Seyfarth Authors Amicus Brief for US Congress in Northwestern Football Union Case before NLRB

CHICAGO (July 3, 2014) – Leading law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP authored an amicus curiae brief on behalf of members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions and the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce in Northwestern University v. College Athletes Players Association (CAPA), which is currently pending before the National Labor Relations Board. 

The brief opposes the NLRB Regional Director’s ruling that Northwestern student athletes can unionize and outlines two core arguments against the NLRB RD’s ruling:

1. College athletes are not employees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)
2. Treating college athletes as employees under the NLRA is unworkable 

The brief submits that the NLRB Regional Director artificially conflated and improperly applied principles from the workplace with the educational environment. In addition, the brief states that if Northwestern University’s scholarship football players are employees, then so are large numbers of students at every other private college and university who participate in programs that are “valuable” to both the institution and the student.  According to the brief, this incongruous result was never the congressional design or intent of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Specifically, NLRA Section 7 rights are incompatible with the college environment, collective bargaining is unsuited to the college student-athlete environment, and employee status would create inconsistent terms and conditions among teams that would result in competitive imbalances that harm intercollegiate athletics and likely reduce the number of scholarships available. 

In the brief’s conclusion, as a matter of both national labor and educational policy, the Congressional Committee Members urge the Board to find that grant-in-aid scholarship football players are not employees within the meaning of Section 2(3) of the NLRA. The profound and inherent differences between the student-university and employee-employer relationship makes employee status unworkable both as a matter of law and in practice.  

All parties will have a chance to respond to the briefs submitted to the full NLRB by July 31, 2014. The Seyfarth team who authored the brief consisted of Bradford Livingston, Mary Kay Klimesh, Ronald Kramer and Anne Harris. You can view the Senate and House Committee’s press releases about their brief below and the full amicus curiae brief here. 

U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions 

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce

 

Contacts:

Brian Kiefer, Director of Public Relations
(312) 460-6401, bkiefer@seyfarth.com

Martin Grego, Public Relations Manager
(312) 460-6659, mgrego@seyfarth.com