[JURIST] The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) [official website] on Monday declined to assert jurisdiction [opinion, PDF] over whether Northwestern University [official website] football players can form a union, overturning its 2014 decision [opinion, PDF] which recognized the players as university employees. In its unanimous decision [press release], which concerned players who receive grant-in-aid scholarships [materials], the Board held that asserting jurisdiction “would not promote labor stability due to the nature and structure of NCAA Division I Football Subdivisions (FBS).” The Board noted that Northwestern University is a state-run institution and that, by statute, the Board has no jurisdiction over state-run schools. As the decision of the Board applies only to the players in this case, it does not prevent the Board from hearing similar cases and reconsidering the issue in the future.

Northwestern University in April 2014 requested that the NLRB review its historic ruling [JURIST report], stating that in the decision the Regional Director “set out to alter the underlying premise upon which collegiate varsity sports is based.” The contested decision was made by the Chicago office for the NLRB one month prior, ruling that football players at Northwestern University qualified as employees [JURIST report] and therefore had the right to unionize. Had the players been allowed to unionize, their player union would be the first in the history of the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) [official website] and pre-NCAA college athletics. The ruling was considered one that could have turned into a landmark decision, as it deviated from precedents of previous cases involving the status of college students as employees of universities. One such critical case, which the ruling discussed, is Brown University [opinion, pdf], an NLRB case from 2004 that questioned whether graduate student teaching assistants were employees of the university. The board distinguished Brown, stating that the football player’s duties were completely unrelated to their academic studies, while the teaching assistants’ duties in Brown were related. Similarly, in Boston Medical Center [materials], the board found that an employer’s interns, residents, and fellows were indeed employees because they had already completed and received their academic degrees.