(05-08-2022 12:02 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Employees don't have to have contracts. Let's say that playing football is a paying job for a student, like working in a bookstore or cafeteria on campus. The students working the cash registers at the bookstore can quit at any time for any reason. They can leave to take a better paying job off campus, they can leave because they are transferring to a different college, they can leave because they think the bookstore's boss is a jerk, or for any other reason.

(05-08-2022 12:31 PM)bullet Wrote:  Indentured servitude is illegal. Employees in the USA are pretty much free to move. In very limited cases you have penalties like with coaches. And you do get some non-compete agreements. But those have to be limited--for example you could prevent them from transferring to one of your conference mates or scheduled opponents for the next couple of years, but not from transferring to any college.

You two are missing my point.

We will end up with contractual employment(which is not indentured servitude or else private companies in this country are going to have a lot of explaining to do) if we enter a world where the athletes are employees. Professional athletes tend to have contracts which is precisely what they will be. I never said contracts are a condition of any form of employment, I said it will end up moving that direction in this hypothetical world we're navigating.

There's no way the schools will employ them and enter a world of shifted dynamics and not require contracts. If the kids can just up and leave at any time then their pay/privileges will be commensurate. Nobody is worried about the kid who quits his job at the library so there's mechanism to motivate him staying. That's also why they get paid very little.

Coaches get paid a crap ton of money and guess what, they've got contracts as a form of guarantee to the payer. The schools/ADs will be the payers in this instance and it's a big business. They're not going to give the athletes the whole ball of wax. With real payment will come real responsibility and real consequences.

Thus if the kids want to take being a pro-athlete seriously then they won't break their contract. If there's any sort of uniform system of competition then the other schools won't sign transferring kids to a new contract if it's outside a established standard of rules for the new employment structure...just like professional leagues. You can just decide to quit one team and join another because you feel like it.

Remember there is no right to be employed by a school if you decide to enroll at a new school. Johnny can quit the library, but that doesn't mean the library at the school down the road is required to hire him for the same role.

It's like I've been trying to tell you people. Students and university employees are not the same thing. You can't truly be both. Johnny working at the library isn't eligible for benefits or a host of other things that genuine employees are eligible for...the fact that he is getting paid for labor is deceptive. His role, both legally and practically, is that of a student. Everything about his experience is filtered through that paradigm.

The librarian is a different matter. That person was hired to aid in the function of the operation of the school itself. Everything about their experience is filtered through that paradigm. This is true despite the fact that employees at colleges tend to have the ability to take courses as one of their benefits. Just because they attend a class and the rules work a little differently for 3 hours a week doesn't mean they're students.

You can't blend the two even if you are able to come up with a superficial way to blur the lines here and there.

Think of this way, students are customers and employees are being paid to meet the needs of the customer. It's a transaction regardless of the nature of academia.

If the athletes become employees then everything changes.