Ruling to allow college athletes to unionize is thrown out (by NLRB)

The National Labor Relations Board on Monday blocked a historic bid by Northwestern University football players to form the nation’s first college athletes’ union, dealing a blow to a labor movement that could have transformed amateur sports.

In a unanimous decision, the board said the prospect of having both union and nonunion teams could lead to different standards at different schools—from the amount of money players receive to the amount of time they can practice—and create competitive imbalances on the field.

The ruling dismissed a stunning decision in March 2014 by a regional NLRB director in Chicago who said football players with scholarships are effectively school employees and entitled to organize. But Monday’s decision did not directly address the question of whether the players are employees. […]

The labor dispute goes to the heart of American college sports, where universities and conferences reap billions of dollars, mostly through broadcast contracts, by relying on amateurs who are not paid. In other countries, college sports are small-time club affairs, while elite youth athletes often turn pro as teens. …

Thank you for referencing that article Olog-hai. Please bear in mind that the following critique is directed at the article and not at you.

The first thing that patriots need to do whenever the corrupt feds make a noise is the following. Patriots need check Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers to make sure that there is at least one clause in Section 8 that Congress can reasonably justify any official action with.

The NLRB is described as a “independent federal regulatory agency.” The major constitutional problems with such agencies are described as follows. The Founding States had made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, to clarify that all federal legislative powers are vested in the elected members of Congress, not in the executive or judicial branches, or in so-called “independent federal regulatory agencies.” So Congress has a constitutional monopoly on federal legislative / regulatory powers whether it wants it or not.

So one problem with independent federal regulator agencies is this. By establishing such agencies, federal lawmakers are wrongly protecting their jobs from the wrath of the voters as a consequence of unpopular regulations in blatant defiance of Sections 1-3 mentioned above.

But an even bigger constitutional problem with federal agencies like the NLRB is this. The states have never delegate to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate INTRAstate commerce, labor issues reasonably under the umbrella of intrastate commerce imo. This is evidenced by the following excerpt.

”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

So not only are federal lawmakers protecting themselves from the possible loss of votes as a consequence of unpopular regulations by front-ending federal legislative powers with actions by non-elected federal bureaucrats, but Congress is allowing such agencies to exercise powers that the states have never delegated to the feds expressly via the Constitution.

Finally, noting that the post-17th Amendment ratification Senate is not doing its job to protect the states from unconstitutional expansion of federal government powers by not killing bills which help to establish federal regulatory agencies, patriots need to remedy this situation by working with state lawmakers to amend the Constitution to repeal that amendment imo.

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