College Athletes ‘Are Workers’ and Deserve to Unionize: Former NLRB Exec

Former National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo believes college athletes would benefit from unionizing.

Since the House v. NCAA settlement last July, schools can share up to $20.5 million in revenue directly with athletes. Each school must offer money to all sports, but payouts do not have to be equal.

Despite college athletes now being able to receive money directly from their schools, they are not recognized as employees, a classification Abruzzo says should change. 

“The players are workers,” she told Front Office Sports. “Their labor is what allows this profit-making enterprise to exist.”  

One of the popular arguments for why players should push to organize as employees is that it would give them collective bargaining power to negotiate a fairer split of the revenue they generate for the NCAA. But Abruzzo says there’s more to the picture. 

“It’s not only about money,” she said. “It’s also about flexible schedules so that they can actually get an education. It’s about no discrimination. It’s about promotional growth and opportunities. It’s about health and safety and well-being. So it goes so far beyond economics.”

One proposed idea on how to regulate paying college athletes is the SCORE Act. The bill, which has stalled in the House of Representatives, would create national standards for NIL, but prevent athletes from gaining employee status. 

President Donald Trump voiced support for the legislation during the “Saving College Sports” roundtable on March 6. Unlike Trump, Abruzzo said she’s not in favor of the bill, arguing it would primarily elevate corporate interests without benefitting the players.

“It’s not helping the players to attain the rights that they’re entitled to as workers,” she said of the SCORE Act. “Who’s going to be telling the players, ‘Okay, we’ve addressed health and safety issues the way we think they need to be addressed,’ as opposed to actually having the players sit at the bargaining table and express their issues of common concern.”

Another idea the president mentioned was going back to the old system where players got scholarships, but were not paid. He went so far as to say he would be signing an executive order to do so. 

“Just because they’re on a scholarship doesn’t mean they’re not employees,” Abruzzo said of Trump’s comments. “Their daily lives are being controlled. They’re performing a service and they’re being controlled such that they can’t take the classes that they want to, they have to eat together, they travel together. So there’s no academic freedom.”

The former NLRB executive is straightforward in her view that players are employees and should be treated as such, with unionization a much better option than the alternatives discussed by the president. When speaking with Front Office Sports, Abruzzo was asked what a potential union for student-athletes would look like. 

“I think what could be very productive is to have one union that represents college athletes in all different sports,” she said. “Then you have supplemental ones that specifically deal with the various leagues or sports.”

Conversations have previously been had amongst athletes about unionizing, with 50 former and current college football players coming together during a two-day summit in 2025 to discuss college athlete organizing efforts.

Abruzzo believes these conversations will be more impactful to making unionization a reality than the work she or any other current or former government officials are doing. “I think it’s gonna be up to the players,” she said, “to really push it.”