- Joined
- Jul 15, 2008
- Messages
- 34,127
- Reaction score
- 64,440
- Points
- 148
My opinion (I'm no lawyer) is that without a contractual agreement, student athletes cannot be considered employees. They tried out for the team voluntarily and were selected for it, with no a priori payment agreement. That is the nature of amateur athletics and extracurricular sports.
Most ordinary employees are employed "at-will", with no written contract. So obviously, the law doesn't require a written contract before considering someone an "employee". I suppose some student athletes might argue that a scholarship is more of a written contract than most people have, so that alone should be enough to have them considered "employees".
It's odd that so many pundits, etc., keep assuming this debate only concerns net-revenue producing sports like football and basketball. Under the law, whether employer is profitable or not is irrelevant to the determination of whether or not someone is an employee. There's pretty much no way outside of Congress itself drawing a rather weird line that the "employee" determination can be limited only to certain sports.