MLB just laid out a despicable path for the NCAA to follow
With an exemption to federal minimum wage and overtime laws for minor league baseball players ready to become law in the United States, a path to insulating itself against player compensation lawsuits has been illuminated for the NCAA.
As Major League Baseball and its network of minor league affiliates celebrate a return on the investment of their lobbying Congress for an exemption to federal labor laws for minor-league players, it’s likely that another professional sports league which seeks to insulate itself from being forced to share any more of its revenue than it wants with the players who produce that revenue has been taking notes. That entity is the NCAA and its hundreds of member institutions.
Because of the recent passage of the “Save America’s Pastime Act” as part of a larger spending bill by Congress, minor league baseball players are now classified as seasonal workers by the federal government and thus their employers are exempt from having to pay them the federal minimum wage or compensate them at a higher rate for overtime work. MLB, which sets the rates at each level of the minors, is free to pay them whatever it wants. The players can either accept it or find other work, as the MLBPA does not include minor league players and there are no unions in the disparate minor leagues.
That exemption written into law which protects MLB, MiLB and all the hundreds of minor league teams from players filing complaints against them on fair compensation grounds probably looks like a utopia for the NCAA and its member institutions. Replicating what MLB did wouldn’t be that far-fetched for the NCAA, either.
A significant portion of the money that went to the coffers of members of Congress came from a political action committee, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. A similar PAC for college athletic directors, the LEAD1 PAC, is a ready-made avenue for funds to lobby Congress to potentially add a similar exemption for NCAA athletes.
If similar legislation were to be passed by Congress in regards to NCAA athletes, it would provide an extra insurance policy for the NCAA and its membership. Should a court ever rule that NCAA athletes are employees of the institutions they play their sports for, it would provide the schools a way around having to compensate those athletes at a rate of at least the federal minimum wage. Several lawsuits raising the issue of whether NCAA athletes are employees of those institutions have risen already. With this exemption, that question would become less crucial for the NCAA’s current business model.
Minor league baseball players, and NCAA athletes should an exemption for them become law, are/would be still free to challenge their schools’/teams’ compliance with local and state labor laws. The effects of those complaints, even if successful, could be largely localized and take years if not decades to mount in quantity to the point where they would affect whole scale change on a national level. Like many minor league baseball players, many NCAA athletes would lack the resources necessary to fight a long legal battle as well.
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MLB has marked up the map to how to legally avoid sharing revenue with the people working hard to produce it. Time will tell if the NCAA will follow that map.