The fact that the men’s basketball team supposedly operates at a loss is one of the justifications offered by Dartmouth College for insisting that its 15 participants are not employees.
According to a recent article in The Dartmouth student newspaper, the company that employs union students is also insolvent.
The discovery demonstrates why, even in the case of college kids who work for their class, the success of an employer is not a legal requirement for the identification of jobs. It also demonstrates why Dartmouth’s desire for success seems to be an especially unconvincing line of attack given that the school has freely negotiated with unionized pupil employees of a losing business.

The Student Worker Collective ( the union that represents dining services student workers ) threatened to go on strike, but Dartmouth and the union were able to come to a tentative agreement on an hourly wage of$ 21—nearly three times the minimum wage in the federal and New Hampshire states of$ 7.25.
The university’s dining chairman, who emphasized Dartmouth wants to maintain reasonable food prices in order to provide for its students, is also cited in the story. Dartmouth Dining has operated at a loss for the past three decades, the chairman noted.
Board regional director Laura Sacks discussed Dartmouth’s emphasis on the inefficiency of its sports program in her Feb. 5 decision, which approved a union election and recognized the basketball players as employees. Dartmouth made an effort to distinguish between the baseball players and the football players from Northwestern who tried to organise ten years ago. Northern soccer players failed to convince the NLRB that they were employees, despite earning money for their Big Ten college. Dartmouth even compared its baseball players to graduate students at Columbia University, whom the NLRB acknowledged as employees in part because the institution received a portion of student grants.
The baseball players criticized Dartmouth’s line of thinking, noting that important business decisions, such as how much to spend Big Green coaches and what to charge for game tickets, are entirely up to the city. The participants also argued that the mathematics at the school was inaccurate and inadequate. Dartmouth’s analysis does not take into account possible distributions from the March Madness event or revenues from an ESPN spread agreement. The hard-to-quantify but still recognisable values attributed to the hockey team in boosting Dartmouth’s alumni charity, admissions, and publicity are also excluded.
According to Baskets, the issue of whether the participants are employees is unrelated to the discussion of how to determine the group’s net gain or loss. She asserted that” the success of any given company does not affect the individual reputation of the individuals who perform job for that company.” Many businesses are currently operating at a loss, but this does not deprive employees of their individual rank.

The people ‘ ability to perform work for Dartmouth in exchange for payment and the school’s right to control that work is the pertinent constitutional question, according to Sacks. She reasoned that the participants are staff through that lens.
Dartmouth athletes are admitted into a favorable admissions group despite no receiving athletic scholarships like different Ivy League athletes do. They then receive valuable items like meals, tickets, clothing, and sneakers in addition to access to athletic facilities. A hockey player can stay at Dartmouth and receive assistance even if he leaves the team during his first year because the school offers need-based financial aid to its students. People are also heavily regulated by the school because of their duties to the group.
The people will vote on whether Service Employees International Union Local 560 represents them as a coalition on March 5. In a dispute that could ultimately be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeal, Dartmouth is anticipated to charm Baskets ‘ ruling to the company’s board in Washington, D.C.