6 Major Reasons You Should Care About the Labor Battles in
 Professional Sports
     
     Sports labor battles result in some of the only
     nationwide, well-publicized discussions of union
     negotiations and union busting.

 By Sarah Jaffe

 AlterNet
 September 25, 2012

 http://www.alternet.org/6-major-reasons-you-should-care-about-labor-battles-professional-sports

 Yelling at the refs is a time-honored tradition in sports,
 but it's been brought to a new level this season in the
 National Football League, as the experienced, unionized
 referees have been locked out by the league since the
 beginning of August. They've been replaced by refs whose
 experience comes from places like the Lingerie Football
 League. Replacement refs have so far been removed from games
 for open support for one of the teams, made mistakes over
 which team was on the field, and one reportedly told a
 player "I need you for my fantasy team!"

 But now there's another sports lockout to worry about, and
 in this case the target might have a little bit more ammo on
 their side. The National Hockey League has just locked out
 its players (for the second time in less than 10 years)
 despite healthy revenues and a sweet new television
 contract. While several players have already signed deals to
 play overseas, the possible loss of an entire season is a
 big blow not only to athletes who have limited careers, but
 to fans.

 People commonly write off sports labor disputes as
 "Millionaires fighting billionaires." It can be hard for the
 average working person to feel bad for the rich players
 whose massive salaries make front-page news. But sports
 labor battles result in some of the only nationwide, well-
 publicized discussions of union negotiations and union
 busting. This year's lockouts are particularly egregious
 examples of the latter. Locking out the refs, Dave Zirin and
 Mike Elk at the Nation said, "is like using an Uzi on a
 field mouse."

 Why should you care about these lockouts? Here's a quick
 rundown:

 1. Lockout, not strike. Many people mistakenly call any work
 stoppage in professional sports a strike. Nothing could be
 further from the truth. As Brad Kurtzberg at Bleacher Report
 wrote, "Nobody is more responsible right now for the fact
 that we do not have NHL hockey than the owners."

 A lockout is a decision by management to shut workers out of
 their job in an attempt to force their union to concede,
 usually on wages or benefits. In the case of the NFL, the
 referees' jobs have been filled by less-qualified workers --
 scabs, in the old union parlance, a word that's fallen out
 of favor in recent years but still maintains a whole lot of
 power in the right context. They will do the job for less
 and don't mind helping the owners bust a union's power. It's
 easy to hate the scab refs or to mock them, but Barry
 Petchesky at Deadspin reminds us that ultimately, the rage
 should be directed at the owners, who, as Zirin and Elk
 note, stand to save $62,000 per team if they break the union
 and get everything they want.

     It's an important distinction to note that most
     criticism of the replacement officials is directed not
     at them, but at the league for forcing it to come to
     this point. We know the refs are doing the best they
     can; we know they're just not prepared. (More than
     getting the calls right, memorizing the rule book and
     keeping control of the game is hard. It takes years of
     experience.)

 In the case of the NHL, the latest collective bargaining
 agreement between the players' union and the owners is up.
 The players were willing to continue playing without a
 contract as long as negotiations were continuing, but the
 owners, it appears, would rather cancel games and lose money
 than allow the players to look sympathetic.

 2. Lockouts are on the rise around the country. It's
 important to talk about the difference between a strike and
 a lockout because lockouts are on the rise, and not just in
 professional sports.

 As New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse wrote
 this winter, the number of strikes has fallen to just one-
 sixth the level of 20 years ago, while lockouts have grown
 to a record rate. Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial
 relations at Clark University, told Greenhouse:

      This is a sign of increased employer militancy.
      Lockouts were once so rare they were almost unheard of.
      Now, not only are employers increasingly on the
      offensive and trying to call the shots in bargaining,
      but they're backing that up with action - in the form
      of lockouts.

 And just like the NFL and NHL, the corporations locking out
 workers across the US are doing just fine; in some cases
 making record profits and paying their executives record
 salaries. They're simply taking advantage of an anti-union
 political climate and high unemployment -- which makes it
 easier to find replacement workers -- to pressure workers to
 give in.

 Replacement workers can legally be paid less, though they
 can't be hired as permanent replacements. In the case of the
 NFL referees, finding replacement workers seems to have been
 easy, though their competence is questioned more and more
 each week; in the case of the players in the NHL or other
 leagues, they're pressured not by replacements but by the
 ticking clock on their own career. DeMaurice Smith,
 executive director of the NFL players union, told
 Greenhouse, "A lot of players have careers of two or three
 years, and you might get a player who asks, `At what point
 is this fight worth one-third of my career?'"

 3. Safety matters. Those careers are short because players,
 particularly in hockey and football, put their bodies on the
 line every time they take to the ice or the field. Hits are
 part of the game, as much so as dazzling athleticism. We
 gasp when a body hits the boards, when a slip or a dodge to
 the wrong side lands a player at the bottom of a pile of
 bodies, and we cheer when they get back up, seemingly
 uninjured, and keep playing.

 As Travis Waldron at ThinkProgress put it:

     I realized this weekend, during college football's
     opening weekend, that I can't watch the game the way I
     used to. Not after a summer filled with reports about
     the dangers of the game, a suicide perhaps caused by
     concussion- related depression, and a dispute over
     player safety. I notice every bone-crushing hit, every
     whip of the head, every helmet-to-helmet clash in a way
     I never have before, and I wince not just because my
     favorite team's best player might be hurt, but because
     somewhere, at some level, young men are racking up
     seemingly routine hits that will affect them for the
     rest of their lives.

 The NFL and NHL have both come under fire in recent years
 for the amount of injuries, specifically concussions, that
 players face. But the NFL's commitment to safety is
 especially suspect when they're willing to roll the dice on
 their players' safety by loading the field with
 inexperienced refs who have trouble controlling the game.

 Those short careers and wild health risks are why the
 players make the big bucks, and even then only a few
 superstars are pocketing millions. As Erik Loomis said back
 in 2010, "These guys are America's gladiators. A few are
 stars, but a lot sacrifice themselves in relative anonymity
 and risk long-term harm. A high salary is the least they
 deserve, particularly given the wealth of the owners." The
 responsibility for their lives falls on refs who make much
 less. And the owners are willing to risk all that to save
 themselves a few grand.

 4. The owners epitomize the 1 percent. So who are these
 owners, anyway? They're the billionaires, not just the 1
 percent but the .001 percent -- what Timothy Noah calls
 "stinking rich." James Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis
 Colts, has a net worth of $1.5 billion; Jeremy Jacobs, the
 hardline owner of the Boston Bruins - who's leading the
 charge for concessions from the players (and a leader in
 forcing the last lockout, too) -- is worth about $2.7
 billion, largely from selling snacks and beer at sporting
 arenas. And they're making bank on the game, too-the NHL is
 back to excellent shape after the season-ending 2004-2005
 lockout, after which the owners got pretty much everything
 they wanted. And we've already noted how little the NFL's
 refs cost the league in relation to its revenues. Could
 there be an ideological reason these ultra-wealthy
 businessmen want to break the unions?

 Take Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider. He's the chairman
 of Comcast-Spectacor, which is partially owned by Comcast-
 yes, the media conglomerate that pays the NHL's TV contract.
 Snider was one of the founders of the Ayn Rand Institute in
 1985; after a split within the "movement," he became a
 supporter of the Atlas Society, the same place where Paul
 Ryan gave his speech calling for the end of Medicare. He was
 the executive producer of the Atlas Shrugged film and has
 publicly stated that "Capitalists build up business so that
 they can give weaker members of society jobs."

 As Larry Brooks at the New York Post noted in the run-up to
 the lockout, owners like Snider have been loading up on
 talented players and signing fat contracts full of bonuses
 they never intend to pay:

     Here is "Mr. Snider" agreeing to pay Weber $52 million
     in signing bonuses within the next three calendar years
     while engaged in an effort to prevent players from
     receiving even a nickel in signing bonuses going
     forward.

     Here is "Mr. Snider" using his financial might to bulk
     up the Flyers while at the same time pledging to
     bankroll a lockout in order to stop the competition from
     ever doing this again.

     For you see, Snider's NBC/Comcast television contract
     with the NHL calls for the network to pay the league in
     full for this season - believed between $150 million and
     $160 million - even if 2012-13 is canceled in full.

 These disputes are too often written off as rich guys
 fighting amongst themselves, but it's simply not fair to
 compare the average NHL salary of around $2.4 million (the
 floor is around $525,000) to the money the owners have.
 These are some of the richest men in the world, and they
 show the same contempt for their employees whether they be
 referees or star players.

 5. All pretense of necessity is off. Did I mention that the
 leagues are doing great? Because they are. Like most of the
 U.S.'s big businesses in the years following economic
 crisis, professional sports are making money hand over fist.
 The average NFL team is worth some $1.1 billion, Dave
 Jamieson at the Huffington Post notes, and even NFL
 commissioner Roger Goodell doesn't pretend that paying the
 refs decently would break them. Instead, the sticking point
 has become the pension plan the league has long had-like so
 many other corporations, the NFL wants to switch the refs to
 a 401(k) plan. "A lot of our guys have made life-career
 decisions based on assuming that pension would be there,"
 Scott Green of the NFL Referees Association told Jamieson.

 And the NHL? Well, their biggest problem is actually that
 the owners won't make nice with one another. James Mirtle at
 the Globe and Mail explains, "The NHL as a whole, in other
 words, now makes money - and if revenues were 100 percent
 shared among owners, they'd all be profitable."

 Mirtle notes that the bottom 10 teams in the league (in such
 notorious hockey cities as Phoenix) aren't making enough
 money to cover expenses, while the rich teams have little
 interest in sharing revenue the way, say, the NFL or Major
 League Baseball do.

 "It's an owner versus owner problem more than it is an owner
 versus player one," Mirtle writes, but as a player agent
 tells him, "Owners would rather try to pound on players than
 pound on each other."

 Back in 2004, the league was struggling and the owners at
 least had an argument for shutting down the entire season.
 But it took years for the league to recover from that
 lockout; it appears that the owners are willing to shoot
 themselves in the foot in order to smack the players down
 one more time.

 6. A labor issue your anti-union relatives will understand.
 With all that said, it's a fact that many people still can't
 dredge up a lot of sympathy for people making a lot more
 money than most of us do. At a time when teachers' salaries
 are decried as too high even by liberal writers, it's pretty
 hard to convince even sports fans that they should
 sympathize with athletes who make up to $10 million a year.

 Yet the referees lockout might finally serve as an object
 lesson. It's much easier to find some sympathy for part-time
 employees who make, while a healthy salary, a tiny one in
 comparison to both th owners and the players. And watching
 the game each week as replacement officials bungle calls and
 lose control of the field is growing more and more painful.
 Sports sites like Deadspin set up a "scabwatch" and a
 Change.org petition has started making the rounds calling on
 the league to bring back the real refs.
 http://deadspin.com/scabwatch/
 http://www.change.org/petitions/nfl-owners-bring-back-the-
 nfl-referees

 As Jeff MacGregor wrote in one of the most eloquent defenses
 not just of the refs, but of labor unions:

     You know that your leisure to watch an NFL game on
     Sunday was argued and bargained and fought for by
     unions, right? That the wages you spent on that game-day
     flatscreen were argued and bargained and fought for by
     unions, right? That your standing as a member of the
     American middle-class was argued and bargained and
     fought for by 200 years of collective effort and
     sacrifice and blood on the part of folks just like you,
     right?

     Or maybe you don't. Maybe we've lost the habit of
     looking out for each other. Of empathy. Fellow feeling.
     Of picturing ourselves in another guy's shoes. When did
     we decide it made sense to give up on each other?

     Next kickoff, maybe think of it this way: That referee,
     that back judge, that stranger down there on the field
     running as hard as he can to keep up with the
     millionaires but falling farther behind with every step?
     Maybe that's us.

 [Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a
 rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at
 @[log in to unmask]]

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