Dartmouth tells NLRB that basketball players are students - for real - not employees

abcnews.go.com:

Dartmouth College lawyers say the Ivy League school’s basketball players shouldn’t be considered employees because they are unpaid members of a money-losing program whose need-based scholarships don’t depend on their participation or talent

BOSTON — Dartmouth College lawyers argued Thursday that the Ivy League school’s basketball players should not be considered employees because they are unpaid members of a money-losing program whose need-based scholarships don’t depend on their participation or talent.

In a National Labor Relations Board hearing to determine whether the team should be allowed to unionize, school attorney Joe McConnell said that the classification of the players as “student-athletes” — whatever its merits for big-money college teams elsewhere — is actually appropriate at Dartmouth.

“Dartmouth’s paramount commitment is to the academic and personal growth of all students, including students who participate in varsity athletic activities,” he said in the Zoom hearing. “At Dartmouth, students’ primary objective is learning, and Dartmouth has adopted policies reflecting that students who participate in intercollegiate athletics are students first and athletes second, and that class attendance takes precedence over participation in athletics.”

For decades, the NCAA and its member schools have insisted that college athletes are regular students who choose to play sports and thus should not be paid anything other than scholarship; a labyrinthine set of rules has evolved to prevent players from receiving almost any benefit not available to the general student body.

Thanks to this unpaid labor, college football and basketball have grown into billion-dollar industries.

But that model has begun to crumble, most