Leaders at Oregon State University told the state employment relations board Monday they object to an effort by its women’s basketball team to unionize, arguing that the players are not employees and therefore cannot legally create a bargaining unit.
It will now be up to the Oregon Employment Relations Board to determine if the athletes qualify as OSU employees and if they meet the requirements to be recognized as a unit.
“The Oregon Board has a chance to make national news by potentially making Oregon a first mover in a much larger national wave of student-athlete organizing,” Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, professor of law at Lewis & Clark, told OPB.
The effort by the Beavers women’s basketball team comes as sweeping changes in the business of college sports have renewed calls to define athletes as employees of their schools. Loosening restrictions around schools paying players has sparked multiple lawsuits and other legal efforts to better define the role athletes hold at their colleges.
The NCAA, the governing body for college sports, has consistently claimed that student-athletes are not employees, and therefore cannot enter into collective bargaining agreements. Instead, the NCAA has looked to Congress — which has remained largely inactive on the topic — to put guardrails around athlete pay on campuses.
But a growing number of student-athletes as well as coaches, lawmakers, professional sports unions and others say unionizing players and entering into collective bargaining agreements are the best ways to protect athletes and schools from the constantly changing landscape.
The objection from OSU was expected by leaders with the United College Athletes Association, the group helping athletes organize. The UCAA has signaled it will continue to pursue the endeavor.
“Ultimately, our goal is to make college sports safe, fair and sustainable for future generations of athletes,” Andrew Cooper, former Washington State University and UC Berkeley track athlete as well as co-founder and executive director of UCAA, told OPB. “And to protect them as humans, students and workers.”
A spokesperson for OSU said in an email to OPB the school is “proud of members of the OSU women’s basketball team and other OSU student-athletes who demonstrate leadership in competition, in their academic pursuits and in giving back to our community.”
However, OSU declined to provide further comment outside of its formal objection filed with state labor regulators.
The first college-athlete petition filed in Oregon
Oregon State’s women’s basketball team is the first group of student-athletes to file a petition to unionize in Oregon. However, similar efforts have tried and failed at private universities in other states.
An effort among Dartmouth College men’s basketball players came to a halt in 2024. In that case, players from the private university would have had to petition the National Labor Relations Board. They opted not to move forward when the Trump administration packed the board with judges thought to be anti-union.
An earlier unionization push at Northwestern University in 2015 was halted when the NLRB declined to rule on the topic of athletes being employees.
“The key lesson from the Northwestern University experience is that even the Obama-controlled National Labor Relations Board did not want to touch this issue,” Cunningham-Parmeter, the Lewis and Clark law professor, said. “Because it could lead to vast differences among athletes — private university athletes would have been able to unionize, but public university athletes would not have been able to unionize.”
He said it was that difference that caused the NLRB at the time to avoid the case.
But the effort from OSU players will be purely a matter of Oregon law, making it unique from past efforts at private schools in other states.
Why OSU women’s basketball players chose unionization
Mikayla Pivec’s storied career as a Beaver came to an abrupt end in 2020 when a global pandemic shut down the most anticipated event in college women’s basketball: the NCAA tournament in March.
Pivec’s Beavers, ranked in the top 20 at the time, were expected to make a solid post-season run before COVID-19 rendered the tournament unsafe. Pivec and others lobbied for an extra year of eligibility, but were told that it would be too expensive.
The next season, when COVID-19 was still forcing game and practice cancellations, the NCAA announced it would indeed move forward with granting an extra year of play. But that was only to current, not former, players.
“I wanted to make sure going forward, athletes have a voice in the decisions that impact their lives,” Pivec told OPB. “So that what happened to me doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
Pivec co-founded UCAA with Cooper. The organization is backed by nationally known labor law firm O’Donoghue & O’Donoghue, and has support from unions for professional athletes. Other major labor groups, like the AFL-CIO, have also voiced support for the OSU women’s basketball team and the larger effort to organize student-athletes.
What’s next
Whether student-athletes are considered employees or not is still up in the air, but the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that players can profit from use of their name, image and likeness, or NIL. There are now two ways that happens: schools directly share revenue with players, and players work directly with brands who pay for content.
The result has been star football and men’s basketball players making millions of dollars. But Pivec said, on the flip side, many college athletes are still making nothing from NIL deals.
“The top end of the market’s getting their money, but a lot of their teammates and the people that contribute to the programs as well aren’t getting paid anything,” Pivec said. “So we really want to make sure there’s minimum salaries for each and every player that’s out there.”
In addition to 10 out of 13 current OSU players signing on to the effort to unionize, more than 100 women’s college basketball players have signed with UCAA, indicating they want to be represented. The UCAA hopes to petition other schools and eventually create conference-wide units for athletes.
Now that OSU has responded to the women’s basketball team’s petition, an administrative law judge with the state employment relations board will hold a hearing. The judge will put forward their recommendation to the full board, which will decide if the athletes qualify as employees.
Whatever the Oregon Employment Relations Board decides could be challenged in state, or even federal, court.
“I think this could be a watershed moment,” Cunninham-Parmeter said, “that starts in Corvallis — and potentially leads to major student-athlete labor changes throughout the country.”