Coalition Needs to Manage Clock

They stood together in a brightly lit conference room, these athletes without a coach, labor organizers without the legal basis to form a union.

All they have are an agenda and unity, two core attributes that must be mixed with patience and perseverance if they ever hope to achieve their goals.

Members of the UCLA football team have formed the Collegiate Athletes Coalition, seeking better health care and life insurance for athletes, higher monthly stipends and the ability to earn more income by working during the school year.

Their opponent is the NCAA, which means this could take awhile. The NCAA is an organization averse to change, particularly when the proponents are student-athletes. I’ve seen student representatives leave NCAA conventions in complete frustration after failing to get through to NCAA big-wigs.

The best route to success against the NCAA is to take it to court, because the NCAA almost always loses. But the Collegiate Athletes Coalition has little to no legal or negotiating recourse.

“Collective bargaining in the traditional sense probably isn’t available to them because they’d have a hard time demonstrating that they were employees under applicable law,” said Glenn Rothner, a labor lawyer who represents unions for Rothner, Segall & Greenstone in Pasadena. “On the other hand, there’s nothing that prohibits individuals in any context from banding together to engage in collective action to accomplish their goals.”

Almost the entire football team is on board with this (15 members were on hand for the news conference). The group’s next goal is to expand to other campuses throughout the country. In the ultimate show of solidarity, these Bruins even had a former Trojan, Daylon McCutcheon, among their ranks Thursday.

The athletes have also enlisted the aid of the United Steelworkers association.

“We’re just here to help,” said Terry Bonds, the Southwest regional director for United Steelworkers. “We’re not in the thing to collect dues or to foment disruption or anything like that. Our goal is to help them, because that’s our business.”

The players realize the court of public opinion might not always be on their side as well. The last thing people want to hear from students receiving full scholarships to elite universities are complaints. But the monthly room-and-board stipends the players receive don’t always meet the costs of the real world.

“Many college students get some support from home,” said McCutcheon, who used some of his stipend to buy groceries for his mother and sister when he was in school. “What about the college students that get no support from home?

“Once you get there, how do you survive, how do you eat? If you have a car, how do you put gas in the car? How do you get by with everyday living?”

Practice and classes leave no time to get another job during the season, and the NCAA limits the players to a maximum of $2,000 in earnings for the rest of the school year.

Football players do this in a sport that exposes them to injuries ranging from nagging to debilitating.

“We appreciate the athletic gifts that we possess and we appreciate the opportunities that are available to us that are not available to others as a result of those talents,” said Ramogi Huma, a former linebacker who is the leader of this movement. “But we also put our bodies on the line for what we do. As a result of our effort and hard work, we bring tremendous resources to both the NCAA and our respective individual institutions. Stated simply, we only want what is right for college athletes.”

Huma has a hip injury that caused him to quit playing two years ago and still acts up on cold mornings. Linebacker Ryan Nece had his left arm in a sling, the result of a torn labrum that required surgery and will probably keep him out of spring practice.

I’m for whatever compensation the players can get. It’s not as simple as paying them to play, because that opens up all sorts of legal issues (for instance, would Nece be entitled to workers’ compensation?) and is impossible to be uniformly applied to all of the sports among the NCAA’s 1,039 member schools.

But if these athletes can carve out whatever little trinkets from the $256 million the NCAA derives in television revenue alone, more power to them.

It’s especially impressive to see them so organized. Huma’s career is finished and he’ll graduate in June. He won’t see any benefits from the changes, but he’s the one who organized the effort.

“Ideally, before I graduate here in June it will have unfolded enough that it can sustain itself,” Huma said. “One of the things we have is trying to sustain this movement when athletes turn over so much.”

It’s tough to maintain momentum against the NCAA, no matter what the group. The Black Coaches Assn. threatened a boycott seven years ago, with heavy hitters such as John Thompson, John Chaney and Nolan Richardson leading the charge. But the march petered out a few steps short of its goals.

A little more than two years ago, graduate teaching assistants in the University of California system seeking higher compensation staged a strike. Although they were students, the California Public Employees Relations Board ruled that they also served as employees (at a greater benefit to the universities) and were eligible for collective bargaining rights because they received money to teach classes.

It’s a little different for the athletes. To maintain eligibility they must pass stringent NCAA criteria that go to great lengths to state the athletes are not paid for their performances.

“Although they may have difficulty demonstrating that they’re employees for the purposes of [labor laws], what they’re not going to have difficulty demonstrating is that when they perform services, they’re generating revenue for the institution,” Rothner said. “If for no other reason than that, they’re likely to have leverage. And they should.”

If the athletes play their ultimate trump card and don’t play games, they risk violating the terms of their scholarships.

It might be easier if we recognized college football for what it really is.

“If there’s going to be a lot of business going on, then treat it like a business,” said labor lawyer Ken Riven. “If it’s going to be a business, labor should have a right to unionize.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: ja.adande@latimes.com