The NCAA is the Site of a Major Labor Campaign

     In January 2021, the Supreme Court ruled nine to zero that the NCAA would be required to allow college athletes to profit off of their name, image, and likeness in endorsement deals, etc. with companies. A rare unanimous ruling, it set off resistance by the NCAA and legislation in statehouses across the nation. As of today:

     Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia have passed legislation, executive action, or budgets that allow college athletes in their states to profit from their name, image, and likeness: 28 states. Meanwhile, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia have bills pending to do the same: 11 states. This leaves Alabama, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Maine, Idaho, Utah, Delaware, and Indiana as the only states that have not introduced name, image, and likeness (NIL) legislation: 11 states. 

     At the same time, eight bills that would set standards for NIL at the federal level are pending in Congress, and I urge Congress to pass at least some of them. At the current rate, NIL laws will be fully implemented across the country by 2024. Why is this so important? The NCAA pulls in roughly $1.2 billion a year, or a quarter of the income of the NBA, which pays athletes millions of dollars every year; the NCAA doesn't pay salaries of any kind, and, up until this point, college athletes have been unable to make any money from their billion-dollar annual industry. The NCAA has taken advantage of students who are hungry for professional athleticism and gotten away with it because they underestimated the resolve of young men and women to be treated fairly.

     Since October, America has seen a labor uprising: the Striketober movement has seen millions of Americans who belong to unions go on strike while millions more seek to join unions. The best example has been the unionization effort at Starbucks: four stores in New York and one in Arizona became the first stores in the 9,000-store corporation to unionize while more than 100 more in at least 35 states have begun the process of holding union elections.

     In an era when 70 percent of Americans support the right to organize, in an era when the proposed Build Back Better Act will make it easier to organize, in an era when the greatest unionization effort in more than 50 years is taking place, let's recognize the fantastic effort by thousands of college athletes to seek the compensation they deserve.