Professor Roberto Corrada Tackles College Athlete Unionization Concerns

Amidst the ongoing debate over college athletics programs and the fair treatment of student-athletes, unionization has been touted as a possible solution. Recent legal developments bring this idea closer to reality. This spring, the Dartmouth’s men’s basketball players voted to unionize in the first ever certified election in college sports. And this summer, the 3rd Circuit ruled that at least some Division I student-athletes may possibly qualify as employees entitled to minimum wage and overtime, a threshold issue to their access to any statutory employment protection.

But what would wide-scale unionization under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) actually look like? Which teams would be covered? Who would they bargain with? And how? Professor Roberto Corrada’s article, College Athlete Unionization, 11 Tex. A&M L. Rev. 829 (2024), tackles these practical concerns, offering pathways for student athlete collective bargaining to succeed despite seeming incompatibilities with existing law. 

Corrada focuses on revenue-generating sports – NCAA Division I Men’s Football and Basketball – and identifies four challenges to unionization: classifying student-athletes as employees, identifying the proper employer, choosing an appropriate bargaining unit, and dealing with the NLRB’s lack of jurisdiction over public employers. He then demonstrates how to navigate each of these issues. 

Corrada predicts that the best path to success for large-scale student-athlete unionization would be to secure an NLRB finding that both the NCAA and the relevant athletic conference are joint employers that collectively control labor relations for all of their university members. This would allow unionization to proceed without regard to whether any individual school is public or private. Alternatively, student-athlete unions can organize at the university level, operating under both the NLRA and state collective bargaining laws. By using pattern bargaining, student-athlete unions could obtain comparable agreements for public and private school within the relevant particular conference or division.

Whatever structure prevails, Corrada hopes it will enable student-athletes to collectively advocate for better treatment and a fair share of the millions in revenue they generate for universities. Corrada notes “probably 90% or more of these athletes will not go into the pros, nor will they earn much from NIL. I think unionization can help these players, and my goal in my scholarship is to show how that can be achieved.” Corrada hopes that as an academic “unbound to client or institutional interests, my perspective can be valuable to policy makers and adjudicators.”