Collective Bargaining 101 and the Potential Role of Collective Bargaining in College Sports

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Michele Roberts, former National Basketball Players Association Executive Director, to discuss collective bargaining in professional and college sports. Roberts’ remarkable legal career includes work as a public defender in the District of Columbia and later as an attorney for two of the top law firms in the country, Akin Gump and Skadden Arps. Ms. Roberts developed a reputation as one the best trial lawyers in America. In 2014, Ms. Roberts became the Executive Director of the NBPA. She was the first woman to hold that position and the first woman to lead a major professional sports league in North America. Ms. Roberts is a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers and teaches as an adjunct at Harvard Law School. She retired from the NBPA in 2022. In our discussion, Ms. Roberts provides a lesson on collective bargaining, offering her expertise and insight into the collective bargaining process and its underlying values. She explains the importance of ongoing athlete input and transactional trust among the parties at the bargaining table. Ms. Roberts also describes the challenges she and NBA players faced during COVID-related negotiations in 2020 and the depth of detail those negotiations encompassed. Importantly, Ms. Roberts offers her thoughts on college athletes as employees and the prospects for collective bargaining in college sports.

Note: We recorded this episode on April 6, 2023.

Timestamps:

1:22 Collective Bargaining 101

4:15 The National Labor Relations Act and its underlying values

8:00 The importance of trust among bargaining parties to create a win-win outcome

11:41 Equality of bargaining power

14:36 The nonstatutory antitrust exemption through a collective bargaining agreement under the NLRA

20:08 The COVID negotiations and the importance of noneconomic issues in collective bargaining

26:00 Transparency in negotiations

31:37 The need for athlete representation and the role of Congress on employee status

34:48 Do athletes need rights under the NLRA?

37:26 Players association/union sustainability with constant turnover in the athlete labor force in professional and college sports

43:43 Potential college athlete support from professional players’ associations

46:48 The civil rights implications of the college sports business model

Note: For hyperlinked timestamps, please view the podcast on our YouTube channel.