---
title: "More Than 100 College Women's Basketball Players Have Signed Union Cards"
description: "Oregon State's team filed a petition with the state labor board on Friday, the first formal step. Ten of its 13 players signed. The organizers picked Oregon deliberately, and the reason they had to explains why a similar filing in California would be harder."
category: "Sports"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/sports
author: "Lucía Fuentes"
published: 2026-07-31T16:55:20.000Z
updated: 2026-07-31T16:55:20.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/more-than-100-college-women-s-basketball-players-have-signed-union-cards
tags: ["college-sports", "labor", "womens-basketball", "ncaa", "unions"]
---
# More Than 100 College Women's Basketball Players Have Signed Union Cards

Oregon State's team filed a petition with the state labor board on Friday, the first formal step. Ten of its 13 players signed. The organizers picked Oregon deliberately, and the reason they had to explains why a similar filing in California would be harder.

More than 100 Division I women's basketball players have signed union
authorization cards through the United College Athletes Association, and on Friday
one team turned that into a filing.

Oregon State's players
[petitioned the Oregon Employment Relations Board](https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/49497178/over-100-college-women-basketball-players-join-union-effort)
for recognition as a union and the right to bargain with the university. Ten of
the team's 13 players signed. Players at Maryland and Indiana are among those
involved elsewhere.

The distinction between signing a card and filing a petition matters. Most college
athlete organizing over the past decade has stopped at the first. This is the
second.

## What they want

The stated demands are compensation, safety requirements and academic protections,
plus a role in decisions that are currently made without them.

"We are professional athletes," said Maryland's Oluchi Okananwa. "Although the
NCAA begs to differ, we are employees." Oregon State's Jenna Villa put the
organizing case more simply: "We want one voice." Jada Williams, a transfer to
LSU, framed it as governance: "Nobody should be making decisions without us."

The NCAA's position is that college sports is an educational extracurricular
activity rather than employment, that schools could not absorb the cost of treating
athletes as employees, and that many athletes do not want employee status.

## Why Oregon, and why that matters here

The organizers did not pick Oregon State at random.

College athletes at public universities cannot go to the National Labor Relations
Board, because the NLRB has no jurisdiction over state employees. Their route runs
through state labor law, and only some states permit public employees to organize
in a way that would reach an athlete. Oregon does. That is the reason the first
filing is in Corvallis rather than anywhere else.

For Los Angeles, this is the whole question. UCLA is a public university, so a
filing by its athletes would go to California's Public Employment Relations Board
and would turn on California law and on whether that board considers a scholarship
athlete an employee, which no California body has decided. USC is private, so its
athletes would go to the NLRB, into the same federal question that has been open
since Northwestern's football players tried it more than a decade ago and did not
get a ruling on the merits.

Two schools eight miles apart would be litigating in two different systems under
two different definitions of the same job.

## What this is not, yet

No athlete anywhere has been recognized as an employee for collective bargaining
purposes and kept that status through appeal. Oregon State can decline voluntary
recognition, and the state board's decision, whichever way it goes, will be
appealed by whoever loses.

What has changed is the ground the argument is being had on. Revenue sharing has
already moved money directly to athletes, which makes the NCAA's position that
this is an extracurricular activity harder to hold. The union filing does not
depend on winning that argument in public. It depends on one state board's reading
of one state's employment law, and then on the courts.

## Sources

- [Over 100 college women's basketball players join union effort](https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/49497178/over-100-college-women-basketball-players-join-union-effort)