[CTcard]

I was a student AND a university employee.  ...

I am sure most universities will fight to keep student-athletes from collecting compensation, but I believe Stanford university will survive even if it is forced to provide lifetime health care, a weekly paycheck and/or a percentage of the gate to the student-athlete-employees.

There are a bunch of different things being conflated here.

You don't mention what you were doing as a University employee, but I strongly suspect that you were not a University employee in a category that would have allowed you to form a union - most likely because you were a temporary employee. And for that matter, apparently Mick was as well (see faculty club story).

The current situation, and the comment in the original post about athletes as employees, seems to only be that Northwestern football players have been declared employees who can form a union. There is no ruling that Northwestern has to provide them with lifetime healthcare, a weekly paycheck, a percentage of the gate, or anything else. Indeed, as things currently stand, coming to such an agreement in collective bargaining would  immediately make the players ineligible for NCAA competition - which I would think would lower everyone's incentive to reach that deal. In fact, I think Northwestern claims that they offer everything allowable under NCAA rules. If true, then by themselves they cannot really agree to anything else.

My guess remains that unionization, at least by itself, won't lead to big changes soon.

The Kessler suit seems to me to pose much bigger potential for brobdingnagian changes, and much bigger danger in driving Stanford out. Kessler says, "We are seeking to remove the NCAA’s anti-competitive restrictions to let the schools decided for themselves, and let competition and free markets determine the outcome." If indeed it came to that, then I could see some schools choosing to pursue and treat players in a manner that Stanford would likely choose not to compete against.

In fact, this is an inherent problem for a sports league made up of nominally individual, competing businesses: you cannot have meaningful competition without a set of rules all agree to but competing businesses cannot in general agree to rules. Most of the pro leagues get around this by having a CBA with a single union.  I wonder whether that model is feasible for colleges: whether a single union could cover all Division 1, or even all FBS football players, that would then negotiate with the NCAA over what rules would exist. First of all, FBS schools cover private and public insitutions that fall under different labour laws, somewhere around 51 different versions (okay a little less - Alaska doesn't have a Div 1 football team). Some of those forbid public-sector unions. Would this not be a barrier to finding an overall NCAA CBA?  Universities also fall under a host of federal and state laws that the NFL does not. The most famous of these is Title IX, but that is only one. Those legal obligations will complicate any push for significant extra compensation from the universities.

I don't really know about any of this, not knowing much about labour laws. Anyone here who does should tell us how this might all work out.

[CTcard]

I was a student AND a university employee.  ...

I am sure most universities will fight to keep student-athletes from collecting compensation, but I believe Stanford university will survive even if it is forced to provide lifetime health care, a weekly paycheck and/or a percentage of the gate to the student-athlete-employees.

There are a bunch of different things being conflated here.

You don't mention what you were doing as a University employee, but I strongly suspect that you were not a University employee in a category that would have allowed you to form a union - most likely because you were a temporary employee. And for that matter, apparently Mick was as well (see faculty club story).

The current situation, and the comment in the original post about athletes as employees, seems to only be that Northwestern football players have been declared employees who can form a union. There is no ruling that Northwestern has to provide them with lifetime healthcare, a weekly paycheck, a percentage of the gate, or anything else. Indeed, as things currently stand, coming to such an agreement in collective bargaining would  immediately make the players ineligible for NCAA competition - which I would think would lower everyone's incentive to reach that deal. In fact, I think Northwestern claims that they offer everything allowable under NCAA rules. If true, then by themselves they cannot really agree to anything else.

My guess remains that unionization, at least by itself, won't lead to big changes soon.

The Kessler suit seems to me to pose much bigger potential for brobdingnagian changes, and much bigger danger in driving Stanford out. Kessler says, "We are seeking to remove the NCAA’s anti-competitive restrictions to let the schools decided for themselves, and let competition and free markets determine the outcome." If indeed it came to that, then I could see some schools choosing to pursue and treat players in a manner that Stanford would likely choose not to compete against.

In fact, this is an inherent problem for a sports league made up of nominally individual, competing businesses: you cannot have meaningful competition without a set of rules all agree to but competing businesses cannot in general agree to rules. Most of the pro leagues get around this by having a CBA with a single union.  I wonder whether that model is feasible for colleges: whether a single union could cover all Division 1, or even all FBS football players, that would then negotiate with the NCAA over what rules would exist. First of all, FBS schools cover private and public insitutions that fall under different labour laws, somewhere around 51 different versions (okay a little less - Alaska doesn't have a Div 1 football team). Some of those forbid public-sector unions. Would this not be a barrier to finding an overall NCAA CBA?  Universities also fall under a host of federal and state laws that the NFL does not. The most famous of these is Title IX, but that is only one. Those legal obligations will complicate any push for significant extra compensation from the universities.

I don't really know about any of this, not knowing much about labour laws. Anyone here who does should tell us how this might all work out.