Professor William B. Gould explains why the NLRB’s Northwestern decision will “inhibit, if not kill” collective bargaining in big athletic conferences. 

The National Labor Relations Board decided on Monday to reject a bid by football players at Northwestern University to form a union.

More than a year after the five-member board took up the issue, it released a unanimous decision saying that the board was “declining to assert jurisdiction” in the case because allowing athletes at a private university to organize would not “promote stability in labor markets.”

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Unless an antitrust lawsuit removes or drastically reduces the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s central authority, similar efforts are likely to fail, said William B. Gould IV, a former chairman of the labor-relations board and an emeritus professor of law at Stanford University.

“I think this will inhibit, if not kill, the possibility of collective bargaining in the big athletic conferences,” he said.