Will 2022 be the Year of the Athletic Worker in North America?
That depends on to what extent 2022 will also be the year of the athletic supporter
The potential for 2022 to be a winning year for many athletic workers in North America exists. How much of that potential they will actually realize depends not only on their own action and solidarity but other workers’ solidarity with their struggles. For certain, the opportunities appear to be many. I’ll break them down and go into how other workers can support their comrades.
New collective bargaining agreements on the way
Athletic workers in two of North America’s biggest professional sports leagues are currently negotiating new collective bargaining agreements. These are workers in Major League Baseball and the National Women’s Soccer League.
MLB has already locked out members of the MLB Players Association in an attempt to force workers to cede ground in their struggle. At stake is worker compensation from a few angles.
Primarily, workers in the MLBPA want to make gains in getting more of the revenue their labor produces to more of its membership. Under the old CBA, franchise owners manipulated the system to undercompensate many workers relative to their actual value and keep them from getting to free agency, where they could exercise their greatest agency.
Additionally, workers want to fight off an attempt by franchise owners to lower a luxury tax that effectively serves as a salary cap. MLB franchise owners have feigned concern about being “profitable” to consumers and used that to justify putting out a product on the cheap.
The truth is the luxury tax has been nothing but a way in which franchise owners share revenues among themselves to deny the same to workers. Workers’ piece of the overall revenue pie in MLB is at its lowest point in six years and could get smaller if franchise owners are the undisputed victors in these negotiations.
In the NWSL, the subjects of negotiations are much broader. This will be the first governing CBA in the league’s much briefer history and it comes at a time when US Soccer will no longer subsidize national team members’ salaries. Every facet of the relationship between workers, the clubs that employ them, and the league as the governing body is at stake.
While these workers and their representatives fight for their future at bargaining tables, other workers are in greater need of formal structures to support their causes. For that reason, solidarity from other workers this year could be most impactful in these realms.
College athletes, MMA fighters are among most exploited entering 2022
As we enter 2022, the situation around labor for college athletes in the United States and fighters in North American mixed martial arts enterprises remains some of the worst in the sporting world.
The UFC is a good example of how labor in MMA is treated as expendable. Fighters on that circuit are not provided health coverage for long-term care and much like in MLB, the system is intentionally set up to deny the largest chunk of revenue to the majority of workers while stakeholders pocket profits.
Recently, Jake Paul called more attention to this.
I’ve devoted a lot of space in previous newsletters to the exploitation of athletic workers on the campuses of colleges and universities in the USA. Many institutions take part in the college sports industry and benefit from that exploitation. The sheer size of the industry makes it one of the single-largest exploiters of human capital in the country.
If workers in that industry realized their power and drastically improved their situation, it would have a positive ripple effect for all workers. It would be a tremendous blow to the capitalist bait-and-switch that holds out the prospect of generational wealth as a reward of indentured servitude while simultaneously erecting every roadblock imaginable to make that prospect unreachable to further enrich the capitalist class.
Among the workers who have the most power to show solidarity with these campus athletic workers are workers in the media. Unfortunately, those workers tend to side with the capitalists to their own detriment. ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit provided another reminder of this before the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.
While other journalists who cover college sports and MMA for a living might not be as faithfully singing the praises of those who exploit labor as Herbstreit, in this context, indifference is tacit approval. Those in these roles in 2022 must shift their focus from simply providing narratives about the games and give more platforms to workers like Marcus Williamson.
Media members who work in college sports and MMA can also support their comrades putting on the show by:
Getting league/team executives and owners on the record about labor issues more often
Retiring the use of the term “student-athlete” from the lexicon forever and using “campus athletic workers” in its place
Referring to combatants in MMA as workers
When bringing up prize purses in MMA events, provide the context of the overall revenues that the circuits like the UFC report
Put in more requests for colleges’/universities’ athletic departments’ records around their finances, worker interactions, and personnel decisions, then share those with audiences
A lot of this comes down to simply being a journalist who realizes what’s good for these workers is good for all workers including himself instead of an overgrown fanboy who doesn’t want to compromise the perk of feeling like the cool kid who gets to sit in the special room, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.
Workers in other industries can show their solidarity, too. The important thing is to listen to what these comrades in these industries are asking for and then act accordingly. For example, if the lockout of MLBPA members continues into February and beyond, patronizing MLB products and services while that is ongoing is just as despicable as crossing a picket line. Close your time and wallet off to MLB then let the league and its franchises know exactly why you are doing so.
Just as the power of these workers lies in their solidarity with each other, the power of athletic supporters is in our unity. Massive, organized action always wins. Here’s to 2022 being the year that manifests in North America not just in sports but all industries.
Adding my two cents on Betty White
My younger brother shared a birthday with Betty White (62 years apart) and is one of the biggest Golden Girls aficionados I know, so when the public became aware of her passing, I immediately sent him a text to see whether we needed to put him on suicide watch.
I loved the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a youth and it’s in my nostalgic comfort TV rotation. So I imbibed a bit on New Year’s Eve and fortunately, three of the four episodes I consumed featured White’s Sue Ann Nivens depiction.
As much as Nivens and Rose Nylund were beloved characters, White overshadowed both of them herself. From her defiance of racial norms in the 1950s to her championing that yes, owners of female anatomy do indeed like to have sex for pleasure, White was a powerful force.
It’s difficult to pick just one example of her work to highlight, so I’d prefer to frame this as something to get you started going down a rabbit hole instead.