![Sample our Sports and Leisure journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5949/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Sports-Leisure.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I argue that there are a number of ethical issues facing college and professional athletes that admit of a unified treatment: viewing athletes as workers. By worker, I mean an agent who sells their labor for compensation. With this notion of worker in place, I present and discuss arguments for four claims: not paying college athletes is morally wrong; that the N.C.A.A. infringes on the right of college athletes to collectively bargain; that it is prima facie wrong to draft and trade professional athletes; and that fans fail to respect athletes’ right to strike when they complain about labor stoppages in professional leagues. I argue that sports fans and members of sports media should explicitly conceive of athletes as workers to recognize and prevent these wrongs. I conclude by suggesting that all with an interest in the welfare of labor have an interest in conceiving of athletes as workers, as it puts what is owed to all workers into stark relief.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. One might reasonably wonder why the relevant normative concept for athletes in the issues I raise is not worker but employee. Indeed, the unprecedented legal challenges currently ongoing in the 2023 case NCAA v. Johnson takes up the questions of whether college athletes are employees. I choose worker rather than employee because I take it that all employees are workers, but not vice versa, and I want to leave it open that there might be interesting claims one can make about athletes as workers but not employees. For example, the professional league Premier League Lacrosse gives ownership equity to its players. It’s not straightforward that these athletes are employees, but they are still workers (McLeod Citation2022). In general, this article is making a moral argument rather than a legal argument. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me to clarify this point.
3. See Cohen (Citation2000).
4. Cholbi (Citation2023).
5. Indeed, the athletes in the 2023 case N.C.A.A. v. Johnson make this very point.
6. ‘Normative entitlement’ in this context is ambiguous between workers having a moral entitlement and a legal entitlement. Unless stated otherwise, by ‘normative entitlement,’ I mean moral, rather than legal, entitlement.
7. Cholbi (Citation2023).
8. Moriarty (Citation2011); see also Heath (Citation2018) and Moriarty (Citation2020).
9. Friedman (Citation1962), Rothbard (Citation1973/1985/1985, Chapter 2); Nozick (Citation1974); for critical discussion, see Cohen (Citation1983) and Munter and Lindblom (Citation2017).
10. For criticism, however, see Mack (Citation2002).
11. Anderson (Citation2017).
12. Lindblom (Citation2019).
13. See Gourevitch (Citation2016, Citation2018, Citation2020), Borman (Citation2017), Reddy (Citation2021), Raekstad and Rossi (Citation2022). For criticism of the right to strike, see Hayak (Citation1960, ch. 18) and Locke (Citation1984).
14. Some might wonder whether the difference between the running back and the fencer is that the former, but not the latter, generate profit, and that is why the running back, and not the fencer, is a worker. I think, however, that both can count as workers, strictly speaking; it’s just that the running back contributes their labor to a much more productive enterprise, and so considerations of fairness kick in for the running back and not the fencer. Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to clarify this point, and others, in this section.
15. See the N.C.A.A. constitution, most recently ratified in 2022, which explicitly emphasizes the ‘student-athlete model.’ The constitution can be accessed at https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/governance/ncaa/constitution/NCAAGov_Constitution121421.pdf.
16. Brand (Citation2006), Metz (Citation2020).
17. See Murphy (Citation2017).
18. Zema (Citation2018).
20. Moreover, it is also far from obvious that receiving N.I.L. compensation is any sort of remedy when it comes to the exploitation of college athletes; there are already several examples of N.I.L. deals exacerbating it. See: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/athletics/2023/06/07/two-years-nil-fueling-chaos-college-athletics.
21. In the landmark settlement of the 2024 case House v. N.C.A.A., the N.C.A.A. and plaintiffs agreed to the framework of a revenue-sharing model for between power-conference schools and athletes. If put into place, this would be a significant step in remedying some of the wrongdoing discussed in this section, though it is just a first step. See: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5510354/2024/05/23/house-v-ncaa-settlement-votes/.
22. See the case decision, accessible at: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/13-RC-121359.
23. See the N.C.A.A. constitution, accessible at: https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/governance/ncaa/constitution/NCAAGov_Constitution121421.pdf.
24. See the historians amicus brief in the N.C.A.A. v. Alston case.
25. See Branch’s ‘The Shame of College Sports’ (Branch Citation2011). Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to discuss the issue of amateurism.
26. The athletes in the 2023 case N.C.A.A. v. Johnson argue to the Third District Court of Appeals that they are employees, not only for the time spent in practice and competition but also in part because of the control that their universities impose on them, where this control is not faced by their fellow classmates.
27. Some sports leagues, like the N.B.A., have maximum salary contracts that place a ceiling on the salary a team can offer any one player, which function in the same way.
28. See Lyons (Citation1972) for discussion of this objection to Rawls on utilitarian grounds.
29. Thanks to an anonymous referee helping me see this point.
30. See Feldman (Citation2018) for an overview.
31. For a list of work stoppages among the big four North American sports leagues, see: https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/03/us/pro-sports-lockouts-and-strikes-fast-facts/index.html.
32. For a book-length treatment of the relationship between athletic labor and injury in the field of sociology, see Kalman-Lamb (Citation2018).
33. See, for example, Spector (Citation2019); for a list of others, see Silva, Mellis, and Kalman-Lamb (Citation2021) and Shirazi and Johnson (Citation2021).
34. Thanks to Tristram McPherson for putting the point in this way.
35. Thanks to John Collins for raising this objection.
36. For other examples, see Archer and Wojtowicz (Citation2023) and Tarver (Citation2017).
37. For helpful comments, thanks to John Collins, Alex Guerrero, Aly McCarthy, Tristram McPherson, Daniel Olson, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. For helpful discussion, thanks to Mich Ciurria, André Curtis-Trudel, Jill Delston, Rachel Harris, Seungsoo Lee, Michael Lennon, Jacob MacDavid, Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer, Tee Neely, Lily Perkins, audiences at the 2022 Philosophy and Activism Conference at UMSL, the 2023 Eastern APA in Montreal, and a 2021 Graduate Student Workshop at Ohio State. Special thanks to my father, Tom Lennon, who inspired many of the ideas in this paper over the course of my sports-watching life.