Ep. 123: Will Congress Protect College Sports? With Randy Levine, President of the New York Yankees

And I want to ask you a little bit about what is the benefits of the Protect College Sports Act and recommendations that committee made.

But before I get there, you mentioned collective bargaining.

And I know you can't and ownership management in general can't speak about the labor issues going on in baseball.

But I do want to ask you from your experience in baseball and the pretty unique relationship that the players have had with antitrust law and not antitrust law and the the power of the Major League Baseball Players Union historically, What's your advice to university presidents and athletic directors putting aside whether the college athletes could unionize under the law? Because that law could change, right? That could be something that Congress decides to do to either allow it or to clearly prohibit it.

What's your advice to college sports leaders as to whether they'd be better off or worse off if the athletes, college athletes were in a union? Because there are more and more college athletic directors who are saying maybe collective bargaining is the answer.

Maybe we need to negotiate rules and those rules will be enforceable

and won't be challenged under antitrust law much in the way that professional sports rules that are in a CBA are not challenged.

I would say that I think it's virtually impossible right now to change the law to allow it.

The National Labor Relations Act, which, as you know, goes back to 1938, which is the pillar of labor relations in our country, specifically exempts state employees.

If these college athletes were to be made employees, they would be state employees.

In many states, as in the South, it's illegal to join a union.

In others in the South, in the Midwest, it basically, you can join a union, but you can't bargain wages or benefits.

And even in liberal states, like my home state of New York, you're not allowed to strike.

I think the problem is in talking about collective bargaining, let's assume just for this argument that you could have it because I don't, I really don't see there's any way to do it.

I think there, in addition to, opening up the National Labor Relations Act, which is problematic based on the political situation in this country.

I think you have serious Tenth Amendment issues down the line.

So I don't think that's possible.

But assume it is, just hypothetically, pretending I'm in your law school class, thinking so.

I'm pretty familiar with all of this.

I negotiated the 96 baseball agreement, which ended the 96 strike.

I was one of the authors of the Curt Flood Amendment, which limited the antitrust exemption in baseball.

So I know these issues really well.

Let's first take it from a labor relations aspect.

What is the bargaining unit? When you're in professional sports, you have 30, 32 teams.

They're all doing the same thing.