This week, the United States Senate is considering the poorly named Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), which does little to protect college athletes and much to open the door to private equity’s involvement and investment in college athletics.
What’s most striking: The bill is being shepherded by pro-labor Democrat Senator Maria Cantwell and co-written by a sports executive with a history of union busting, anti-worker activism as long and rambling as a Trump rally.
What does the Protect College Sports Act really do? It creates a national pool for media rights for college sports, which could kick open the backdoor to a group of private equity investors already eager to vulture every shred of value out of athletic departments. That is the role of private equity, after all: use financial leverage to force a company to take on debt, which is often followed by mass layoffs, suppressed wages, and weakened collective bargaining agreements
Some in Washington D.C., including labor allies such as the AFL-CIO Sports Council, a coalition of leaders in college sports leagues including the player unions of the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, NWSL, USL, PHPA, NLLPA, and PWHLPA have expressed their strong opposition to the bill and called out the harsh restrictions posed on college athletes’ ability to mobilize, unionize and earn their true market value.
One of the masterminds behind this bill is Randy Levine, President of the New York Yankees and an influential national adviser on sports legislation. Levine sits on President Trump’s Saving College Sports Council and is a key investor in RedBird Capital, the private equity firm which also played a key role in writing the PCSA.
Levine has a long history of anti-labor activity. In addition to serving as an executive with the Yankees, he is of counsel at Jackson Lewis, a law firm once labeled the “No.1 Union Buster in America” by the AFL-CIO. Jackson Lewis is regularly hired to counsel employers, including colleges and universities, on “union avoidance,” a practice around preventing unions from forming in the first place, or grinding negotiations to an impasse if they do organize. Employers spend more than $1.5 billion annually on union avoidance, mostly to lawyers at Jackson Lewis, the Starbucks union-busting Littler Mendhelson, and others.
But Levine also has a history of anti-democratic activity, directly targeting Latino/a voters. When working for Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral campaign, he headed a “voter integrity” committee which marched through Latino neighborhoods, handing out cards warning that voters should “have their green card because INS (now, ICE) are picking up illegals.”
Just as important is what the bill doesn’t include: anything which would address the employment status of college athletes, who can now be paid for their labor. Fair compensation and worker protections are long overdue for primarily Black and brown young men and women who have sweated dollars and broken bones on the field and the court for more than a century. Yet suspiciously, the PCSA includes no language regarding employment. Was this the deal made behind closed doors with Levine along with billionaire booster and “policy shaper” Cody Campbell, and the Trump White House. Campbell went on Fox News touting the bill as “the last and only chance to restore some measure of order and stop the chaos in [the] college sports landscape.”
At the very moment when college athletes are finally being paid, will worker protections be snatched away from them by a political bargain? As the official statement from Athletes.org made clear, The “Protect College Sports Act” Does Anything But Protect Them.
The NCAA has touted that college athletics have reached a “record level of participation by Hispanic/Latino athletes.” Yet at this moment, as participation and power grow, anti-worker forces are trying to snatch it away when no one is looking.
The Protect College Sports Act is a slap in the face to organized labor, which has championed the College Athlete Right to Organize Act, sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy and others. Any friends of labor, especially those supporters of the PCSA like Senator Cantwell, should demand that it include language around athlete employment status and the right to organize. And they should run, not walk, away from anything union-buster Randy Levine had his hands in.
Karla Pineda is Executive Director of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), an AFL-CIO constituency group representing millions of Latino/Hispanic union workers nationwide.
