The NFL Lockout and What It Means for the Black Community
With the current National Football League Collective Bargaining Agreement scheduled to expire on March 3, 2011 at 11:59 pm, the sports world is bracing itself for what appears to be a potential lockout of the 2011-2012 football season.
The topic has been brewing for years, ever since the original labor agreement was signed in 1993 and extended in 2006. But with the season officially coming to an end after last Sunday’s Super Bowl it has become the most pressing issue for the sport today.
Will there be football come next fall? Or will we see the first work-stoppage in the NFL since the 1987-1988 season?
These are all questions that remain to be answered and that will be wrestled over in the coming months.
However, the potential impact of the lockout is much bigger than just football. It’s an issue that cuts across economic classes, and merges the road between sports and life into a singular reality. At its core, it is a classic lesson of American labor relations and will go down in history as an important demonstration of modern activism within the American workplace. The effects it can have on private industries where union representation have declined are monumental. But there’s also a more critical social significance that matters in all of this – the exercise of unity by a group heavily populated with black workers.
Professional sports are one of the few arenas in which the black worker wheels this much collective bargaining power. It doesn’t exist in Corporate America nor in Education, where many believe the greatest strides have been made in recent decades. In sports, the black male worker is irreplaceable because of the scarcity of the talent he possesses.
While the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) represents all players from every racial and social spectrum, the outcome of this new Collective Bargaining Agreement is more crucial for mid-income players (many of whom are black) than it is for those who come from already-established economic backgrounds.
Today, a great deal of the professional sports industry is made up of young black men who come from humble beginnings. So for many of them the game is their only escape out of those dire monetary conditions. For those players, over 60% of the league, the idea of long-term economic security is just as imperative as playing the game.
The NFL is the most popular pro sport in America because of these players. It has surpassed Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League in annual profitability. But such contentious labor disputes at the height of this success resurrects an often-shunned notion New York Times Columnist, William Rhoden, examined closely in his critically-acclaimed book, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete.
In the book, Rhoden articulates the imaginary line of power that black athletes have in the institution of sports, and unveils the challenges for economic growth they are faced with collectively.
In fact, the National Football League generates nearly $8 billion dollars annually in revenue, so if every black player in the NFL ever got together and decided to take control of their own destinies by starting their own league, they could likely earn a fortune. More than they are getting today.
They are some of the major revenue generators after all. The reason why the fan buys the season-ticket package and the rich guy purchases the $250,000 dollar luxury suite.
Many of them are the main attraction.
But such a demonstration is unlikely to ever take place. It wouldn’t stand the chance of succeeding no more than the Negro League was able to sustain itself in professional baseball.
Many critics who follow the sport have said that the NFL became the juggernaut it is today by practicing an ideal that is usually unpopular in this country. For decades the league has operated within what closely resembles a Socialist system of cooperative economics, where profits are evenly dispersed amongst all the franchises whether they win or lose, and adequate media coverage is provided to teams in small markets like Green-Bay as it is to those in larger markets like New York.
This concept of putting the last first and the first last worked and made everyone rich, but ultimately to their detriment. As the pie grew larger and the players began redeeming their fair shares, the owners decided to bring it to an end. As the saying goes: they want their pie and to eat it too.
Other professional leagues are without a doubt watching how this all plays out and at some point in the next couple of years will seek to curb player revenue as well. By then, if we’re lucky, the debate in football will be over, but the storm of another lockout will likely loom.
If the NFL Players Association is successful at protecting what it currently has, imagine what other unionized workforces will attempt to accomplish by forging a similar sort of unbending consensus? Maybe it will prove that Gil Scott-Heron was wrong when he famously said, “The revolution will not be televised.” Because come next fall, we just might be watching it on ESPN.
