On Friday, the United College Athlete Association announced it was working with the Oregon State women’s basketball team to unionize the team under the Oregon Employment Relations Board and announced it was looking for members to sign up. The UCAA’s interim executive committee includes LSU point guard Jada Williams.
In an article published by ESPN on this story, Williams said “Nobody should be making decisions without us. A lot of people treat us like kids, but we live adult lives. We should negotiate transfers, money, eligibility, everything. We should have a voice in all of it. … We’re ready to shake the room.”
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The UCAA began working on unionizing women’s college basketball athletes in 2024 and focused on the Big 10 and SEC. The UCAA has hundreds of members across multiple sports, and it claims over 100 women’s basketball players as members. Williams, a transfer who is at her third school, has been a vocal leader on issues of unionization and collective bargaining, and she’s been one of the UCAA’s faces as they lobby against the Protect College Sports Act.
Oregon State will be the first public university with a team that’s attempted to unionize, and it comes in the same week that Stanford football players announced they’d be doing likewise. The main difference is that Stanford’s effort goes through the federally controlled National Labor Relations Board, while Oregon State’s effort goes through the state-controlled Oregon Employment Relations Board. State laws vary on who can and can’t form unions, but the NLRB rules apply across the country. That’s why the unionizations efforts that came before were at private schools like Northwestern and Dartmouth.
