Wow!!! Penn track and field athletes sue claiming they are entitled to minimum wage - Court disagrees

Liberalism.

Another word....ENTITLEMENT

Ivy League is not what it used to be I guess.

LetsRun.com wrote:

(all of the full-time employees at LetsRun.com are Ivy league graduates)

Next you're going to tell us wejo ran in the 2000 Olympic Trials and later ran 28:06 for 10k.

Thank god. I'm trying to run at UPenn and it's hard enough to get their coach to care about a 9:1x.xx 3200m guy like me without knowing that he'll have to get the bursar to dish out $10/hour for me to run.

If a runner gets paid by the hour, doesn't that mean that they make less money if they run faster?

I think the best posters on the LRC message boards should get paid, considering all the ad revenue we generate.

LDOPA wrote:

I think the best posters on the LRC message boards should get paid, considering all the ad revenue we generate.

We already do.

"How could they possibly claim that a volunteer activity was worthy of minimum wage?"

Don't people choose to voluntarily run post college in hopes of one day attracting a sponsorship? So if running isn't worth minimum wage...then why would any contract pay say Bolt over minimum wage?

Whether or not they are considered employees is important as far as liability.

If an athlete is injured (think football), the school is liable if he is an employee. There is no liability if he is not an employee.

What has happened in the past is that school football players have been permanently injured and unable to ever work again and the schools have been held not liable for any payments because the athlete was not considered to be employees.

"Memo: College football players are employees"

http://watchdog.org/278653/memo-college-football-players-employees/

"players are statutory employees under the National Labor Relations Act."

This reeks. I'll bet there are some powerful supporters of college football behind this in some way. Someone on the University of Pennsylvania women’s track and field team is related to someone that has an interest in seeing that college football athletes are not paid for their services.

Let Jonathon loose. This could be interesting.

gahuga wrote:

[quote]LetsRun.com wrote:

(all of the full-time employees at LetsRun.com are Ivy league graduates)

Subtle, nice. You never would be able to guess that looking at the way this site is run and the amount of bigotry that moderators facilitate.

Memo - most college football players are not smart enough to get into the colleges they play at so that opportunity for an education is payment enough.

what time I had to read the decision suggests that it really depends on the following:

"We have held that these rules “define what it means to be an amateur

or a student-athlete, and are therefore essential to the very

existence of” collegiate athletics. Agnew v. Nat’l Collegiate

Athletic Ass’n, 683 F.3d 328, 343 (7th Cir. 2012). The multifac-

tor test proposed by Appellants here simply does not take

into account this tradition of amateurism or the reality of the

student-athlete experience. In short, it “fail[s] to capture the

true nature of the relationship” between student athletes and" Penn.

That is begging the question. Yes, there is a tradition of amateurism but the notion that collegiate athletics in its very concept entails not paying athletes is to determine the answer through that loaded concept. The nature of the activity doesn't establish it is not work: people are sometimes paid for doing track and field. College students are often paid directly for working by colleges without that being incompatible with the very nature of being a student.

Does the college gain anything from the activity? That something is unprofitable doesn't mean it does not involve an employment activity. And students obviously are required to do these activities, and often at a high level, to maintain their scholarships.

A stronger case would be challenging NCAA on their blocking of college athlete endorsements. Katy Ledecky giving up $5mil to swim at Cal. Use that antiquated amateurism as the first wedge in destroying NCAA.

jjjjjjj wrote:

Does the college gain anything from the activity? That something is unprofitable doesn't mean it does not involve an employment activity. And students obviously are required to do these activities, and often at a high level, to maintain their scholarships.

In this case, there are no scholarships(Ivy league does not hand out athletic scholarships). So, no student is required to do anything.

In other cases where a football player is attending High Brow University on an athletic scholarship, he would be getting paid $100K (?) per year for tuition, room, board, books, fees, etc.

How about if we eliminate ALL athletic scholarships. The schools can pay individuals to play, football, basketball(whatever) but they have to be enrolled in the school, and be academically eligible.

They pay the cost out of their pay for being employees(welcome to the real world).

This seems like an ill-conceived crusade for track athletes. If universities have to pay athletes in non-revenue sports, the obvious decision for the school is to stop having non-revenue sports.

poor planning wrote:

This seems like an ill-conceived crusade for track athletes. If universities have to pay athletes in non-revenue sports, the obvious decision for the school is to stop having non-revenue sports.

I have nothing to add, I just want to call attention to this post. One of the smarter ideas on this thread.