September 14, 2023, 6:03 p.m. ET
BOSTON — Dartmouth College basketball players are the latest college athletes to challenge the status quo by attempting to unionize.
In a petition filed Wednesday by the Service Employees International Union with the National Labor Relations Board, 15 players from the Ivy League school were identified as representatives. SEIU was listed as the plaintiff and Dartmouth College and its board of trustees were named as the employer.
Dartmouth College spokeswoman Jana Barnello issued a statement to The Associated Press confirming the petition was filed to represent the players and saying it was under review. According to the online filing listing, the petition has been assigned to the NLRB Boston Region.
“We have the utmost respect for our students and unions in general,” the statement said. “We are carefully reviewing this petition with the goal of responding in a timely yet thoughtful manner consistent with Dartmouth’s educational mission and priorities.”
The Northwestern University football team applied to form the first union for college athletes in 2014.
The move was met with almost immediate opposition from college conferences and schools, arguing it would fundamentally alter a system that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to conferences and schools.
The move ultimately ended in August 2015 with the NLRB board’s unanimous decision that creating a new system of union and non-union college teams would result in different standards from school to school. It said a system with different money for players and things like training time would lead to a competitive imbalance.
That decision contrasted with an earlier ruling by a regional NLRB in Chicago that said scholarship football players were employees under U.S. law and therefore had the right to organize.
However, no comment has been made on whether the players are employees of the schools they play for.
Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, wrote in a social media post that the case could take years to be finally resolved.
“There is a good substantive legal argument that many, although not all, college athletes are employees,” McCann said wrote on X. “Dartmouth is probably not the ideal private school men’s team to try this out because they are not a large program and are in the Ivy League, where there are no athletic scholarships. So from that perspective it’s a good school.”