Mac Schneider | Vox

The NCAA’s “Student-Athlete” is under fire – but misclassification is everywhere

2021-11-03T11:58:03-04:00

Kyle Allen playing for Hawai’i Pacific University, 2011. | Barry Markowitz

On September 29, the top lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Jennifer Abruzzo, issued a memo declaring that the institutions of college sports — including the NCAA, its member conferences, and universities — are misclassifying players as “student-athletes,” rather than employees entitled to basic worker protections and benefits. Abruzzo added that she would take legal action wherever the agency has jurisdiction under the National Labor Relations Act if the practice continues.

The first page of the memo cites the second episode of Vox’s new HBO series, Level Playing Field, which premiered last week, in support of their argument. The episode, “Misclassified,” focuses on the student-athlete label and how misclassification in the NCAA is part of a wider trend of employee misclassification throughout the US — and on one former college basketball player, Kyle Allen, whose personal experience illustrates exactly what’s at stake for the thousands of athletes potentially impacted.

In 2010, Kyle accepted a scholarship offer for $25,485 to play basketball for Hawai’i Pacific University (HPU). It’s the kind of letter the NCAA says represents “opportunity” for 79,000 first-generation college students a year, but accepting that opportunity would upend Kyle’s life. Two years after signing his name to the contract, Kyle found himself without a college degree, no offer to play professionally, and bleak job prospects. Soon after that, he was behind the wheel of his car, driving for Lyft and trying to figure out what, exactly, had led him there.

Kyle’s experience isn’t unique to college sports. His story is just one of the innumerable examples of American institutions skirting the rules meant to protect workers in every sector of the economy.

NCAA sports are a multibillion-dollar industry, but the vast majority of athletes won’t ever see a dime for powering it, and the path to a professional career is exceedingly narrow. Being able to profit from the value they create is one reason the NCAA insists on calling players student-athletes: a term created by a team of NCAA lawyers in 1955 to avoid having to treat players like employees.

Inevitably, the incentives of competition pull players away from the “student” aspect. “The very first practice, you realize this is no longer fun, it’s a job,” Kyle said. “Essentially seven o’clock in the morning to around seven o’clock at night, you are on company time.”

If you’ve been following the news around the NCAA’s various legal and legislative battles, you know the landscape has already begun to shift. The confluence of a handful of state laws forcing the NCAA to finally allow its college athletes some of the fruits of their labor, in the form of endorsement or licensing deals, and June’s blistering, unanimous Supreme Court ruling called attention to the NCAA’s “disturbing” dependence on unpaid labor. But the issue goes deeper than allowing players to make a few bucks signing autographs.

“These players are performing a service and they are under the control of their institutions and perhaps even conferences,” Abruzzo told Vox. “The players at academic institutions are statutory employees, and if they’re going to be misclassified, then institutions are going to have to be held to account.”

Before this year, college athletes getting a free tattoo or selling a song they wrote could lead to serious consequences, while their schools could rake in millions plastering arenas and stadiums with sponsor logos and profiting from TV deals. Now, NCAA athletes can finally earn money off their own names without risking their athletic careers. It’s not just huge, international brands getting into business with college athletes; regional and local businesses are in the thick of it as well.

But the core injustice of the NCAA remains. That athletes are allowed to earn money off the field does not make up for them being denied compensation for what happens on it. The student-athlete designation denies players all sorts of other workers’ rights, such as compensation if injured on the job or the right to collectively bargain. “I’ve learned that that term really was created to deprive players of their statutory rights, and to kind of create this false narrative that they are amateurs,” Abruzzo said. (Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, admitted to engineering this narrative, but after retirement lamented his role in creating what he described as “a neoplantation mentality.”)

Still, the arrangement has largely continued, with only minor changes adopted by the NCAA, despite decades of criticism. The NLRB memo is a significant step on a new, more equitable path for college athletes like Kyle, whose experiences after college illuminate injustices of labor misclassification in this country.

Two years into his time at HPU, after a series of disagreements with his coach, Kyle found himself off the team and without a scholarship. He started driving for Lyft and Uber to support his family, and the similarities between his days playing and his new life driving were readily apparent. Instead of a “student-athlete,” Kyle now worked as an “independent contractor,” without the benefits of an employee. “Without these drivers, you have no business,” he said. “Without these players, you have no business.”

The experience left Kyle in what he called a “vortex of poverty.” He’d been taken in by two false dreams. “You get a full-ride scholarship or you get to pick your hours,” he said. “It’s an illusion of freedom. But in reality, you are still on a plantation.”

Abruzzo also sees the connection. “It’s not only players at academic institutions,” she said, “but others that feel they’re being misclassified, as independent contractors or otherwise, that don’t have statutory protections.”

For as long as there have been worker protections, there have been employers fighting to escape them. Corporations powered by gig workers, undaunted by existing minimum wage laws that purport to protect employees, skirt any obligations to their labor forces by classifying everyone as an independent contractor, thus claiming that minimum wage laws don’t apply to them. One study of delivery workers in NYC found they were making $7.87 an hour after expenses, not counting the time they spent waiting on orders. Another found ride-hail drivers in Seattle were earning an average of $9.73 an hour. And a competing study of Seattle, backed by a partnership with Uber and Lyft to use their real data, still found that around a third of workers were being paid less than Seattle’s minimum wage.

“Regardless of these algorithms and other things,” Abruzzo said, “there have been any number of cases where we’ve said, sorry, you know, you’re saying you don’t have control over them, but really you do. They’re not independent contractors. They are employees.”

Misclassification in the American labor force didn’t begin with the NCAA, and it’s not confined to the companies that live in your phone: While an estimated 1 percent of workers are working in the app-based economy, 10 percent of the total workforce are full-time independent contractors, and up to 40 percent work as part-time contractors.

Not all independent contractors are misclassified, but its use as a means to escape protections is pervasive. Somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of all companies misclassify at least one worker. And no sector is immune from contending with these issues: Freelance relationships are still very much the norm throughout the media and entertainment industries — including at Vox Media — which can lead to difficult decisions.

When seen through the lens of employee misclassification, the debate over the term student-athlete suddenly carries significant weight for many Americans who have nothing to do with college sports: If we can change the way student-athletes are treated, who else deserves to be called an employee?

Just before Labor Day, a federal judge allowed a lawsuit to proceed claiming college athletes are employees. Abruzzo is hoping to move the needle on winning players the right to collective bargaining through litigation in the NLRB, after Northwestern University players were narrowly denied the right to unionize in 2015. She also hopes employers look at the shifting ground and act on their own, or that workers force them to: “The employer should be reconsidering it, especially if they have control. And the workers themselves should be looking at it: ‘I think I am protected by this act. I don’t care what my employer says.’”

It took Kyle another six years to get back on track. After losing his scholarship, struggling as a driver for years while fighting off the depression of losing his dream, he was finally able to earn an online college degree on the side, enabling him to seek a new job in a new field. He now works in education, helping kids in his hometown of Sacramento. It’s one of those increasingly rare opportunities: the kind with benefits, and a union.

Finding out about Abruzzo’s memo, Kyle said, “It makes me feel seen, honestly. It makes me feel seen. It gives me the strength to keep the fight going.

“I’m proud of the work we did, and the work she’s doing in making sure that student-athletes are seen and heard, and that we have a voice.”

Level Playing Field: Misclassified is streaming now on HBOMax.

Introducing Vox’s new HBO show, Level Playing Field

2021-09-14T18:37:30-04:00

We’re excited to announce our new documentary series, Level Playing Field, premiering Tuesday, September 14, at 8 pm ET on HBO Max.

Each of the four episodes tells a different story from the world of sports to reveal a broader social inequality impacting all of us. In one case, that means following the plight of an NCAA student-athlete to understand what it can tell us about American labor policy — policy that is often shaped to serve the interests of employers in all sorts of industries. In another, that means revisiting a debate over midnight basketball in the 1990s to understand how racial politics warped a debate over funding a youth sports program.

Our decision to create a show focusing on the intersection of sports and politics was motivated by the increasing overlap between these two worlds. Despite the number of people who desire to “keep politics out of sports,” the impossibility of that goal is evidenced by the long history of sports figures playing a key role in determining our country’s political future. In the United States, sports is politics.

In fact, much of today’s media tend to cover politics similar to how SportsCenter might. It has for a long, long time. It makes some sense, since politics, like sports, is full of rich stories that make the most of our inescapable tribalism but can reduce the life-and-death stakes of complicated public issues to something we can yell at our screens about.

It’s no coincidence that sports language often finds its way into political debate, whether it’s winning and losing, choosing a side and sticking to it, or getting over a hurdle to reach the finish line. Politicians and activists of all stripes use it as a metaphor for how they want the world to work: People want fair competition, so rules should be designed in a way that allows for a level playing field.

To address this, most major sports leagues organize their competition to try to reset their own starting lines in creative ways: The NFL distributes its massive television income equally despite the far larger viewership for some teams, so those finishing last have a chance to catch up. Both the NFL and NBA give the worst teams the best draft picks.

The rest of the world generally … doesn’t. Change is slow, and it’s difficult or impossible to redraw long-outdated lines to reflect our grayscale world. That’s where Level Playing Field focuses. Our stories show the overlap between sports and politics in four different topics: labor, immigration, racial justice, and elections.

By grounding our storytelling in personal journeys, viewers will see firsthand how abstract policy decisions translate to very real impacts in someone’s day-to-day life. Altogether, what they show is just how extraordinarily difficult it is to make the world reflect our idealistic desire for fairness.

Midnight Basketball revisits President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill to understand how a few lines of funding for a youth sports program became the touchpoint in a racialized national debate over the decision between investing in crime prevention versus punishment.

September 14, 8 pm ET

Misclassified follows the experience of a single “student-athlete” who became an Uber driver after his college hoops career came to an end. With added perspective from former Stanford tight end and current Sen. Cory Booker, we dive into the little-known history of how the term “student-athlete” was created by the NCAA and its team of lawyers. That enabled a system of exploitation that shares a lot in common with the economy the rest of us work in.

September 21, 8 pm ET

Down the Backstretch goes to the other side of the horse-racing track, where a group of mainly immigrants do the unseen, dangerous, and difficult work that powers the sport — like millions of jobs Americans simply don’t want to do.

September 28, 8 pm ET

The Assist follows the extraordinary story of how WNBA star Elizabeth Williams made a new blueprint for athlete activism by leading her team in a fight against its owner, Kelly Loeffler, on behalf of Rev. Raphael Warnock and his attempt to win her Georgia Senate seat in the 2020 election.

October 5, 8 pm ET

The series represents something new for Vox and demonstrates how our short documentaries, spanning from YouTube to Netflix to, now, HBO, will continue to evolve. So please watch, share with friends, and tell us what you think.

The big lesson from South Korea’s coronavirus response

2020-08-06T16:50:12-04:00

Both South Korea and the US identified their first positive case of Covid-19 on January 20. But where other countries failed to contain their epidemics, South Korea succeeded. By April, as the US remained in lockdown due to the coronavirus’s unceasing spread, South Korea had begun to open up. Citizens returned to public spaces and businesses began welcoming back customers. Although there have been minor surges in the time since, South Korea’s case rates continue to remain lower than other countries that have experienced a major outbreak.

South Korea’s Covid-19 containment was so successful in part because the country had seen it before. In 2015, South Korea had an outbreak of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) caused by a coronavirus similar to the one responsible for Covid-19. Thirty-eight people died, and South Korea suffered the largest outbreak outside of the Middle East. Based on that experience, the country undertook extensive measures to plan and prepare for the next outbreak.

This time, it was ready. Before the coronavirus arrived in January, South Korea’s government had worked closely with health officials to prepare a plan of action that included a stockpile of testing kits and clear guidelines for identifying and isolating positive cases. The plan’s success prevented the country from suffering death tallies seen elsewhere in the world — and South Korea has become a model, both now and for future pandemics.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

How “forever chemicals” polluted America’s water

2020-08-04T11:24:20-04:00

North Carolina’s Cape Fear River is a massive water system. It stretches across the lower half of the state, collecting runoff from 29 counties and providing water to millions of people. But in the city of Wilmington, where the river meets the Atlantic Ocean, residents are worried about the drinking water.

In a 2019 test of tap water, Wilmington and neighboring Brunswick County were among the top five areas for high levels of PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — a group of man-made chemicals commonly used for making nonstick or water-resistant products. The chemical class has been linked to health problems including cancer, and traces can be found in the blood of an estimated 99 percent of Americans.

Now, North Carolina is reckoning with the legacy of pollution upstream — and discovering what decades of PFAS contamination means for the rest of the country.

Watch the video above to see how PFAS products went from military technology to household staple, and why US chemical companies get away with regulating themselves.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. If you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Why fighting the coronavirus depends on you

2020-08-25T15:27:25-04:00

In March 2020, the World Health Organization officially classified Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, as a pandemic. That means the disease no longer constitutes just an outbreak or even an epidemic; the coronavirus has now spread around the world, and will continue to reach into other countries and communities.

That’s in part because of how contagious the virus is. When you’re infected with the flu, it takes about two days before you start to show symptoms. But coronavirus symptoms take an average of five to six days to appear, so it’s easy to spread well before you notice that you’re feeling sick. Many people are spreading it while going about their daily lives as usual.

The risk is that once coronavirus starts to spread in a community, about 20 percent of cases are severe and may require hospitalization. As those cases multiply, hospitals can fill up quickly. And people with severe cases of Covid-19 who can’t receive proper medical attention are at a much higher risk of dying.

Ideally, we would be able to stop the virus from spreading entirely. We can’t do that right now. What we can do is slow it down, so that the severe cases get spread out over a longer period of time, and hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed on any given day. And that’s where each one of us comes in. The best way to slow down the spread is for everyone — healthy, sick, young, old — to limit social contact as much as possible, immediately. This is called social distancing, and it only works if enough of us do it. But if we do, it could mean the difference between the life and death of someone you know.

Watch the video above to see how social distancing can work.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Why this Russian gas company sponsors soccer teams

2020-01-31T17:07:49-05:00

Russia has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, and most of it is controlled by Gazprom, a state-owned natural gas company. Gazprom sells natural gas to foreign countries, but it’s also well-known to soccer fans. The Gazprom logo is ubiquitous at major international soccer competitions — and across the chests of players from teams in Russia, Germany, and Croatia.

Sponsorship deals are common in soccer. But Gazprom has had an interesting role in reshaping the strategic aims of companies that pay for the privilege of displaying their logo on a team’s jersey. Unlike most companies sponsoring soccer teams, Gazprom is under the control of a foreign state whose geopolitical aims extend far beyond the soccer field. While other companies use sponsorships to sell consumer products, Gazprom uses its as a way to extend its gas network in Western Europe — and, by extension, extend the influence of Russia.

That’s been especially true in Germany, where the team FC Schalke 04 has had a longstanding sponsorship deal with Gazprom. Nicknamed “Die Knappen,” or “The Miners,” the team is one of the most famous clubs in all of Germany. And since 2006, the Gazprom logo has appeared on their jerseys.

To understand what role that logo has had in shaping the geopolitics of Russia and Western Europe, make sure to watch the video above.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

What makes Delhi’s air so deadly

2019-12-16T14:37:36-05:00

Every November, Northern India experiences some of the most dangerous air pollution levels in the world. When the pollution hits Delhi, the more than 30 million people living there are forced to live in a toxic cloud of smoke. They breathe in car exhaust, construction dust, and industry emissions that are in the air year-round, but there is another source of pollution that mixes in with Delhi’s contamination and pushes the air quality to hazardous levels every year. And it can be traced back to a policy meant to save water.

In 2009, a policy was enacted in states situated upwind of Delhi to protect dwindling water supplies, but it is having unintended consequences and wreaking havoc on the lungs of residents in India’s capital city. To learn how it’s happening and what’s being done to stop it, watch the video above.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

China’s fight with the NBA, explained

2019-11-11T14:38:05-05:00

Last year, nearly 500 million people in China watched NBA basketball. That’s an enormous number, more than the entire population of the United States, and it represents how hard the NBA has worked to build a market in the most populous country in the world. It also shows how much the NBA stood to lose when, on October 4, 2019, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, posted a tweet about Hong Kong.

In the 1990s, the United States started improving its trade relations with China. Ever since, the NBA has made a deliberate effort to grow its Chinese fanbase by hosting annual summer tours, negotiating domestic broadcasting contracts, and launching creative marketing schemes that appeal to Chinese fans.

It’s been a huge success. NBA stars became celebrities in China, and the league is now an important conduit for other American companies eager to tap into the Chinese market. The NBA’s commercial growth in China has been staggering: In July 2019, the NBA renewed a deal with Tencent, China’s largest streaming platform, that was worth $1.5 billion — three times what it was worth just five years before.

The NBA’s success in China represented one half of a larger goal that US leaders had in mind when they originally opened up trade relations with China: That American companies would profit from trade with China and that ideas like democracy and free speech would have more exposure in China.

When Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters, it tested that theory. Morey’s tweet provoked the ire of the mainland Chinese government, which censored NBA broadcasts in China. Shortly thereafter, numerous Chinese companies suspended their business deals with the NBA.

The NBA stumbled in their response: not quite apologizing, but not standing up against the Chinese government, either. Players like All-Star LeBron James were asked for their response to the controversy, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver struggled to respond coherently. For them, the problem was that standing behind Morey’s tweet could threaten what the NBA has built in China.

The NBA is not alone in this; lots of companies looking to do business in China have learned to prioritize profits over political ideals. But this particular incident, and the scale of the Chinese response to it, have highlighted that dynamic in stark terms.

This video explores the history that led to this critical moment, and why the relationship between the US and China isn’t exactly what was predicted 20 years ago.

The problem with sex testing in sports

2019-07-03T17:38:41-04:00

The recent controversy surrounding South African runner Caster Semenya has raised a question in the world of sports: What kinds of naturally occurring advantages should be regulated and why?

For swimmer Michael Phelps, the advantages of having a wide wingspan, long torso, and producing low amounts of lactic acid are celebrated. But for Semenya, whose body produces a naturally high level of testosterone, the response has been different. Athletic officials have been debating whether an elevated level of testosterone should disqualify her from competing as a woman and they recently decided that, yes, it should.

This spring, the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld rules imposed by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) limiting the ability of certain athletes with high levels of testosterone to compete as women. By a margin of 2-1, an arbitration panel of three made a decision in favor of IAAF regulations, which they described as “discriminatory” but “necessary” for “protecting the integrity of female athletics.” Many have called the ruling flawed.

More recently, the ruling was temporarily suspended, and the issue is far from being resolved. In fact, the court case is just the latest chapter in the Olympic champion’s decade-long battle with athletic authorities. Ever since she became the 800-meter world champion in 2009, the IAAF has gone through several iterations of their regulations for women athletes, and Caster Semenya has been on the receiving end of each successive policy.

Throughout that time, the media has been following Semenya’s story closely and shaping a narrative that is often misguided or inaccurate. “Gender,” “sex,” “intersex,” “transgender,” and other terminology have often been misapplied when discussing the controversy. To be clear, Caster Semenya is not transgender, but the lack of a standard for using terms like “sex” and “gender” has left many people confused about the actual circumstances of the case and Caster Semenya’s involvement in it.

The core issue is that “sex” is different from “gender” and there are many ways a person’s sex can develop beyond typical categories for men and women. When athletic officials try to divide athletes by sex, the line drawn changes depending on what criteria they use.

But this controversy started long before 2009. In this video, we piece together the underlying issues relevant to sex testing in sports and contextualize them within the long history of athletic officials scrutinizing women athletes. By covering the debate surrounding Caster Semenya, along with historical events concerning Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska and Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, this video explains why athletic officials have repeatedly failed in their attempt to establish definitive sex testing regulations for female competitors.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

The truth behind the TV show Cops

2019-05-03T11:10:39-04:00

When it premiered in 1989, Cops presented itself as a raw, unscripted look at policing in the US. Down to its iconic theme song, Cops has remained more or less the same since: an unfussy purveyor of “Bad Boys” on American TV screens since the first Bush presidency. The show has been on longer than The Simpsons, and as it begins its 31st season this year, it holds the title as the longest-running primetime show in the US.

The show has no actors, no narration, no music, and it’s filmed entirely with handheld cameras trained on police units throughout the country. Despite its stripped-down production value, the show has always managed to draw an audience — primarily by packing the episodes full of police chases, drug busts, and other criminal antics. Driving that success are numerous law enforcement officers who are not only willing but eager to go on the show. Why?

The show is run by producers who profit from filming situations that can be humiliating, violent or intense in other ways. And given this unscripted — and potentially image-damaging — format, it might seem odd that police would choose to participate. That is, until you realize how this show gets made.

For more than a year, the team behind the podcast Running From Cops has been researching the show. In this video, Vox worked with them to examine the reasons police choose to participate in Cops. To learn what they are, start by watching the video above, then check out the podcast.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s other videos on our YouTube channel. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.