the school threw its weight behind defeating the union push. Dan Persa, the former Wildcats quarterback, warned players that Fitzgerald might leave if they voted for the union. Players heard other ominous warnings—that donations could dry up, or a new $225 million athletic center could be scrapped. Players got calls from alums telling them that casting their lot with Colter could hurt their job prospects after graduation; the Northwestern alumni network would desert them.
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Colter felt as if his former teammates no longer trusted him. Northwestern’s campaign had worked. He polled the room, and it was clear the school would win the election. Even some of his closest confidants from the previous months weren’t with him anymore. Players now questioned his motives: Why had he given them only a day to sign the cards? He also noticed that most African-American players supported the union and most white players opposed it. “There was a huge divide,” Colter says. “The majority of the team was split along racial lines. It was just ugly.”
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On Aug. 17, 2015, the NLRB in Washington finally issued its ruling on Northwestern’s appeal. The five members unanimously agreed not to exert the board’s jurisdiction over whether Northwestern’s football players were university employees. Perhaps fearful of the consequences of upending the governance of college sports, the board punted. The union ballots would never be counted. The status quo reigned.
The challenge is in the outsized influence the NFL and the alumni association hold over players who will only ever be in the program for at most five years. Players have a huge incentive (the NFL draft) to toe the line while the school has a huge monetary incentive to fight back aggressively. And the NLRB is routinely stacked with corporate flacks intent on devolving labor power to business administrators.
So much of football is a complex web of social networks - coaches, advertisers, state administrators, big donors - that determine whether any player actually puts a foot on the field. And none of them want to see players organized. Not when the deal they’ve currently got is so sweet.
Trying to get a 19-year-old high school recruit to understand their value before an injury takes them off the field, when these top picks are surrounded by recruiters and alumni and other shady characters who want the exact opposite… its very hard. These kids are trapped in a bubble from day one. And they’re all rendered disposable, unless they can reach out to one another and hang together.
Fate of the Union: How Northwestern football union nearly came to be
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The challenge is in the outsized influence the NFL and the alumni association hold over players who will only ever be in the program for at most five years. Players have a huge incentive (the NFL draft) to toe the line while the school has a huge monetary incentive to fight back aggressively. And the NLRB is routinely stacked with corporate flacks intent on devolving labor power to business administrators.
So much of football is a complex web of social networks - coaches, advertisers, state administrators, big donors - that determine whether any player actually puts a foot on the field. And none of them want to see players organized. Not when the deal they’ve currently got is so sweet.
Trying to get a 19-year-old high school recruit to understand their value before an injury takes them off the field, when these top picks are surrounded by recruiters and alumni and other shady characters who want the exact opposite… its very hard. These kids are trapped in a bubble from day one. And they’re all rendered disposable, unless they can reach out to one another and hang together.