Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, was dismissed Tuesday by President Donald Trump as part of an anticipated shake-up of the federal agency responsible for overseeing the rights of private-sector employees.
Abruzzo’s tenure as the NLRB’s top in-house lawyer began in July 2021, just weeks after the NCAA adopted its interim NIL policy, and was defined by her influential role in shaping the national conversation on college athlete rights.
Two months after taking office, Abruzzo issued a landmark memorandum, asserting that college athletes should be recognized as employees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). While the NLRB’s jurisdiction is limited to the private sector, Abruzzo’s memo highlighted the concept of a “joint employer” theory of liability, which could potentially hold the NCAA and athletic conferences accountable for unfair labor practices by schools.
“My intent in issuing this memo is to educate the public—especially players at academic institutions, colleges, athletic conferences and the NCAA—about the legal position I’ll be taking regarding employee status and misclassification in appropriate cases,” Abruzzo said in a statement at the time.
Though her memorandum was not legally binding, it eventually set the stage for a unionization bid by Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team and a series of unfair labor practice charges filed on behalf of college athletes at USC, Northwestern and Notre Dame. In November 2021, former University of Minnesota regent Michael Hsu filed the first NLRB charge against the NCAA, followed several months later by the National College Players Association’s charge against USC, the Pac-12 and the NCAA, which invoked the joint-employer theory.
In a June 2022 interview with Sportico, Abruzzo reflected on the relatively cautious pace of these efforts, noting that the potential resistance to college athlete labor rights was not unlike the pushback faced by Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests during the national anthem before NFL games.
“It was never my goal to have people file charges,” she said. “But, you know, charges can be filed by anyone. They don’t need to be filed by current college players.”
For a time, it seemed that these college sports-related labor efforts would ultimately receive favorable rulings from the NLRB leadership when Joe Biden was president. However, the political landscape shifted dramatically after Trump’s victory in November, and each of the petitioners subsequently withdrew their efforts, likely out of concern that a newly GOP-dominated NLRB would not support their cause.
Nevertheless, in a statement on Tuesday, Abruzzo sounded a general note of optimism.
“There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle,” she said. “So, if the agency fails to fully effectuate its Congressional mandate in the future, as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers, with the support of their advocates, will take matters into their own hands to secure the dignity and respect they deserve in the workplace, along with a fair share of the significant value they add to their employers’ operations.”
