Charlie Pierce with an essay about the similarities between how team owners regard their workers, and what the rest of us deal with:
The people who own professional sports teams come from the same upper corporate class that has spent 30 years destroying the idea of the American economy being a mixed system and a cooperative venture rather than purely an engine of private profit. In all their other successful ventures, keeping down the workforce has been a primary goal. The creation of a passive workforce has been so thoroughgoing that it is now a discipline taught in America’s finest business schools. Indeed, there is more than a little evidence that the elite from which we get our owners is rigidly and steadily fashioning for itself a country of independent owners and subordinate workers. Last week, for example, Rebecca Kemble of The Progressive reported on a meeting of a special committee of the Wisconsin State Legislature at which one state official said that, as far as he was concerned, the purpose of public education was to develop a “workforce.”
“In workforce development we say,” this fellow said, “you begin at birth and end at the grave.”
This is the prevailing zeitgeist in the world in which all of the owners of our professional sports teams make their real livings. Why should they be expected to act differently toward the people who work in their enterprises than they have for their hobbies? Of course, the workers in the industry of sports have a number of advantages over the anonymous workers in America’s other corporations, many of whom are hanging on by their fingernails. First, they are independently rich and independently famous. Their complaints command a spotlight. Second, they have strong and functioning unions; one can only guess what happened among the presiding blazers of the NHL when Donald Fehr took over as the head of the NHL players’ union. And third, the enterprises in question literally cannot function without them. The Sacramento Kings can’t save money by outsourcing the roster to Vietnam. Put these together, and you get the not uncommon complaint that the labor side in sports is “going too far,” usually from people whose industries have crushed their unions and/or packed their jobs overseas. In reality, sports is one of the few arenas in which the battle for power and control between management and labor approximates what it used to be, back in the days when the country had both billionaires and a functioning middle class. And that sticks in several affluent craws.
So we get stories like the ones last week, in which the NHL owners demand a few additional pounds of flesh and the management of the NFL announces, seriously, that it might be willing to throw its quality of play to the seals. These are only opening bids, but what drives them all is something permanent and, as near as I’ve been able to tell, immutable. It’s about control and, therefore, about power, and if once the Red Sox had given a damn about anything else, they could have had Jack Morris starting in the 1988 playoffs.
