I men's basketball and football have all but turned into a university-subsidized farm system for the professional leagues. For the time being, the CAC is stopping short of arguing, as graduate teaching assistants have done, that their constituents are in fact university employees and should be seen that way in the eyes of the law. We're not covered by labor laws. We can't collectively bargain with our employers. But even if the CAC is not ready to argue that athletes are employees, others will.
Athletes are basically vocational students.
In big programs, they are working thirty, forty, fifty hours a week. Some are trying to go to school around that, some are not. In either case, you are not getting paid very much. If the status of college athletes ever changes significantly, Sperber believes those changes will come from courts. For now the United Steelworkers union is urging the CAC to follow in the footsteps of other campus organizing projects it has advised, like United Students Against Sweatshops.