football and basketball players at USC be deemed employees of their school and the NCAA.
