{"id":800611,"date":"2026-07-31T19:57:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T19:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/800611\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T19:57:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T19:57:17","slug":"oregon-state-womens-basketball-union-pursuit-details-legal-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/800611\/","title":{"rendered":"Oregon State Women’s Basketball Union Pursuit Details, Legal Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe latest turn in the legal fight for recognition of college athletes as employees who can form unions is taking place out west, with members of the Oregon State<\/a> women\u2019s basketball team on Friday filing a petition for union representation with the state\u2019s Employment<\/a> Relations Board.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe development is legally important for at least two reasons.<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst, it\u2019s the first time a group of female college athletes has formally sought recognition as a players\u2019 union. The Oregon State players\u2019 effort is occurring as women\u2019s college sports continues to grow and become more popular with fans, and 54 years after Title IX became law.<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, it\u2019s\u00a0not\u00a0the first time female college athletes have sought recognition as employees.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied Penn track and field athletes Gillian Berger and Taylor Hennig recognition as employees within the meaning of the Fair Labor<\/a> Standards Act (FLSA), which guarantees minimum wage. Berger and Hennig came up short in part because their athletic participation was deemed too closely tied to their educational experience and amateur status.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSecond, Oregon State is a public university, which has major significance from a labor and employment law perspective. It means that the relevant laws and adjudicating bodies that will determine if the women\u2019s basketball team can become union members are state, not federal.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s a key difference from efforts by football players at Northwestern in the mid-2010s to gain employment recognition and by men\u2019s basketball players at Dartmouth earlier this decade to form a union. Those players were students at private universities, so whether they were employees and could unionize was a question of federal law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), officials at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and, potentially, federal courts.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Dartmouth players made history<\/a> by becoming the first certified bargaining unit in college sports. They not only voted to unionize, but also won the election and their unit was certified by the NLRB. Yet the players withdrew their election petition at the end of 2024, at least in part because of concerns a favorable decision by NLRB regional director Laura Sacks might not have survived review by the agency board, which was expected to be reshaped by the incoming Trump administration.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Oregon State matter will be determined by the Oregon Employment Relations Board, which would oversee an election by the players. Decisions by the board can be challenged in Oregon courts.<\/p>\n

\n\tOSU athletic department representatives did not respond to a request for comment. The school is contractually bound by membership obligations in the Pac-12 and the NCAA<\/a>, which means it can\u2019t pay players for their labor and remain in compliance with conference and NCAA rules. This was a potential conundrum for Dartmouth given its membership in the Ivy League and the NCAA, and could become one for OSU too.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe basketball team\u2019s petition was made through the United College Athletes Association (UCAA), a union whose mission is to represent college athletes \u201cas humans, students and workers through collective bargaining.\u201d That objective is not just about access to pay, but also other employment benefits, such as health care, leave, access to wellness programs and various other benefits enjoyed by OSU employees. OSU is no stranger to collective bargaining, either, as its faculty and staff are unionized.<\/p>\n

\n\tUCAA says the players\u2019 organizing effort began two years ago, when more than 100 college women\u2019s basketball players requested collective bargaining with the Big Ten and SEC. Those requests were rebuffed.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea of a conference collectively bargaining with athletes from schools in the conference is noteworthy. One hurdle for collective bargaining at individual schools is that, within a conference, usually some are public and others are private, and as noted above, that means a very different legal process on whether the athletes are employees and can unionize. In fact, in some states, public university employees are prohibited or greatly limited in bargaining, while in others, the opposite is true.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut a conference is private, and thus governed by federal labor law, and could theoretically function as a multi-employer bargaining unit on behalf of member schools. That topic was explored in\u00a0Sportico\u2019s recent story on Stanford<\/a> football players\u00a0forming a fraternity<\/a>\u00a0with the College Football Players Association and the aspiration of it eventually leading to conference-wide collective bargaining.<\/p>\n

\n\tA key advocate of conference-wide collective bargaining is former NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who in 2021 argued that college athletes are employees and should be able to unionize.<\/p>\n

\n\tAbruzzo is now a UCAA advisor and, in a statement on Friday, said, \u201cThe NCAA and its members should not get a bailout that prevents a true path for these vulnerable workers,\u201d adding that \u201cthe labor movement must unify around the right approach to make sure that college athletes enjoy robust collective bargaining rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOSU went 23\u201312 in 2025\u201326, playing a second season in the West Coast Conference while the Pac-12 re-formed. Scott Rueck has coached the team since 2010, leading it to a Pac-12 championship and Final Four berth in 2016.<\/p>\n

\n\tRueck signed a contract extension in 2022 that will see him earn $1.05 million in 2026\u201327.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 2024\u201325 Beavers made the Elite Eight before losing their top six scorers in the transfer portal that offseason.<\/p>\n

\n\tSenior Jenna Villa, a member of the UCAA\u2019s 10-person interim executive committee, will return this season, having led OSU in scoring during the 2025\u201326 campaign after transferring from Washington State.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe OSU effort is occurring as Congress struggles to pass<\/a> federal legislation that would grant the NCAA and member schools limited antitrust immunity to enforce the\u00a0House v. NCAA\u00a0settlement, eligibility and transfer rules, and revenue-sharing opportunities. The latest leading bill, the Protect College Sports Act, might not get a vote before the Senate goes on recess and faces a legislative schedule that is limited as the November midterm election approaches. Dozens of college sports reform bills have been introduced in Congress since 2021 and each one has failed to advance.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a world where college athletes engage in collective bargaining with their school (and\/or conference and the NCAA), negotiated rules related to wages, hours, and other conditions, including transfer and eligibility, would be exempt from antitrust scrutiny. That\u2019s through the nonstatutory labor exemption, which reflects a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are practical hurdles to that idea, including whether the bargaining unit would consist of athletes from a team, or athletes from different teams at the same school, or a conference-wide entity on behalf of a sport or different sports.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo date, colleges, conferences and the NCAA have been opposed to recognition of college athletes as employees, let alone union members. That opposition is under attack in\u00a0Johnson v. NCAA<\/a>, where the athletes argue they are student workers, much like their classmates who are in Work Study, and should be paid at least minimum wage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The latest turn in the legal fight for recognition of college athletes as employees who can form unions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[7,217,14801,25183,30857,231,772,17121,1544,15659,9774,8512],"class_list":["post-800611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-college-basketball","tag-dartmouth-college","tag-employment","tag-labor","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaa-legal-issues","tag-ncaab","tag-northwestern-university","tag-oregon-state","tag-stanford"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117016359301112248","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}