Is playing big-time college sports an extracurricular activity or a job?
Two law professors at Michigan State University, Robert and Amy McCormick, think it is definitely a job for football and basketball players on athletic scholarships at Division I schools. The married couple has added a new dimension to the long debate over paying athletes by arguing they are “employees” under federal labor laws and entitled to form unions and negotiate wages, hours and working conditions.
“There are more demands put on these young men than any employee of the university,” says Robert McCormick, who was an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board under President Carter. “These young men are laboring under very strict and arduous conditions, so they really are laborers in terms of the physical demands on them while they’re also trying to go to school and being required to go to school.”
The way football and basketball players in Division I programs manage juggling sport and school, the McCormicks maintain, undermines the NCAA’s contention they are student-athletes.
“Athletes don’t have free choice of what major they take if the classes conflict with practice schedules,” Amy McCormick says. “That’s one fact that flies in the face of the idea that they’re primarily students and secondarily athletes.”
Donald Remy, the NCAA’s general counsel and vice president for legal affairs, says court precedents and tax laws have upheld the status of college athletes as students.
“The NCAA, in accordance with courts that have addressed the issue, believes that student-athletes are not employees, under the law, and that they should not be treated as employees either by the law or by the schools they attend,” Remy says. “Moreover, taxing authorities do not consider the benefits student athletes receive to be taxable compensation.”
