The NCAA Says Student-Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid Because the 13th Amendment Allows Unpaid Prison Lab

[MCP]

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/22/ncaa-student-athletes-unpaid-prison/

In the United States, college athletes — particularly those who compete at some of the largest football and basketball programs — generate not millions but billions of dollars for universities, brands, and television networks. In 2015, the top programs made a combined $9.1 billion. The NCAA, for its part, just signed an $8.8 billion dollar deal with CBS to air March Madness, the college basketball championship tournament.

College sports is a business – a very lucrative business.

That very obvious dynamic undergirds a lawsuit filed by former NCAA athlete Lawrence “Poppy” Livers asserting that scholarship students who play sports are employees and deserve pay. The Livers case argues that student-athletes who get scholarships should at least be paid as work-study students for the time they put in.

What the NCAA did in response to the lawsuit is as vile as anything going on in sports right now.
What the NCAA did in response to the lawsuit is as vile as anything going on in sports right now. I had to see it for myself before I believed it. At the root of its legal argument, the NCAA is relying on one particular case for why NCAA athletes should not be paid. That case is Vanskike v. Peters.

Only there’s an important detail: Daniel Vanskike was a prisoner at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, and Howard Peters was the Director of the state Department of Corrections. In 1992, Vanskike and his attorneys argued that as a prisoner he should be paid a federal minimum wage for his work. The court, in its decision, cited the 13th Amendment and rejected the claim.

The 13th Amendment is commonly hailed as the law that finally ended slavery in America. But the amendment has an important carve-out: it kept involuntary service legal for those who have been convicted of a crime. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” the amendment says. It’s that phrase — “except as a punishment for crime” — which allows American prisons to force their inmates to do whatever work they want or need them to do.

The use of the case stems from several other law cases alleging unpaid labor; two of them are previous lawsuits against the NCAA in which the case was cited as precedent, and the NCAA won.


Livers v. NCAA Filing on Comparison of Student-Athletes to Prisoners18 pages
In their response to the NCAA’s motion to dismiss, Livers’s lawyers are arguing that the precedent was mistaken for applying the 13th Amendment exception for unpaid prison labor in a case dealing with non-prisoners.

“Defense Counsel’s insistence that Vanskike be applied here is not only legally frivolous, but also deeply offensive to all Scholarship Athletes – and particularly to African-Americans,” Livers’s rebuttal to the NCAA’s motion says. “Comparing athletes to prisoners is contemptible.”

“Comparing athletes to prisoners is contemptible.”
The NCAA is showing an incorrigible nerve to use this case, Vanskike v. Peters, as one of its justifications for not paying student-athletes. The Vanskike case has been cited in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals 14 times before, but in each of those 14 cases there were prisoners arguing that they should be paid a fair wage for their work.

Yet the NCAA wants to rely on this case and to call on the 13th Amendment. The body that runs college sports wants to use a justification for the slave labor of convicted criminals to justify its outrageous greed.

This is not just bad optics. It gets to the heart of what the multibillion-dollar enterprise that is the NCAA thinks not just of its athletes, but of its core business model. It is, in essence, admitting that student-athletes are working as slave laborers and as such do not deserve fair compensation.

Bigotry has a way of revealing itself. And that is exactly what the NCAA — by leaning on the case of a prisoner demanding he be paid as its justification for denying their athletes a wage of any kind — has done here. It has revealed itself to us.

Top photo: South Carolina players sit in the locker room after the semifinals of the Final Four NCAA college basketball tournament against Gonzaga, Saturday, April 1, 2017, in Glendale, Ariz.

 

[QueEx]

The fight that Ed O’Bannon started with the NCAA isn’t over yet

Division I athletes do get scholarships and supplemental cash, but more could be done

26 Mar 1995: UCLA FORWARD ED O”BANNON CELEBRATES BY CUTTING HIS PART OF THE NET AFTER THE BRUINS 102-96 WIN OVER UCONN IN THE NCAA WEST REGIONAL FINAL AT THE OAKLAND COLISEUM IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.



BY WILLIAM C. RHODEN@WCRHODEN
March 16, 2018


In April 1995, Ed O’Bannon’s UCLA Bruins defeated Arkansas to win the men’s NCAA Division I national championship.

He scored 30 points, grabbed 17 rebounds that evening. Four months shy of his 21st birthday, O’Bannon lived a dream that many college players never realize.

Then he awoke.

Twenty years after leading UCLA over Arkansas, O’Bannon handed the NCAA an even greater defeat. In August 2009, days after O’Bannon’s 31st birthday, a district court judge in the 9th Circuit ruled that the NCAA violated antitrust laws by not allowing student-athletes to profit from their likenesses in broadcasts and video games.

The ruling was a major blow against a commercialized intercollegiate sports industry that, at its most competitive levels, masquerades as a co-curricular educational enterprise.

Today O’Bannon, 45, resides in Las Vegas with his wife and their two children. He loves the game of basketball, and looks forward to watching the NCAA tournament. But O’Bannon’s five-year battle against the NCAA permanently altered how he watches and how he perceives the college game.

“I’ve grown up,” he told me during a recent interview. “I’ve had certain experiences since we won our championship in ’95. I look at the game through a completely different lens.”

As a result of winning the suit, EA Sports took video games featuring college players out of stores.

O’Bannon’s fight against the NCAA is documented in a new book, Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle Against the NCAA written with Michael McCann.

He wrote his book to inform, educate and to explain.

“I’m not some mad, angry former player who wanted to take a video game away,” he said. “That wasn’t my goal, but that happened, unfortunately.”

A major outcome of the lawsuit is that NCAA member schools are able to give athletes the full cost of attendance, something the NCAA had resisted. That allows scholarship athletes to receive a monthly stipend check that can be for as much as $500.

This is still not enough to cover living expenses and is insignificant when compared with the NCAA’s earnings from the men’s Division I tournament.

“If you live off campus, where does that go?” O’Bannon asked. “Probably to rent or groceries. After rent, groceries and gas and your insurance on your car, where are you?”

I have asked college athletes over the last few weeks for a dollar figure, a number. How much?

The answers have varied.

“I’m not saying half a million dollars,” O’Bannon said. “But I am saying something significantly more than they are getting so they can take care of those things.”

Critics of the NCAA’s system have proposed that athletes boycott or otherwise demonstrate for a greater share of revenue. O’Bannon argues for that as well. But he reminds himself — and critics — that it’s difficult for young players, caught up in the moment, to see the NCAA forest for the NCAA’s trees.

O’Bannon certainly could not.

When he was at UCLA, O’Bannon said, his goal was to play on a big stage, play with his brother, Charles, and win a national title for UCLA and for Los Angeles, where he was raised.

“That was all that mattered to me,” he said.

During his court testimony, O’Bannon went further, saying, “I was an athlete masquerading as a student. I was there strictly to play basketball. I did basically the minimum to make sure I kept my eligibility so I could continue to play.”

After a two-year NBA career and eight seasons playing in Europe, O’Bannon earned his degree from UCLA.

He knows some athletes feel the way he felt, but expecting them to rail against the system that feeds them is unrealistic.

“That’s a tall order for a 19-, 20-, 21-year-old to carry out,” he said.

Yes, a boycott “would completely change everything,” O’Bannon said.

“Just the threat of a boycott would change the game. But the person or team that does it would carry that for life. A lot of people would not understand the boycott. They would ask ‘Why us? Why you? Why our team? Why this game?’ ”

If he knew in 1995 what he knows now, would his approach at UCLA have been different? O’Bannon said he would have been more vocal.

“I wouldn’t necessarily look to rally the troops and boycott, but I would definitely test the waters.”

By that he meant he would have asked players at other schools how they felt about possibly demonstrating.

The next barrier to fall as a result of his lawsuit will be allowing athletes at all levels of competition to sign endorsement deals.

Before the tournament began, the NCAA announced that, for the first time, the association had made $1 billion off the tournament.

That’s bad optics.

Although the money helps fund many non-revenue sports and other student-athlete initiatives, a billion dollars is a billion dollars.

“It’s not like they’re being greedy or unappreciative,” O’Bannon said referring to student-athletes.

“It’s like, you look at coaches getting $8 million a year and assistant coaches making $250,000 each. And we’re not getting anything?”

On the other hand, there is value in having room, board, tuition and fees paid for in full. No one disputes this.

Anyone paying off student loans, any parent writing monthly tuition checks can appreciate the value of a debt-free exit from college.

Yet the athletes we watch over the next few weeks and those we watch during the college football season produce value.

How to determine a value that allows athletes to benefit and the intercollegiate system to survive is a challenge.

These are questions and dilemmas O’Bannon never considered in 1995 when UCLA won the NCAA title.

You grow and you learn.


“I look at the games in a much more educated way,” he said.

“I still love basketball and I get the kids. I know what they’re thinking because I was once that kid out there playing in front of millions of people, accomplishing my goals, living out my dream.”

He added: “I still love the game, but now I see it as more of a business and understand a lot of the moves that are being made.

“But the love of the game and the competitive nature the kids put on display are what I dig about the game and this time of the year.”

William C. Rhoden, the former award-winning sports columnist for The New York Times and author of “Forty Million Dollar Slaves,” is a writer-at-large for The Undefeated. Contact him at william.rhoden@espn.com.


https://theundefeated.com/features/fight-ed-obannon-started-with-ncaa-basketball-isnt-over-yet/


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