Are National Collegiate Athletic Association NCAA athlete em

Are National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athlete employees? What do the circuit courts say? What are the arguments on both sides? Why is it important for them to be or not to be employees?

No specific cases mentioned. I can support my answer with any applicable court cases.

Solution

According to a federal appeals court — employees of their schools and are therefore not entitled to be paid anything. The plaintiffs argued that schools pay students in the work-study program at least minimum wage, while student-athletes are expected to give up significant chunks of their time training and competing for schools that benefit greatly from the students’ work but pay them nothing.

Earlier this year, a federal court in Indiana dismissed [PDF] the complaint against the NCAA and all the defendant members’ schools except for the University of Pennsylvania — where the three named plaintiffs had been on the track and field team — ruling that these track stars had no standing to sue these colleges or the athletics organization. Then the court dismissed the claim against Penn, finding that the student-athletes had failed to state a claim under the FLSA.

The panel also notes that the legal consensus thus far has held that “student athletes are not employees in the workers’ compensation context and are thus not entitled to compensation from their schools for injuries they suffer while playing their respective sports.”

It is important for them to be employee because-

1. The NCAA currently produces nearly $11 Billion in annual revenue from college sports -- more than the estimated total league revenues of both the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.

2.   Although the NCAA claims college athletes are just students, the NCAA\'s own tournament schedules require college athletes to miss classes for nationally televised games that bring in revenue.

3. While the NLRA governs only private enterprises and thus would not apply directly to public universities, it remains the starting, and usually ending, point for this inquiry. This is because the various state statutes governing the employment relationship among public employers and employees are modeled after the NLRA and usually draw their meanings from the interpretations given the NLRA by the NLRB and the federal courts.