Paying the walking billboards
Pictured at podium: Proletariat champion Kain Colter
The sports world often takes a verbal beating in progressive circles. Then again, arenas of populist interest increasingly do. We have sports to thank for many things in the United States, and the general strengthening of labor unions is one of them. The Major League Baseball Players Association has long been one of the most powerful and influential unions in the U.S. Now, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Northwestern University football players have the right to form a union. The impact could reach far beyond college sports, and even sports in general.
The most talked about issue with this case is the potential monetary compensation for the athletes, but just as important for them should be the issue of access to health coverage and to worker's compensation. These are benefits that might have the most direct impact, particularly in an activity as physically dangerous as football.
The sham concept that is the “student-athlete” has proven to be long-lasting and ugly. The players and the public have both been told that efforts on the field of play in collegiate athletics, efforts which produce billions of dollars for individuals other than the players themselves, are being fairly compensated by free tuition, but the NLRB has found that it’s actually that tacit agreement that proves the athletes are actually “workers.” The value of college tuition has already put a price on their work. Consider this analogy: A restaurant proprietor tells you that you can have a free meal, but in exchange, you have to linger after closing time and help clean the restaurant. That meal isn’t really free, is it? It’s precisely the same with college sports.
Should college football players be paid outright? I happen to believe they should, but that’s not even the point. Maybe athletes in some specific sports shouldn’t be paid, like if they don’t generate any revenue for the school, but the point is that they are all workers, and workers in America have the right to form a union and make formal, collective demands. Maybe for some the compensation is only tuition. Schools already make decisions as to which players get full scholarships, partial ones, or none at all. Perhaps instead it would now be four years of guaranteed tuition, instead of what we see today when “compensated” athletes routinely lose their scholarships after suffering debilitating injuries. Maybe for others it will be the establishment of a trust fund for their future financial security, or perhaps a cut of a lucrative shoe contracts. Who knows? If I’m a star athlete visiting a college campus tomorrow: “What do you got for me?”
Make no mistake, colleges are terrified of this entire idea. That’s why they’ve been misrepresenting the relationship between "student" and school for generations. If the athletes organize, it might next be the graduate teachers, and the adjuncts, and the maintenance and building staff, and then what would we have? A lot of better-paid Americans, I guess.
This ruling has the potential for loud repercussions beyond the university environment. That’s the really exciting part. Schools would no longer be able to ignore the existing uncomfortable realities—the hypocrisies—of the major revenue-producing sports, which are populated primarily, and not coincidentally, by impoverished men and women of color. Northwestern is battling their own students here tooth and nail, fearing that the NCAA and Big 10 Conference could respond punitively, cutting them off from that lucrative cable TV money that jacks up the price of your monthly bill roughly four-fold. (This is what's wonderful about the labor challenge coming from within the conference that has the most lucrative TV deal.)
We may ultimately discover that we have no legitimate need for an NCAA. The governing body has served as nothing more anyway than a no-accountability cartel substituting its own authority over that of the American legal system. We may find that the NCAA’s corporate sponsors… sorry, “Corporate Champions,” have to give money to the players, not only the coaches, if they want to associate their "brand" with the institutional team brand. In my little dream world, we may even find that the football-mad, bottom-feeding, scab states of the Southern United States would have to change their “right to work” laws if they wanted their beloved teams to be able to recruit the best players.
I'm getting goose bumps. It would be a pleasure to watch both athletes and administrators get what's been coming to them.
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The NLRB ruling is a positive development for my favorite sport also—Major League Baseball. I’m sick of taxpayers supporting free minor league systems for sports that compete with baseball, which created its own true minor league system almost a century ago.
posted by CM @ 7:03 PM
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