Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  Meanwhile, the high-pressure culture also incentivizes players to maximize their earning potential by any means necessary—and that often includes performance-enhancing drugs of various kinds. “As sports have grown into a global Goliath, players have turned their bodies into chemistry sets,” Dave Zirin wrote. Yet, as Zirin also noted, the use of steroids to improve strength dates back to 1889, when a French scientist began injecting himself with animal hormones in order to find a way “to increase the strength and mass of workers in the service of the industrial revolution.” The owners and sponsors encouraged the steroid era in sports as well, advertising the oversized physiques of their athletes and cheering every Home Run Derby with dollar signs in their eyes, yet blaming the players for doing what seemed to make sense—because, it seemed, if they didn’t, someone else would. Steroids then became a way for owners to try to break the MLB players’ union, demanding that the players give in to invasive testing regimes that would allow employers to turn a blind eye when it suited them, and dump players “randomly” tested when they wanted to lose a pricey contract or a sudden cold streak.37

  Steroids aren’t the only health risk for athletes, or even the worst. Attention has increased in recent years to the horrific results of repeated head trauma, with research on the issue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) highlighting its frequency in football and hockey players. A New York Times story on Derek Boogaard, a hockey player known more for fighting than scoring, detailed the personality changes his friends and teammates noticed before his death: “Those who went to New York noticed his memory lapses were growing worse. Boogaard joked about them, saying he had been hit on the head too many times. But they also came to worry about his darkening personality and impulsive behavior. His characteristic sweetness and easy manner, his endearing eagerness to please, had evaporated.” Boogaard died of an overdose at twenty-eight, an age that would have been mid-career; the doctor who examined his brain was shocked by the amount of damage. “This is all going bad.”38

  For those who survive, life can just get worse. Lorraine Dixon, the wife of Rickey Dixon, a former NFL player diagnosed with a different neurodegenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), let reporters into her daily life. Dixon played six seasons in the NFL; the money was gone by the time he got sick, at forty-seven. The $1 billion settlement the NFL agreed to pay out over traumatic brain injuries meant some money for the Dixons, but not even enough for Lorraine to quit her job. So she cared for two children and her husband, who used a wheelchair, around her work schedule—the health insurance from her job was necessary to keep her husband’s treatments up. Dixon and other NFL wives had organized on a Facebook group, supporting one another while they waited out the legal battles and the heartbreak of watching their husbands spiral down. “I look at Rickey laying in the hospital bed, [tracheotomy] in his throat, tube in his stomach, has lost 57% of his body weight, can’t talk and can barely move and I think about the NFL and I ask Jesus to help me forgive them,” Dixon wrote. “Money is truly the Root of all Evil.”39

  Even leaving aside the possibility of such injuries, the sports system has intensified its demands on the bodies of athletes. To reach the top level of a sport, as Meghan Duggan did, one must start as a child. The kind of “human capital” that children are increasingly pressed to build from a young age to turn toward the workplace, as Malcolm Harris wrote in Kids These Days, is especially visible in the bodies of young athletes. “Building muscle is a great way of thinking about human capital because it’s so literal: work over time accumulates in the body.” Such a process turns play into work far earlier than it probably should; children are being honed for future college scholarships and professional dreams before they’re old enough to pick a major, drive a car, or sneak a beer.40

  Yet the language of play and its universal benefits masks the work that young people do in the name of sports, and that runs straight through to the supposed amateurs of the NCAA. The Southeastern Conference, just one of several collegiate leagues, reached the billion-dollar mark in 2010. As Taylor Branch explained, “that money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.” Tens of millions watch college sports; the biggest football schools bring in tens of millions of dollars in profits. In forty states, the highest-paid public employee is a public university’s football coach. “For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—‘amateurism’ and the ‘student-athlete’—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes,” Branch wrote.41

  The argument for collegiate sports rests on the idea that sports are part of a well-rounded education. It’s the argument made by elite colleges in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it can be found, in a different form, embedded in Title IX—that access to sports should be equal for all as an educational activity. But the reality of top-level sports, Branch wrote (football and basketball, mainly, but also hockey and soccer), is that athletes are expected to put their sport first and their education last. Special courses for athletes and resources to make it look like they’re passing classes are a given, and scholarships are usually canceled if an athlete is cut from the team. At some schools, less than half of the student-athletes actually graduate with a degree, according to the league’s own numbers. During the trial for a lawsuit filed by an instructor who didn’t want to play along with grade inflation, the defense attorney for the university involved in the case, the University of Georgia, argued, referring to a hypothetical student-athlete, “We may not make a university student out of him, but if we can teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a garbage man when he gets through with his athletic career.” Sounds like a lot of concern for education.42

  Like graduate-student workers, college athletes make money for their schools, and like those workers, they are trapped in a kind of limbo status between “student” and “employee.” That makes them vulnerable to the same kind of status coercion. Particularly for Black athletes, this peculiar status brings with it strange working conditions, at times reminiscent, in the workers’ own words, of the plantation. A mix of paternalistic concern and scorn colors the way coaches and administrators talk about and to student athletes, wrote sociologist Erin Hatton. “In particular, they are said to need protection from two sources of possible corruption: their own poor choices and commercial exploitation.” And yet coaches also made explicit threats to cut players’ scholarships, or bench them—denying them playing time during which a pro scout might see them. One former football player told Hatton that when he played in the All-Star game, “I had a guy that evaluated me mentally as soon as I got there. Then, I walk in… , they tell me to strip down to my underwear.… I got guys checking body fat percentage on me, guys looking me up and down, [asking] my height, my weight. And, if you think about it, back in the 1800s when they had the slave trade… that was the same thing they did when they were auctioning people off.”43

  Lately, though, NCAA players have been challenging this status. Quarterback Kain Colter and a group of his Northwestern University football teammates pressed a case that they should be allowed to form a labor union. The regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled in their favor in 2014, based on “the enormous revenue and benefit that result from the efforts of the Northwestern football players and on the rigorous control that Wildcats coaches have over the lives of the scholarship athletes.” (Northwestern had taken in $235 million from football between 2003 and 2012.) The NLRB director detailed the extensive control that coaches exerted over the players’ lives, from social media restrictions to workout requirements to approval of living arrangements, and concluded that this level of control was the control an employer exerts over an employee, not
a teacher over a student. But the full NLRB dismissed the athletes’ petition the following year, in a narrow decision that nevertheless upheld the status quo.44

  Lawsuits against the NCAA have had more success. A 2014 antitrust lawsuit argued that the NCAA “has unlawfully capped player compensation at the value of an athletic scholarship.” The attorney in the case, Jeffrey Kessler, told reporters, “In no other business—and college sports is big business—would it ever be suggested that the people who are providing the essential services work for free. Only in big-time college sports is that line drawn.” Other lawsuits have been filed and have even resulted in some damages being awarded. The NCAA, seeing the writing on the wall, loosened its rules preventing athletes from making money off their own images (yes, you read that right).45

  As colleges began to reopen their athletic programs in the summer of 2020, bringing athletes back for practice during the COVID-19 pandemic, those athletes faced yet another disturbing trend: they were asked to sign waivers absolving their university of liability if they caught the virus. “More than 30 athletes at 14 college programs, at the very least,” had tested positive in early June, wrote Ross Dellenger at Sports Illustrated, and those athletes had been asked to sign documents bearing “virtually the same message: here are the virus risks, here are the precautions the school is taking, here are what precautions you should take and here’s why you can’t sue us.” The documents, Dellenger noted, do say athletes can’t lose their scholarships for not signing—but they can’t play until they do. It’s just another risk those players are being asked to take with their health—again, while they aren’t getting paid. This and other issues around the season led to a push, in August 2020, toward unionization. First, hundreds of players from one conference announced that they would not play unless their demands around health, safety, and racial justice were met. Then, players from across the NCAA’s conferences joined a Twitter call for unionizing, following in the footsteps of Kain Colter and his teammates at Northwestern.46

  The women of USA Soccer fought for years to challenge the idea that loving the game means they don’t need—or deserve—equal pay. Long dominant on the international scene—thanks to Title IX—the American women had racked up a string of victories. At home, it had been a struggle to make professional play viable; the third professional league, the National Women’s Soccer League, launched in 2013, was slowly expanding, but it still didn’t pay most of its players a living wage (unless they were subsidized by their national federation). But the women of the national team were household names: Abby Wambach. Ali Krieger. Megan Rapinoe. Crystal Dunn. The US men’s team couldn’t make it past the World Cup quarterfinals; they failed to qualify entirely in 2018. Meanwhile, the women, when they won the Cup in 2015, pulled a TV audience of twenty million just in their home country. And so they organized, they sued, and they threatened a strike; they called for equal pay and equal conditions (no more playing on Astroturf when the men got fresh grass). They put their fame to use, winning gains in their 2017 bargaining agreement with USA Soccer, and they continued the push as they headed to the 2019 World Cup in France. Once again, they dominated. As Megan Rapinoe, her hair dyed purple, kicked in the first goal of the game, as the clock ticked down on their 2–0 victory, the stadium filled with cheers, and then, slowly, the din settled into one clear chant: “EQUAL PAY.”47

  Unquestionably, though, the biggest challenge to the powers that run the sports world in recent years has been Colin Kaepernick. Inspired by the protests rocking the United States over the deaths of young Black men at the hands of police officers, then San Francisco 49ers quarterback Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem at a preseason game in August 2016. He later switched his protest to taking a knee, and other athletes—including Rapinoe—followed his lead. Many were threatened, or benched, but Kaepernick had lit the fuse, and he was punished for it. He opted out of his contract with the 49ers in 2017, choosing free agency, but no NFL team has signed him since. Kaepernick settled his lawsuit with the league—he’d argued the league had violated the terms of the union contract by colluding not to put him on a team—but still no one hired him, even after Nike signed him up to a massive endorsement deal. Kaepernick, like Muhammad Ali before him, sent a signal to the owners and to the world that they could not control him, and he has used his fame since then to give high-profile donations to social justice organizations and to hold “Know Your Rights” camps for young Black men in cities across the country. But Kaepernick said he wanted to keep playing, and the NFL still refused to let him.48

  In spring 2020, the eruption of nationwide protests at a scale never before seen, after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, vindicated Kaepernick. NFL owners and coaches tripped over themselves scrambling to apologize, plastering their social media accounts with “Black Lives Matter” statements. Jim Harbaugh, Kaepernick’s coach in San Francisco, said he was proud of the player (though he’d opposed the protest at the time) and called him a “hero,” comparing him to Jackie Robinson and Ali. Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized for “not listening” to players, but did not specifically name Kaepernick, a move that director Spike Lee called “piss poor and plain bogus.” Goodell said he would “welcome” Kaepernick’s return to the game, but continued to say that was up to the teams; the teams professed interest, but none had committed as of September 2020.49

  Kaepernick’s protest laid the groundwork for, in August, an explosion in the world of professional sports. On August 26, the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks announced that they would not play their playoff game, citing the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the ongoing white supremacist violence. Their strike spread across the league, swiftly jumping to the WNBA, where the Washington Mystics came out for their game and knelt, backs to the camera, in white T-shirts rent by seven bullet wounds. Naomi Osaka of tennis skipped her semifinal match, and refusals to play halted games in baseball and soccer too. While the strike—reported, falsely, in the press as a “boycott,” an indication of just how hard it remains for us to see sports as work—was short-lived, it was a powerful reminder of athletes’ platform and ability to force the rest of us to take notice.50

  Athletes like Kaepernick and Rapinoe have proved that they have a massive platform for discussions of workers’ rights: Kaepernick’s case against the NFL is at bottom a giant labor grievance. Running back Marshawn Lynch’s refusal to perform at press conferences is a job action, work-to-rule, a way of showing up the boss by performing strictly along the lines of your job description and by doing so highlighting the ways in which you are expected to give up more of yourself to your job than that bit for which you’re getting paid. These athletes are millionaires, savvy marketers all of them, who have turned their own images into a means not just to make money, but to send a signal to everyone who watches them: you can’t silence us. We deserve respect, as humans, as people who will no longer be marginalized, as workers. You don’t own us.51

  MEGHAN DUGGAN AND HER USA HOCKEY TEAMMATES HAD BEEN talking about their working conditions for a while. During conversations on the bus or around the dinner table while on the road, they’d find common themes, things that didn’t feel right to any of them. “When you’re a young kid, you have the mentality of ‘Keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and work,’” Duggan said. “As a lot of us evolved in our careers, this was something that we were passionate about and that we devoted our lives to. We were pretty strong powerful women. We started talking about a lot of the different changes that we thought we could make and thought we could see in the program.”

  It was 2015 when they reached out to a legal team to support them. It was a long process, Duggan said, of researching, learning about their legal rights and what other teams in other sports had been able to do. They decided that what they wanted from USA Hockey was a four-year contract that would cover the Olympic cycle and their other international events, that would provide regular pay, disability insurance, and pregnancy benefits—e
verything, in other words, that full-time employees could expect at a decent, unionized job. They knew, though, that their power came from standing together, and that at some point they might have to refuse to work in order to make their point. “We knew that it could eventually get to the point where we would have to boycott a world championship,” Duggan said. “That is our Stanley Cup, that is our end-all-be-all, that is what we train for all year long in a non-Olympic year.”52

  Over a year went by with no progress in their negotiations, though, and so they made their move. They announced publicly that without a contract, they would refuse to play in the 2017 International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Women’s World Championship. They were supported in their declaration by Carli Lloyd and other women’s soccer stars, as well as by the men’s hockey legend Mike Eruzione and others. The NWHL players promised not to play on a replacement team, refusing to undermine the players’ solidarity. “I am just so proud of our team,” Duggan said. “We were dead serious. We were willing to risk everything for it.”

  It was a moment for feminism—the Women’s March had just gone off in January, marking what was likely the single largest demonstration to that point in US history, and it was followed by a Women’s Strike on March 8, International Women’s Day. The women’s soccer team had been making demands for equal pay. And the hockey women made themselves part of it—making more news with their threatened strike than if the championships had gone off without a hitch, since, as they noted in their demands, the women’s game was often very badly publicized. Their demands also included expanded programming for women’s hockey. They were fighting, Duggan said, for the bigger picture, for all of the women who would come up after them. “I can’t even tell you how many phone calls I made, but it felt like I called every single female hockey player in the entire country,” she said. Her message, in asking them not to cross a picket line if it came to a work stoppage, was, “This is about all of us and this is what it means. I don’t know what you’re hearing or what you’re reading, but from the horse’s mouth, this is what’s happening, this is what we’re trying to change, and we are asking you to stand with us.” The excitement those players might have felt at being called up to play in a championship, she said, couldn’t be underestimated, yet USA Hockey was unable to pull together a replacement team to break the players’ potential strike.53