FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
NFL Owners vs. Players

From CounterPunch:

With the NFL’s contract set to expire on March 3, and rumors of a lockout gaining momentum, fans are not only wondering if there will be a 2011-12 football season, they’re already blaming the NLFPA (National Football League Players Association) for this predicament. For whatever reason, it’s the players and their union who usually get blamed in these disputes. Rarely do fans direct their hostility toward the owners.

And

Myth #1: These guys don’t need a union.

For openers, if they didn’t have a union, they wouldn’t have minimum salaries, defined pensions, guaranteed work rules, or grievance procedures. They wouldn’t have these things because they wouldn’t have had the muscle to obtain them. Professional athletes need a union for the same reason nurses, airline pilots and autoworkers need one. Without a union, they’d be at the mercy of the owners.

And if you trust team ownership, you haven’t been paying attention. In 1990, major league baseball’s owners were found guilty of collusion, a felony, and fined $280 million. Team owners are sharp-eyed, hardbitten businessmen, not sports dilettantes. Just as defense contractors plunder the U.S. treasury while waving the American flag, team owners like to pretend they’re performing a public service rather than engaging in naked commerce.

More here.

It's really easy to fall into the standard narrative on professional sports unions versus ownership: spoiled, pampered, highly paid guys who have never held a real job want even more money so they can "play." Kind of easy to be totally unsympathetic when that's how you see it. Indeed, that's how I've felt for most of my life until it occurred to me at some point in the late 90s that there was so much money being thrown around in American professional sports, especially the NFL, that players demanding a larger share of the wealth they literally create isn't so unreasonable.

I mean, as the above linked essay observes, many of these NFL players may be millionaires, but the team owners are billionaires, making billions of dollars from the fabulous performances, injuries, blood, sweat, and tears of the players they employ. And this is no joke: playing football destroys the human body, sometimes very quickly, like when a player's spinal cord is severed on the field, or in the long term, like when multiple concussions cause early onset senile dementia for former players in their forties and fifties. If the money's in the industry, these guys deserve their fair share, no way around it.

And let's not forget that the vast majority of NFL players aren't stars, don't get the "franchise label," aren't famous enough to get a Nike promotional contract; most NFL players are workaday jocks, who show up, play in anonymity for a few hundred grand a year, and then retire when their bodies can't take it anymore. I mean, a few hundred grand is nice, really nice, no doubt about that, but teams couldn't play without these guys. There would be no NFL riches without the quiet effort made by these journeymen players. The union is for those guys, not the stars.

So sure, I support the players. Always. Unless, of course, their demands become so extreme that they threaten the very existence of professional football. But given the hundreds of billions in yearly revenue that comes to the NFL, it's very difficult to imagine players' demands killing the golden goose.

But what's really fascinating to me about these periodic labor disputes in big time sports is that the exact same argument I've just made applies to all workers in all fields. Yeah sure, it's the owners' business, but it's my work. Businesses couldn't exist, couldn't make money, without the life's efforts of people just like you and me. We all deserve a better share of the wealth we create.

It's funny, really. The Fox Newsers and their ilk have been using the word "redistribution" a lot these last few years to refer derisively to taxing the wealthy in order to pay for important social programs. As though the government was somehow stealing from capitalists and handing the money over to the undeserving. The problem, and the humor, lies in the way that this point of view utterly ignores the "redistribution" that takes place at the point that capitalists hire workers. That is, the situation is generally such that a business has an opening and offers a wage for it. For most jobs, there is no negotiation; you take it or leave it. Usually, you have to just take it because you need the income. Always, you're getting paid less than you're worth, getting paid a great deal less than the amount of wealth that your labor produces. And why wouldn't businesses do this? Why shouldn't they fleece the population for as much as they can? I mean, besides ethical considerations. Answer: there is nothing stopping businesses from doing this, short of the rare private sector labor union, or the woefully inadequate minimum wage.

In short, because people need the work, capitalists hold all the cards, and can essentially steal the lion's share of your labor. Just because they can. That's where the real "redistribution" is. And as long as we have an economic and political system that favors "redistribution" toward the capitalists, we must have a tax system that "redistributes" wealth towards those who should have gotten it in the first place. Unfortunately, we don't even really have such a system of "redistribution." Not anymore, at least, not since "liberal" President Bill Clinton signed away "welfare as we know it" back in the 90s.

It's really time for labor unions to make a comeback.

And if this doesn't get my anti-union buddy Matt to comment, nothing will.

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