How the NFL Players Union Beat the Owners

Seems to me the lessons here are clear: perfect solidarity, refusal to settle for less, ability to exploit current social, political and economic conditions, and a fighting, competitive spirit. Also, having as your opponents owner/management scumbags everybody hates really helps.

Dave Zirin at The Nation:

First and foremost, the players, led by NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, stood together. The hundreds of athletes showed extraordinary solidarity, considering that a typical pro career lasts only 3.5 years; the pressure to get back to work must have been intense. Divisions were more apparent on the ownership side, where many chief executives started to grumble that they were killing the golden goose, especially after a court ruled that they couldn’t receive network money for games that weren’t broadcast.

Second, the owners were wildly off in their prediction that fans would turn on the players. That’s the way it has always been in sports labor conflicts. At best, fans have seen it as “millionaires versus billionaires”; at worst, fans have jeered at anyone who would complain about “getting paid to play a game.”

But not this time. The most obvious reason for the profound shift in fan sentiment is that it was a lockout, not a strike. The players’ slogan, “Let us play,” reflected the fact that they—just like the fans—were happy with business as usual.

Also, there is far more consciousness now among fans about the physical toll—including concussions as well as the deadly disease ALS—that football takes on the human body. This is a sport with a 100 percent injury rate. The fact that commissioner Goodell would express sympathy for the physical plight of players even as he demanded two extra games in the season (which, according to polls, fans didn’t even want) seemed immoral and greedy.

Also, there is far more consciousness now among fans about the physical toll—including concussions as well as the deadly disease ALS—that football takes on the human body. This is a sport with a 100 percent injury rate. The fact that commissioner Goodell would express sympathy for the physical plight of players even as he demanded two extra games in the season (which, according to polls, fans didn’t even want) seemed immoral and greedy.

And finally, workers across the nation have taken it on the chin at the hands of big business. This lockout would have sent to the unemployment lines stadium workers, parking lot attendants and everyone else who scrapes by thanks to NFL Inc. Steeler All-Pro Troy Polamalu seemed to capture the moment when he said, “It’s unfortunate right now. I think what the players are fighting for is something bigger. A lot of people think it’s millionaires versus billionaires, and that’s the huge argument. The fact is, it’s people fighting against big business. The big-business argument is, ‘I got the money and I got the power, therefore I can tell you what to do.’ That’s life everywhere. I think this is a time when the football players are standing up and saying, ‘No, no, no, the people have the power.’”

Standing strong together and going for the win is an attitude NFL players have been taught from day one. It served them well in a lockout that no one predicted they would win. In fact, one anonymous source in the union said, “These guys are so competitive, some of them don’t want to settle for a bigger piece of the pie. They want the whole bakery!”

Winning this battle didn’t only secure for the players a fair collective bargaining agreement. It didn’t only increase the earnings of veteran athletes, strengthen benefits and mercifully keep the season at sixteen games. It also raised even more important questions, which NBA players should be asking as well: What do we need owners for? Players are the game—no one shows up at Cowboys Stadium to watch Jerry Jones pace imperially up and down the sideline. We should be asking why we can’t have more fan-owned teams, similar to the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers—that’s a team with 112,000 owners. Why can’t players get equity and even ownership of the franchises themselves? And why can’t a big chunk of the revenues that players produce go back to the communities where they play? A thick percentage of all proceeds at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field goes to local charities. Given the current state of our cities, this would be a huge benefit to urban America. Also, think about how this argument combines the logical and the radical. It opens up discussions about economic democracy that the people who run the NFL—and the people who run our country—would prefer we not have.

Pro football is a players’ and fans’ game. The fans come to see the players, and taxpayers build the stadiums. The one irrelevant element is the owners. It’s time for a change.

Such a victory will be much more difficult for NBA players.

Ari Paul in The Nation:

Despite the fact that many fans dismiss sports labor conflicts as squabbles between billionaires and millionaires, the current struggle between the National Basketball Players Association and the owners has much in common with classic labor disputes, including a misrepresentation of owners’ losses and so-called worker excess. The union, meanwhile, claims that at no point during this round of bargaining has it asked for anything more than a firewall against givebacks, and argues that the owners are using a weak economy to further erode the NBPA’s power.

SNIP

But there is a broader class struggle in this dispute, and it extends far beyond the basketball court. It won’t just be the players who will lose paychecks if there is no resolution. The owners will also be effectively locking out a vast labor force surrounding the game. This includes everyone from the highly paid sportscaster to the low-wage coliseum parking-lot attendant to the part-time concession stand worker, all of whom contribute in some way to BRI, and all of whom have rent and mortgages to pay. Michael McCann, director of the Sports Law Institute at the University of Vermont, points out that without a season people may be less likely to buy sports apparel, a blow to the retail sector. And what will happen to servers at sports bars who depend on big tips on game night? “They’re the most vulnerable victims, because they have no seat at the table,” he said.

Through that lens, the struggle is really not about billionaires versus millionaires but billionaires versus everyone else—including consumers, some of whom perhaps need to revisit a scene from the classic comedy Airplane! A young boy visits the cockpit of an airliner mid-flight and discovers the co-pilot is basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who denies his identity despite the boy’s adulation. But the star buckles when the kid says his father believes Abdul-Jabbar’s defensive game is lacking and that he only gives a hundred percent in the post-season. Insulted, Abdul-Jabbar grabs the boy’s collar and says, “I’m out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for forty-eight minutes.”

Basketball fans demand the best from players, and that makes sense. Fans are entitled to expect that if they are paying—whether through pricey tickets, premium TV or the tax dollars that finance stadiums—they should get the most bang for their buck. But basketball is work. And just as Abdul-Jabbar described, it is hard work the average person is incapable of doing. It requires constant practice, carries the specter of injury and can only be performed in an athlete’s youth. The same can be said of many other professions, such as firefighting. And while one might scoff that we don’t need basketball the way we need first responders, the reality is that any work stoppage in a major sports league has enormous and harmful economic consequences.

The reality here is that the owners are using a recessionary market to justify economic restructuring that would put more money in their pockets, taking it from the highly skilled laborers who make the product so singularly mesmerizing. There is an impulse in the United States to say to skilled workers that they can afford to take some cuts. But that impulse typically stops at CEOs and owners. Maybe this high-profile labor struggle is an opportunity to confront that logical inconsistency.

Liberals know that the real drivers of economic growth are workers, and liberals always take the side of workers against owners.