A legal battle that would open the door for some college athletes to form unions took an expected, yet significant step forward Thursday when the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against the NCAA, the Pac-12 and USC for unfair labor practices.
Those three parties will argue against lawyers from the NLRB in a hearing scheduled for Nov. 7. The hearing is the next step in one of several mounting challenges to the NCAA’s fundamental belief that college athletes are not employees and thus should not be paid directly for their athletic performance.
“The conduct of USC, the Pac-12 conference, and the NCAA, as joint employers, deprives their players of their statutory right to organize and to join together to improve their working and playing conditions if they wish to do so,” said NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. “Our aim is to ensure that these players, as workers like any other, can fully and freely exercise their rights.”
If athletes — this complaint applies only to football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball players — are viewed as employees under the National Labor Relations Act, they would have the ability to…
