__
College sports, as reported by the NYTimes‘ business columnist Joe Nocera, “A Union Stands Up for Players“:
“I hate bullies,” said DeMaurice Smith.
__
Smith, a former white-collar criminal defense lawyer with the high-powered law firm Patton Boggs, has been the executive director of the National Football League Players Association since 2009. That is to say, he runs the union that represents professional football players. Last year, he wrestled with the bullies running the N.F.L., who locked out the players when they couldn’t reach a labor agreement. Now he is setting his sights on an even bigger bully: the N.C.A.A.
__
It’s about time. Over the past few months, as I have been looking into the practices of the N.C.A.A., I have been struck by the fact that the players, exploited by everyone else in the system, have no one to advocate for them. The N.C.A.A. likes to say it exists to “protect student-athletes,” but it’s a laughable claim. The N.C.A.A. exists to rationalize the tawdry fact that the labor force of a $6 billion business — the estimated revenue of college football and men’s basketball — receives no compensation. (That’s what amateurism in big-time college sports really is: unpaid labor.) Coaches, athletic directors, conference presidents, the N.C.A.A. itself — they all take advantage of the teenagers who are making them rich, knowing their young charges have no recourse…
I don’t watch college sports — I managed to spend 16 years working at a Big 10 university without ever attending a game — and I am objectively pro-union. So maybe I’m biased, but when civil rights historian Taylor Branch writes an Atlantic cover article on “The Shame of College Sports“, maybe there’s more to discuss than this year’s lineups?
Cacti
Protecting the corrupt big-college indentured servant system of “amateur” sports is the sole function of the NC-double asshole.
MattR
I think there is very good argument to be made for paying college athletes, but last I checked a full scholarship, including room and board, qualified as compensation.
I don’t think I have ever heard it mentioned, but I wonder if there would be Title IX issues if they started to compensate football and men’s basketball players only.
Cacti
@MattR:
The seat revenue from a single game can cover the cost of scholly’s for a whole year.
Raven
And people get hurt playing football.
Raven
You want to work and angle on this? Think about all the African American athletes playing at the “flagship” universities of these cracker ass, racist motherfucking states. Organize the brothers on the Bama football team to strike against the voter ID and immigration laws. That’ll get their fucking attention.
JPL
Baseball has triple A teams, football has college players. Colleges should not be training grounds for NFL players. IMO
btw..I love watching football but maybe not the Saints anymore.
Raven
This shit ain’t goin nowhere.
Arm The Homeless
Keep yuckin’ it up.
You’re not fooling anyone. If you didn’t give a shit about how bad you fuckers were losing, you wouldn’t be here, you’d be trolling Rentboy
Jim Gauuan
They deserve to be paid. Coaches are raking in the dough too. The room, board and tuition argument is bullshit. Damn kids can’t even get a free plane ticket home.
Brian S
@MattR: A good chunk of student athletes aren’t on a full scholarship. Many are on half scholarships, and all of those scholarships can be revoked for some pretty specious reasons.
The Moar You Know
Huh, this is timely. I just found a court filing from 2003 that describes in gruesome detail how my dad and father-in-law (both worked for the same company) got chiseled out of their pensions by their union, who figured that they’d fuck over the 150 old guys who were only a couple of years from retirement and give the bennies to the 3,500 younger guys, who would be around and voting for the union leadership for another few decades.
I have been a union member in previous jobs and still believe that tripling the number of unions in this country would fix most of our ills, but goddamn this has me shaken and enraged. My dad and my father in law broke their bodies and health performing one of the most difficult and demanding jobs that exist – they’ were airline pilots – and they didn’t deserve to lose everything they worked for. The worst part is that the company and the government were willing to take care of their pensions. But the union decided they had better uses for the money.
Martin
The Atlantic had a quite good cover story along these lines.
It hit right when the Penn State scandal broke.
Brian R.
This Washington Monthly article is amazing, while the comment thread needs fumigating. Or at least someone else there to poke fun of all the teatards.
gene108
Not all colleges and college athletes play at institutions that rake in tens of millions and pay their coaches seven figures.
Most college athletics programs are probably just getting by.
If you start paying athletes, how do you create equality?
Does this mean Texas-Austin or the University of Michigan should be subsidizing the athletic budgets of the “sisters-of-the-poor”?
If it came to that, you’d start having big schools opt out of the NCAA’s and create their own athletics association and all bets are off about what little of amateurism still exists in college athletics.
Think about it, the big college conferences – B1G, Big 12, ACC, PAC 12, and Big East – compromise about 60 teams in total. D-1A/FBS football consists of about 110 teams. Expand those conferences out a bit to pick up some of the better mid-majors and you’d have no need for the NCAA in college football.
Same goes with college basketball. There are about 330 teams playing D-1 basketball. Most of them are small, have no real shot at winning anything beyond their conference tournament and are probably kept alive by whatever profit sharing does exist in college athletics.
Start paying players and those schools will close up their athletics programs, because they can’t compete with bigger schools.
Right now there’s some party because of the scholarship limits the NCAA imposes, for example.
I just don’t see how you can create an equitable system to pay college athletes.
I’m not saying the NCAA is perfect. Far from it, I just think once you start paying college football and men’s basketball players to play, you’ll throw what ever sense of equality exists right now.
Think of MLB, with single A, AA and AAA clubs being independent entities trying to compete for talent with MLB clubs, with their existing resources.
That’s sort of what college athletics can turn into more than it already is if you start greasing the wheels with money going to more parties.
P.S. This ignores the prevalence of street agents on college basketball influencing a high school kids decisions and the rise of street agents in football.
P.P.S. You might as well abandon the AAU all together, because Nike, Adiddas, etc. would probably view it as a good investment to luck up a 14 y.o. to potentially have enough star power at 20 y.o. to boost sales, if they endorse their products, by sponsoring some “AAU” teams for these kids.
Raven
The announcer on the SEC Tourney game just called a player the “Hoop Nazi”
NO HOOP for you!
MattR
@Brian S: True, though if we are talking football and basketball then the vast majority are on full scholarship (and the walk-ons would probably never qualify for pay if it was allowed). If I understand properly, the problem is not so much that scholarships can be revoked but that they are issued on a year by year basis and the renewal is at the complete discretion of the coaches. I also thought that that was changing in the near future so that schools will finally be allowed to offer guaranteed four/five year scholarships if they choose. (Though it would be even better if they were required to guarantee the scholarship for multiple years)
Martin
@The Moar You Know: Unions are like all organizations – good and bad. One of the unions I worked with challenged every effort we made to promote a few of our staff that would have taken them out of the union. Took us 3 years to get one promoted. That was pretty shitty. But they’ve done a better job of delivering reliable wage increases than the non-union employees.
But bottom line, workers are better off with an organization that is accountable to them over one that is only accountable to shareholders, even if it doesn’t always translate in practice.
Andrey
@The Moar You Know: Wait, really? Being an airline pilot is that bad for your health? I’m not disbelieving you, just really surprised and curious. Outside of catastrophic failure modes (crashes), what are the health issues involved with it?
gene108
@JPL:
If it wasn’t for the popularity of college football, the NFL wouldn’t exist.
If it wasn’t for the popularity of college basketball, the NBA would not exist.
College football and basketball became big time well before professional leagues in either sport became viable.
Just for historical reference regarding the popularity and talent of the NFL versus college athletes back in the day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_College_All-Star_Game
The college all-stars went 2-1-2 in the first five contests.
The Moar You Know
@Andrey: Massive long-term sleep deprivation, long-term hazardous chemical exposure and the really bad one – long term radiation exposure.
My dad’s in his mid-60s, as is my FIL. They both look to be in their late 70s or early 80s.
techno
The bullies LOVE team sports because it lets them intimidate even elite workers. They can make them play in dangerous conditions and they don’t even have to pay them. They hire bullies as coaches—screamers NOT teachers.
It’s sickening. I had a roommate who played football when I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota. He was a walk-on so he wasn’t even offered a scholarship until he was a junior and then suffered a career-ending injury on the opening kick-off of his first scholarship year. They promptly gave it to someone else. He was a pharmacist’s son and could give detailed medical descriptions of the kinds of injuries that players played with. (sputter)
For FREE! It’s as bad as slavery and just as disgusting!
Martin
@The Moar You Know: Don’t forget that it’s a high stress job as well. Delays, agitated passengers, hijacking (I assume they were flying in the 70s), weather – just general things going wrong knowing that you have really catastrophic failure modes and a lot of people you’re responsible for.
scav
@The Moar You Know: Knew about the radiation, the sleep deprivation worries me a bit. Long Haul truckers have regulations I’m pretty sure and things are getting better about MDs and hours — has this been getting better for pilots? Or is it more due to the irregular pattern of flights or something else?
ETA: Cicadian rhythms should be messed up with the time-zone jumping and light patterns being changeable.
The Moar You Know
@Martin: I’m my father’s son. Yeah, they were flying in the seventies, my dad started flying the year I was born. It’s pretty stressful on the families as well. I’ve done sim training with them. It’s not a low-stakes job.
I can’t believe this. My wife found the filing not an hour ago, I just finished reading it. She’s in tears, and I’m having kind of a crisis of conscience or something. I feel like a number of things I’ve believed in most of my life are maybe not so true.
No. The rules are insane and in my opinion criminal.
Mean no disrespect, all, but I gotta check out. I’m not helping the thread and I need to go attend to my wife. My dad invested a lot outside, he’s OK. Her dad didn’t, and isn’t, and we didn’t really know why until just now.
CarolDuhart2
@The Moar You Know: Let’s not forget-you probably haven’t-that it’s also a pretty sedentary job-sitting in the cockpit for hours, combined with stress-it’s a job where you can’t really have downtime on the job. What I mean is that you really can’t go to the breakroom and put your head on the table (I used to work nights) and sleep. It’s also a job where mistakes can be lethal and the margin for error less than a surgeon’s.
As for paying college athletes, what gets me is the sorry way in which injured or unfavored college athletes really get nothing in exchange for their misery. The sports like baseball and soccer where lower level players go to farm teams instead of college seem more fair. The players make a living wage, earn credits towards some kind of retirement, health insurance and can earn extra money and send it to their parents.
Perhaps the NCAA can pool money so that their athletes can at least get a living stipend and can either take some money home if they are cut, or trade that for a second chance at an education as a non-athlete.
Morbo
Close enough?
Abstruse
Meh, The system is so currupt you’ve got centenarians protecting pedophiles. I’d love to see that change, but as someone that is still paying for the education I received it’s hard for me to sympathize.
Thatgaljill
Last fall I was lucky enough to attend a very small dinner with some of alumni network leadership of a major football school, the University’s President and AD plus some additional athletics staff. I was seated next to the lovely young lady responsible for the athletic department’s endowment fund development. During the course of dinner I learned A LOT about athletic scholarships that I hadn’t known before, as well as the balance of scholarships across all sports for Men and Women.
Now, I’m a MAJOR college football fan… I have my team and a team I follow in every other conference. I’m no fan of some of the ridiculous rules the NCAA comes up with (seriously, they dictate how many pages can be in the media guide). I’m a strong believer that there should be additional compensation over the scholarship because there’s a lot of money generated and to do so would also give student athletes a monetary incentive to stay in school. Perhaps it could be held in trust until after they earn their degree…
And I’m not sure a third party advocating for the interests of student athletes is actually a bad idea.
JoyfulA
@CarolDuhart2: No schools should have athletic teams, and that includes high schools. Athletics should be clubs and farm teams.
Soonergrunt
I’d like to take just a moment to direct everybody’s attention to today’s Balloon Jobs thread. If you haven’t taken a look, please do.
If you need a job or know someone who does, see what’s available and post the basic info.
If you have or know of a job available or about to become available, take a look at the people available, and post the basic info.
And now, back to your very important thread sticking to the man in the higher education sports industry!
Soonergrunt
@Morbo: If I see anything like that, there WILL be smashed tail lights. Probably flat tires, too.
Michael Bersin
@gene108: Bingo!
Omnes Omnibus
@JoyfulA: Disagree. I think athletics can teach students a lot. Also too, I was involved in “minor” sports (cross country, track, fencing, and rugby) and I went to a D-III university where sports were different than they are at the big schools.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morbo: Is that for fucking real?
Drum Circles And Weed
@Omnes Omnibus: That and much, much worse (general warning).
Omnes Omnibus
@Drum Circles And Weed: What a truly offensive website.
Joel
@gene
No offense, but fuck parity in college sports. Let’s get some semi pro leagues and do it like baseball.
Anonymous At Work
This’ll be squashed very easily. The NFL and NBA can refuse to hire any players from a college “union”, nor could incoming players be recruited to a “union” but one would have to be set up at each college, each year. There isn’t enough continuity to establish a system here.
FridayNext
@gene108:
You: Most college athletics programs are probably just getting by.
Me: Then close them. That’s what they do with academic departments they can’t support.
You: If you start paying athletes, how do you create equality?
Me: Who cares?
You: Does this mean Texas-Austin or the University of Michigan should be subsidizing the athletic budgets of the “sisters-of-the-poor”?
Me: No. Let the “sisters-of-the-poor” raise their own gd money. If not, close their program.
You: If it came to that, you’d start having big schools opt out of the NCAA’s and create their own athletics association and all bets are off about what little of amateurism still exists in college athletics.
Me: I’m okay with that. Most true amateur athletes are on the intramural field anyway.
You: Think about it, the big college conferences – B1G, Big 12, ACC, PAC 12, and Big East – compromise about 60 teams in total. D-1A/FBS football consists of about 110 teams. Expand those conferences out a bit to pick up some of the better mid-majors and you’d have no need for the NCAA in college football.
Me: That’s a bad thing?
You: Same goes with college basketball. There are about 330 teams playing D-1 basketball. Most of them are small, have no real shot at winning anything beyond their conference tournament and are probably kept alive by whatever profit sharing does exist in college athletics.
Me: Again, so what? College athletics existed for decades on nothing but regional tournaments and rivalries. Arguably, football still does with computer and pundit wizardry thrown in to create some sort of socially constructed champion. Why would it be a bad thing to go back to that. Oh right. It would be less lucrative.
You: Start paying players and those schools will close up their athletics programs, because they can’t compete with bigger schools.
Me: Or maybe the smaller programs would scale back down to the size they were before the whole thing turned into a giant pyramid scheme with players at the bottom. Or maybe the programs do shut down and the athletes actually go to class and colleges go back to being about education. Oh the horror.
You: Right now there’s some party because of the scholarship limits the NCAA imposes, for example.
Me: I’ll assume you meant parity there. If it is in the interests of the teams to find parity they will with or without paying the players because they will earn billions more with it, than without it.
You: I just don’t see how you can create an equitable system to pay college athletes.
Me: I am rarely a strict market person. But there are billions of dollars being made here. I find it hard to believe you couldn’t shave off a little for the players to get a few crumbs and still have completive games, tournaments, and championships when it is so overwhelmingly in the rich boys interests to make it happen.
At minimum players should have their own advocates be it a union, an agent, or whatever. I currently attend a Div-I school and the athletes are literally treated as property of the school. The athletes, I mean student athletes, don’t even have control of their own image or name. There are Pepsi (official soft drink on campus, another million dollar endorsement deal) machines all over campus with the photos of coaches and players from all the teams, men and women. The coaches get paid premiums for this well above their salaries and bonuses. The players get nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Our football team had a 500 year (with some scrub opponents on the other front end of the schedule) and the coach still walked away with millions in salary, bonuses, and endorsement money. With a system that rewards mediocrity that lavishly (and he would have gotten millions upon millions more if they won no games and they terminated his contract) I don’t believe for second the NCAA or the schools couldn’t find a way to find some money for the players somehow. Allow multi-year contracts, oops I mean scholarships, allow the students to earn a small stipend. Or, and I know this is crazy talk, but at least allow them to earn their own money on their own time. The coaches earn extra money doing commercials for every small business in town, why can’t the players? On our campus deans, coaches, and AD’s drive caddies, beamers, and SUV’s of all shapes and sizes and the athletes can’t even afford scooters. That’s wrong.
And if they can’t maybe this whole system doesn’t deserve to survive.
handy
Major conference college athletics is a racket. I used to enjoy NCAA hoops and football but the rush for the TV money has been killing it for me for the past several years. I suppose there always was an element (at least in the modern) but it’s just become blatant now it is sickening.
I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of a college “union” on its face, but in the spirit of the post I think tell these young people they should be grateful for getting a free ride to a college degree kind of smacks in the face of the idea that people should have every right to negotiate and fight for the value of their labor. Gratitude is a good quality to foster in a person but I don’t demand it of others, particularly those whose situations and life experiences are different from my own.
KG
@Omnes Omnibus: This. Plus, for sme of us, it was sports tha kept us interested in school. I don’t know if I’d have made it through high school if it wasn’t for water polo (and swimming, I guess). It wasn’t that I’d have not got good grades, I’d have just been bored to death. It probably would’ve done me me good in undergrad
Omnes Omnibus
@KG: Water polo? You’re fucking insane.
Little Boots
there will be an awesome rally tomorow.
KG
@FridayNext: I generally can’t stand Jay Bilas, but a while back he was on ESPN on a panel (including big time college coaches and others), and basically said, “let athletes have agents and be able to get endorsements.” That made a whole lt of sense to me. Most guys would get a couple of small deals, the schools could put some reasonable restrictions on the endorsements (no alcohol, no strip clubs), and it just makes sense
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s really cruel to the horses.
Little Boots
john, wadda ya think, want to show up?
KG
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, and in southern California, at that. I love the game though, ton of fun, made some great friends that I wouldn’t have otherwise
KG
@Soonergrunt: Once you teach them to swim, and not poop in the pool, it’s fine
peggy
@FridayNext:
Nocera suggested as a minimum:
For Big 10 type, tournament bound football teams, give the recruits a 5 or 6 year guaranteed no cut scholarship so that when they do not make the NFL, they will still have the time to get a college education. Football daily practice and traveling to games prevents serious academic study. Also provide medical care and long term disability insurance.
That college scholarship benefit nowadays disappears the moment the athlete gets hurt or loses his position. These kids are racking up concussions which may leave them brain damaged and will get kicked out of school if they complain.
Suffern ACE
I’ve now decided that this election is going to resolve around the issues of FannieMae and each candidate’s personal reflections on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Little Boots
I blame Omnes, for no particular reason.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: Come on, it’s better for their joints.
Little Boots
Omnes, will you give the gift of music?
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: Have you ever seen a palomino go off the 10 meter platform?
Not pretty.
Little Boots
@Soonergrunt:
that sounds dirty, but I don’t know why.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: That’s what thoroughbreds were bred for.
Soonergrunt
@Little Boots: It’s like a gelding doing a half-Gaynor with a twist, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Little Boots
I do.
and omnes, why so shy?
Little Boots
oh, come on, people, wake up already.
it’s just getting fun now.
Little Boots
John’s not angry, is he,
I love John.
why won’t he get that?
Little Boots
goobers.
would you get to the new thread.
if you can.
Little Boots
omnes, come upstairs.
‘
it’s weird without you.
Joey Maloney
@Morbo: Holy shit. I had to Google to make sure that wasn’t some lame Photoshop. I still can’t believe anyone would think that’s a good idea to display publicly. But it’s real.
I guess all we can hope for is that anyone so benighted as to put one of those on their car has a breakdown on Chicago’s South Side.
Omnes Omnibus
@Joey Maloney:
Tee-hee.
Phylllis
I’ve been of the opinion for a while now that if the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, etc want to continue what is essentially a damn feeder system for their teams, they ought to pay for it. Down to high school and maybe even youth leagues at this point.
Rafer Janders
@MattR:
Well, what’s the cost of a year’s tuition, plus room and board, on the open market? About $30-$50K a year, depending on the school?
That seems fair, until you consider that the coaches can make hundreds of thousands to millions a year, and when you start to compare that to what players in the NFL earn.
The truth is, even getting a full scholarships (which is actually not often a full scholarship, and is always subject to revocation, with no contractual protections) means the player is drastically underpaid.
Joey Maloney
I think the whole idea of student-athlete is outmoded, at least when the sport is played before tv cameras in sixty-thousand-seat arenas and the coach’s salary is an order of magnitude or two more than a professor’s. And when players can suffer injuries that cripple them immediately or cause long-term damage to their bodies and minds.
Drop the pretence entirely. Make the teams commercial properties owned by the university. Make the players employees who get the same benefit package as any other university employee and salary according to what the market will bear. That wouldn’t end the corruption but at least it would make it less likely for the rot to spread to the academic mission.
Another Halocene Human
I read something recently that alleged that college sports are kept amateur so the players are “students” and hence unable to receive worker’s compensation benefits, since mid-century.
Thank you for bringing up this topic as there are potent racial issues here as well.
From a labor point of view, it is rank exploitation. Here in Florida, one of the “Boys of Old Florida” who was a star in the 80’s ended up drug-addicted and homeless. He was used up and thrown away and that degree wasn’t worth shit. Some of these young men manage to parlay college fame into a career in business but most get their ignorance and egos fed and then don’t make it in the big leagues anyway. Just a lot of shit.
Sorry about the profanity, but it’s all kind of awful.
Also, too, before UF was forced to desegregate, the black people in Gainesville weren’t even allowed to buy tickets to sit in the stadium bleachers during a game… they were allowed in after the game to clean up. That’s the sort of thing that makes you heart-sick. What wretched vale of tears this is, which the evil in our hearts hath wrought.
Mike
There are only three college programs that actually make a profit off their athletic programs–the University of Texas, Notre Dame, and The Ohio State University. Most other athletic programs lose money. Why? Because all the big money that comes in from football and basketball gets funneled to the lesser sports like lacrosse, soccer, track etc. This is especially true of the Title IX sports that we love so much. College womens’ soccer and softball have been huge successes, but not at the box office. All those programs, and programs like wrestling, crew, water polo, cross country running, baseball, etc. are funded by the big time football/basketball programs, since those programs do not draw paid spectators. Even at major schools, the football gate receipts are not enough and students are charged activity fees for varsity athletics.
Of course, if you go to a smaller school, or one without a big name football or basketball program, the athletic department doesn’t make diddly and costs the school a lot of money. It is considered a necessary expense, since athletics are a big draw at many schools, especially those that allow athletic scholarships (all division III schools are prohibited from offering scholarships–can you imagine them having to pay players without gate receipts)?
I do think that there are serious abuses of athletes by the NCAA. The one year scholarship thing is BS and leads to such abuses as oversigning–which encourages hurt players to be cut and lose their scholarships for no fault of their own. The NCAA obsessing over free tattoos and whether an athlete got $100 more for a summer job than they are “supposed to” reeks of authoritarian bullshit. So, I do have sympathy for the other side. Of course, being treated like gods on campus with a free ride is a pretty nice perk and is worth quite a bit, IMO.
These kind of abuses, though, are only an issue at big division I schools. The vast majority of college athletics are not big money programs and should be treated as such. I think the best way to handle everything is to let the student athletes unionize. That would allow many of the problems to be addressed on a case by case basis.
What I do know is that something is gotta give at some point. The big schools are bringing in a lot of cash. Even though that money is distributed to less popular sports, it looks really really bad. One day a judge will side for the big school football players and then all hell will break loose. Those big school football/basketball players have a pretty good argument. If they win, though, a lot of amateur wrestlers and swimmers are going to pay the price.
Mike
@Rafer Janders:
It depends. If you are the starting quarterback for Notre Dame, then yes, you are underpaid. If you are getting a free ride for fencing, then the opposite is probably true, since no one is paying to watch you. Of course, the money that goes into Notre Dame football is spent on the fencing that no one watches and the university overpays the athlete. It all balances out.
Another Halocene Human
@The Moar You Know:
Couple of thoughts. Pension cuts give me ragegasms because, yes, in these physical jobs (and that includes transportation jobs), workers break their bodies and their health for the company, and then they get tossed away like so much trash. That’s wrong.
When you look at labor relations, you have to look in the context of who has the bigger lever. Sometimes unions are pressed into a corner because management has all the power at the time. I know that the last ten years have been utterly brutal for airline unions, between the government interventions and lack thereof, the Bush administration’s attitude towards labor relations, industry turmoil, wages dropping like a rock, and so on.
I obviously don’t know your situation but I don’t understand how the union could have taken money out of a government-regulated pension. I thought there were some pretty strict regs about that. (ERISA?) There are no public-sector airlines (Except US Scareways, hawr hawr!), so they must have been private side, and that comes under ERISA, right?
What the NLRA did NOT do was to guarantee democracy WITHIN unions. The bosses love that shit. Many unions have absolutely lousy internal control, making them prey to thieving local leadership, cronyism, company unionism, mafia infiltration, or travesties like the Hoffa-jr dictatorship over the Teamsters. (Btw, our wonderful government put him there. Don’t imagine for a second that wasn’t on purpose. Rat-fucking writ large.)
Look, nobody said the workplace had to be a democracy, but the union itself… well, it’s given special powers (like a government), takes your money, willy-nilly in some states (like a government), and its leaders are elected and must meet certain eligibility requirements, such as employment at that shop (much like a government). Free associations (which are private and can be closely held) are not considered unions and vice versa. (States are free, for example, to outlaw unions in the public sector–as outrageous as banning unions sounds.) I believe union members should be guaranteed democracy within their unions and they are owed a certain degree of transparency. The IRS and Labor Dept do require some of that transparency (and I wouldn’t want to impose excessive burdens… some shops are small and their treasurers not exactly accounting wizards), but as for internal democracy… eh.
There out to be, for example, certain standards to union constitutions and bylaws.
Then you have choices by particular unions that have to do with their character and history and the nature of the industry they’re in. I know in my union there was a huge controversy at one time over allowing pension members to retain voting rights. (It, was, er, racial. And the pensioners were the old guard. What’s awesome is that the shitshow resulted in a wildcat strike. I can just picture the purpled faces and veins popping.) Who votes, when you vote, what influence you have on the process make a big difference.
Another Halocene Human
@Martin: Yeah, that’s the one. Major food for thought.
angler
D1 college sports are a con, and Nocera has been atoning his both sides do it [banks and borrowers] coverage of the financial crisis. But . . .
I love the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It hs 2 drws: te one and doe tournament drama that beats the World Series and other best of 7 tourneys, and does it in shorter order than the NFL. Second,m it can be a proxy for American social conflict: small schools v. big goliaths; ndog nobodiies vs storied programs; ancient obscure rivalries, publics v. privates, east v. west, Catholic v. Prods Mormons. Finally, as a gambling proposiion the NCAA mens’ BB brackets are the template for everything from Fug madness to rugby.
And it’s all bull. Let the athletes play for money and bring down the pay for athletic admins and coaches. Even if the plight of the athletes doesn’t work, think of the universities. D1 sports don’t pay back into the general fund. These are stand alone corruption machines that produce Penn State scandals. Is a football coach worth 30 senior professors? That pay ratio describes Ohio State in 201-11 when Urban Mayer made $4M and the average salary for a full prof was $131k (it takes 20 years to get to that pay grad on average).
Argh. I’m still filling out my brackets.
Another Halocene Human
@gene108: I know this is going to be harsh coming from a total stranger, but what the hell are you talking about there at the end?
Don’t teens in “xtreme sports”, which are white, white, white (and their parents are wealthy) get all kinds of crazy sponsorships?
I don’t really understand your argument, but I’m hearing this tone-of-high-dudgeon slippery slope thing in it, like “here comes the deluge”, yet all these upper-middle-class playgirls and boys can get cereal commercials and fruit snack sponsorships (and energy drinks, and gum, and SI pictorials, and fitness stuff endorsements, and special signature Patagonia limited edition swag deals, etc, etc) AND THE WORLD HAS NOT COME TO AN END.
No, they aren’t team sports, and they don’t play for their college. I doubt any of them are missing out… they either go to college and pursue their dream, or they defer college a little bit but still go (like a starlet).
I suppose volleyball is a posh sport which is big in college so you have to stay amateur. I wonder if this is actually bad for the girls… more pressure to give it up and get an MRS?
Another Halocene Human
@Andrey:
Well, hell, if the hours (shift work) weren’t bad enough (ever talked to any young pilots? it’s hellish… like working on the damn railroad, except the railroad is frigging regulated), now all this info is coming out about how deadly sitting for hours on in is for your heart health and the risk of clots and stroke.
Especially sitting on a plane.
Another Halocene Human
@scav:
They’ve done a bunch of research on RR workers. You need 2 solid 3-4hr sleep blocks (varies by person, but you must be actually asleep) in a 24 hour period. Some people will function shaving this off but they become impaired cognitively.
The reason for the length of the blocks is that only towards the end of the block do you enter the profound, deep sleep part of the cycle.
The railroad considers you on the clock until they deliver you to the door of the place where you will be sleeping, whether it’s RR owned or (increasingly) a public accommodation. This ensures the worker gets the FULL 4 or 8 hrs horizontal. Also, if the crew goes over hours–even if they’re not driving but stuck with a stopped train or stuck behind something else–they are DEAD and another crew must be brought in to replace them. NO EXCEPTIONS. I think they used to say “Okay, RRs, you can stretch this in an emergency,” but every day was a frigging emergency. So no more.
AFAIK, there are no such regulations on airline pilots. It’s an utter travesty and the public is put at risk.
Ditto for residents (young MDs).
Joey Maloney
@Another Halocene Human: I believe the FAA has finally published regs for passenger airline pilots that implement a lot of this. I don’t know if they’ve taken effect yet, and I do know that it’s passenger carriers only – cargo airlines *cough*cough*FedEx*cough are exempt.
Another Halocene Human
@JoyfulA:
I knew a lot of good students who did JV. I didn’t, I was working and also had violin, so I did intermurals, also club soccer one year. (BAYS. It was fun.)
The ancient Greek gymnasium was founded on the principle that a healthy mind went hand in hand with a healthy body. Physical culture is being utterly ignored in US schools. We don’t even do basic daily calisthenics like they do in Asia. Gym class has fallen to budget cuts. I think, in general, school-sponsored sports are great, until it turns into this ugly overgrown thing, where the school’s academics are rotty and all they have going for them is the football team, and the coaches are petty tyrants, breaking rules left and right for a shot at small-town glory, and the kids are being used and abused. Yeah, that I don’t care for at all.
Maybe Aristotle was right: everything in moderation.
Another Halocene Human
@FridayNext:
Worse, remember when they went after that black college football player who had a nice SUV and accused him of taking a
bribe, er, improper gift and it turned out his family was middle class and his parents bought it for him?They’re so used to dealing with slaves they got flummoxed when a free man came up to play their crooked little game.
Another Halocene Human
@handy:
I don’t know how the Supreme Court feels about it either. Public universities still have graduate student unions but apparently at private universities, graduate students are not allowed to unionize!
Nope, no matter how much you are being exploited (post-doc slave labor and all), you are a student, stupid, and you CAN eat prestige.
Tastes like leftover ramen water with stirred in ketchup packets, or so I’ve heard.
Summer
I don’t know what the answer is regarding reform of college athletics, but as someone who has taught for years at a Division I school, there are two problems that manifest every day of the semester:
1. A demanding 40-hour-per-week job on top of classes negates the benefit of a full scholarship.
2. Student athletes, of all sports, and students are admitted following different criteria. Non-student athletes excel in the classroom. Student athletes are usually not prepared to cope with the rigor of a college classroom. And the celebrated and feted student members of the university community are the student athletes.
I have great respect and admiration for how hard these kids work at their sports and to maintain their scholarships. And some are really smart and could do well if they were allowed to focus on being students. But the corruption at the heart of the system as regards to these kids being “students” really brutally wrong for universities and affects everything we do.
Another Halocene Human
@angler: Ha ha, Urban Meyer. When Tebow was crying like a little baby, Urban was dry-eyed but crying on the inside.
He did an absolute crap job of recruiting and also of managing his players. They were swimming in weed and other stuff, and the remarkable thing is how few times they actually got arrested considering all the stuff they did.
Another Halocene Human
@Joey Maloney: Good to know. Now, if they would only regulate coach bus drivers!
Greyhound is unionized and their contract has a bunch of fatigue and hours provisions… yet a decade ago they had the worst safety record in the biz. Well, all these Chinatown (regulation-skirting) shops and British (union-busting, labor-law-flouting) conglomerates have taken a big slice of market share since then. One can only imagine what the picture looks like now.
Interstate coach drivers are not covered by the overtime provisions of the NLRA, for example. (A senator in the 30’s made a boo-boo and it was never corrected.)
Joey Maloney
@Another Halocene Human: Here’s more info about the new FAA regs.
gene108
@FridayNext:
I think players should have a right to their likeness and get a cut from jersey sales, etc. like pro athletes.
They can earn money. What they and alumni/boosters can’t do is set up a job, where the player gets paid for doing nothing.
If football and basketball spent more money on their players, the non-revenue sports would be hurt, especially women’s sports. When Title IX became law, there were schools that shuttered several men’s sports, in order to make room for women’s sports.
I don’t see the non-revenue sports surviving, if you start pushing more money into football and men’s basketball.
@Another Halocene Human:
This article has a bit of what I was talking about.
You have people, called street agents, who see dollar signs on talented teenagers. They do what they need to, to get the kid to associate with them. If the kid goes pro, they get a cut of the pro-contract money.
Also, with AAU teams being sponsored by shoe companies now and with street agents, you have kids, who will not go to a college because they wear the “wrong” show. If a kid plays for a Nike AAU team, they are looking at getting a Nike endorsement deal, if they go pro and/or Hike wants to keep them in their camp and not lose a potential endorser of their product.
Letting more money slosh around an already sleazy system isn’t going to help matters.
Think abut it like the Citizen’s United decision. Money has a corrupting influence on the political process. The solution? Allow people to spend unlimited amounts of money on political activity! Brilliant!
@Mike:
Well said regarding non-revenue sports.
gene108
@FridayNext:
I think players should have a right to their likeness and get a cut from jersey sales, etc. like pro athletes.
They can earn money. What they and alumni/boosters can’t do is set up a job, where the player gets paid for doing nothing.
gene108
@Another Halocene Human:
This article has a bit of what I was talking about.
You have people, called street agents, who see dollar signs on talented teenagers. They do what they need to, to get the kid to associate with them. If the kid goes pro, they get a cut of the pro-contract money.
Also, with AAU teams being sponsored by shoe companies now and with street agents, you have kids, who will not go to a college because they wear the “wrong” show. If a kid plays for a Nike AAU team, they are looking at getting a Nike endorsement deal, if they go pro and/or Hike wants to keep them in their camp and not lose a potential endorser of their product.
Letting more money slosh around an already sleazy system isn’t going to help matters.
Think abut it like the Citizen’s United decision. Money has a corrupting influence on the political process. The solution? Allow people to spend unlimited amounts of money on political activity! Brilliant!
gene108
@Mike:
Well said regarding non-revenue sports.
jon
A drama major on a scholarship gets on a local commercial and gets paid? Congrats.
A music major plays at an art opening. For a fee. She’s on scholarship, too. Congrats.
The art opening gives an art students some sales, to supplement their scholarships. Congrats. Hard work pays off a little.
A chem major gets a paid internship at a company. Congrats.
A scholarship athlete gets a ride across campus. In a golf cart? Corruption scandal! Two-year investigation! Loss of scholarships! No bowl game for that school!
There has to be a valid reason for the differences.
Joey Maloney
Well, a lot of those athletes are near. But I’m sure that has nothing to do with it.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@gene108:
I’m going to have to disagree.
The NFL was started up to attract (mostly)working class Catholics and Jews who were essentially frozen out of big time college football and the WASPy institutions- Notre Dame being a notable exception- where the game was played. Before the advent of the NFL. those fans and players had high school football, and little but mines, factories and steel mills after that.
After Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman Trophy in 1935, he was the first pick in the first NFL draft. After initially refusing to sign because he thought he might compete in the ’36 Olympics, Berwanger decided against the NFL because he couldn’t get George Halas to commit to paying him $1,000 per game. The business world looked more promising than the NFL.
And that was a pretty common story (minus the Heisman and first-pick-of-the-draft status) for former college football players prior to WWII. They could make as much if not more money by getting a J.D. or using their college connections to get good jobs in offices- where they wouldn’t wreck their bodies.
Barry
@gene108: Shorter version:
Look, some of our slaves generate high value; others barely cover their (miserable) food, clothing and shelter. If we go to this unAmerican anti-Christian ‘wage’ system you’re talking about, how do we deal with that?
Barry
@Andrey: “@The Moar You Know: Wait, really? Being an airline pilot is that bad for your health? I’m not disbelieving you, just really surprised and curious. Outside of catastrophic failure modes (crashes), what are the health issues involved with it?”
That does tend to destroy the credence of his story.
John of Indiana
Fuck the NFLPA. They had their stupid bowel in Indianapolis the week Our Bitch Mitch signed Right-to-Work-for-LESS into law. Either they said nothing and collected their paychecks or the “Liberal” media buried the story. Would have liked to have seen them stage a 15-minute job action right in front of the national Teee-Vee audience before the start of the game.
As for NCAA players, the college gives them a full-ride scholarship, T-bone steak for breakfast and the best medical care when they blow out something. The booster club provides a new sports car or SUV, a very nice apartment that they don’t have to share with 6 other guys, access to women, and a “small” stipend.
Everybody knows the “rules” and they push them right to the breaking point.