Bipartisan legislation aimed at setting the rules of the road for college sports contains significant labor provisions that risk eroding athletes’ individual and collective bargaining power.
The Protect College Sports Act, which passed the Senate 77-22 last week, has been panned by unions — most notably the AFL-CIO — that argue the legislation would give the NCAA too much power over student athletes without offering an explicit opportunity for them to unionize.
The bill would instead provide the sports organization with a partial antitrust exemption giving it broad control over enforcing rules concerning athlete transfer and eligibility.
Those changes would undermine nascent organizing efforts among student athletes, who have faced setbacks over the past several years including a historic but ultimately unsuccessful unionization drive from the Dartmouth men’s basketball team. It also leaves open the question of whether college players should be classified as employees, a necessary criteria for unionizing under the National Labor Relations Act.
While the PCSA contains some beneficial provisions for college athletes — including health and safety standards and mandating student representation on athletic governing boards — critics say the bill gives the NCAA broad ability to set terms and conditions for student athletes that professional sports leagues typically have to bargain over.
If ultimately passed into law, the bill would codify certain working conditions, including revenue-sharing caps and transfer limits, without input from affected athletes.
“These are essentially contract stipulations that are being federally codified without approval or without negotiation with the people that they will be applied to,” said Darrell Lovell, a professor at West Texas A&M University. “Here, you’re getting all the positives on the organization side, the caps, the limited transfers, the agent caps, but the players are getting none of the negotiating power.”
Antitrust Concerns
With the limited antitrust exemption, the NCAA will have less incentive to collectively bargain with athletes because there will be less threat of lawsuits, labor observers said.
Last year, a federal judge approved a $2.8 billion settlement resolving years of antitrust litigation against the NCAA and its power conference. As part of that deal, known as the House settlement, colleges were allowed to directly compensate athletes for the first time. But it also set revenue sharing limits for Power Four schools, projected to be roughly $20 million per year.
Most professional sports leagues, with the exception of Major League Baseball, don’t have antitrust exemptions relating to athlete eligibility and compensation and rely partially on collective bargaining to balance the scales for players’ rights when there’s little competition.
“A huge part of athletes’ leverage right now is pointing out this system is illegal and their great leverage here is that they can provide an answer to fixing it, which involves their own voice,” said Jody Calemine, advocacy director at the AFL-CIO.
The bill’s codification of revenue sharing caps and transfer requirements could also discourage athletes from organizing because unions will have less ability to negotiate wages and certain working conditions.
The legislation would codify the House settlement’s revenue sharing cap but allow schools to exceed that limit by $22.5 million per academic year to retain players who had been with their team for at least one season. The bill would increase scrutiny over name, image, and likeness deals and limit players to one transfer during their college career.
“The PCSA would establish unprecedented, mandatory benefits for student-athletes including health, wellness and academic protections and increased votes in the decision-making process,” NCAA spokesperson Meg Wright said in a statement. “Student-athlete leaders from across the country support the bill and are actively lobbying their members of Congress to get it passed.”
Unions would still be able to negotiate over some conditions of employment, including travel, gym time, and training procedures that could be worth players organizing, said Irwin Kishner, a sports law attorney at Herrick, Feinstein LLP.
“There’s more to it than just dollars and cents,” he said.
Employee Classification
The legislation punts on the question of whether college athletes are employees legally allowed to unionize.
There have been some attempts from student athletes to formally organize and request recognition from the National Labor Relations Board, most notably the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team, which won a union election in 2024 after an NLRB regional director classified them as employees. The union ultimately withdrew its petition following President Donald Trump’s election later that year to avoid a looming Republican board majority that would have likely reversed that decision.
Federal labor law doesn’t allow direct judicial review of representation cases, so the lack of an employee classification in the PSCA cements college athlete unions’ vulnerability to the NLRB’s political whims, labor attorneys said.
“You could envision a scenario where after the next presidential election, if it were to go to a Democrat, that organized labor would be emboldened to pick up where they left off in attempts to organize student athletes,” said Benjamin Stockman, a partner at Paduano & Weintraub LLP.
The NLRB will determine if college athletes are considered employees for unionization purposes. A separate case, Johnson v. NCAA, argues that student athletes are employees subject to minimum wage requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act and is working its way through federal court.
There are some concerns from athletes and labor scholars over employee classification, however, including that the bill would give universities more direct control over student players. The AFL-CIO’s Calemine said the labor federation was open to Congress bypassing the NLRA and giving college athletes collective bargaining rights without necessarily classifying them as employees.
“I’m concerned that once we put those titles in place, there are then going to be expectations about what coaches can get out of their employees and firing them at will,” said Debbie Hogan, a sports management professor at Keiser University – West Palm Beach.
“I would still rather see them have some type of collective bargaining without being classified as employees,” she said.
