You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law Tuesday a bill that bans college athletes at public universities from joining unions. The legislation, which passed the Michigan Senate earlier this month, requires all college athletes to be classified as "students," preventing them from being classified as employees.
There's been no indication that such an attempt to unionize was taking place at Michigan's public universities, and the legislation was apparently in response to the ongoing unionization efforts of athletes at Northwestern University, a private university in Illinois. (The National Labor Relations Board oversees unionization issues at private institutions, but states govern unionization rules for state employees.) “The Republican Legislature has done so much union busting over the years that now they've resorted to busting unions that don’t even exist," a spokesman for Progress Michigan, a progressive marketing group, told Michigan Live.
