The NBA Lockout: The Least Important Thing In The World
By Sean Dinces
04 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org
It seems doubtful that as they gathered in Ogawa Plaza, the thousands of workers and allies who took part in the November 2 nd general strike in Oakland were giving much thought to the ongoing battle between NBA players and ownership over how to divide a few percentage points of league revenues. It's equally hard to imagine that the NBA lockout has grabbed the attention of the strikers' comrades still going strong in Wall Street's Zuccotti Park, even though the negotiations between owners and players are taking place just a few miles away in midtown Manhattan. Nevertheless, some voices on the left have tried to keep the lockout within the orbit of progressive consciousness, as evidenced by labor columnist David Macaray's October 26 th Huffington Post editorial , in which he entreats his readers to stand by the players because, after all, they “still represent labor.”
Macaray is right. Given no other option, we should side with the players because, as he points out, their skill is what ultimately generates profits for ownership. But Macaray doesn't mention that there is a reasonable option for people on the left other than siding with the players: we can stop paying attention to the lockout altogether. Granted, this doesn't help irrationally devoted NBA fans like me get their fix of commercially-saturated hoops. But it will save us all a lot of time and mental energy debating the virtues of solidarity with a labor struggle in which the 99%—not counting those who depend on income from concessions jobs in NBA arenas—has little, if any, material stake.
This lockout is a tug-of-war between different fractions of the 1%, and working fans will continue to get screwed regardless of who wins. The owners want us to believe that higher player salaries lead to higher ticket prices, and that as a result we should call on all of those “greedy” athletes to take a pay cut so that Joe the Plumber can bring his kids to a Cleveland Cavaliers game without taking out a second mortgage on his house. This argument seems intuitive enough, but as sports economists have been trying to point out for decades, it's wrong. Even if Kobe Bryant plays for free, the owners of the Lakers will maintain outrageous ticket prices as long as throngs of moneyed Los Angelinos continue to line up outside of the Staples Center. In other words, high ticket prices are first and foremost a function of the demand for seats, not of team payrolls. This is why the price of Chicago Bulls tickets didn't go down immediately after Michael Jordan left and ownership slashed the team's payroll. Demand for seats remained high as the team rode the ongoing wave of popularity created by Jordan, and prices only came down after the recession of the early 2000s hit, when fans suddenly had less disposable income to blow on watching bad basketball. Sure, some owners who have spent millions on idiotic contracts may raise ticket prices in an attempt to offset their own stupidity, but they won't lower prices just because player salaries go down; they'll only lower prices if fans stop coming.
But what if the players win? What do working fans get then? You guessed it: nothing. The players get a bigger piece of a revenue pie that, regardless of the outcome of the lockout, will remain squarely in the hands of the 1%. Sure, it's a nice gesture for NBA players to express solidarity with rank-and-file workers, but a victory for them is not a victory for the American labor movement; it's a reshuffling of resources among the egregiously wealthy. This is why the breath that so many of us have wasted arguing about the implications of the lockout is better spent talking about things that matter, like how organized labor can ally with and learn from the recent surge in protest fostered by the Occupy movements. Better yet, we can talk about how it's already happening, and with a surprising amount of success in the case of campaigns like the New York Teamsters' struggle against Sotheby's. The fact that campaigns like this are getting more play in the mainstream press is a good sign. In recent decades the labor disputes in pro sports were usually the only labor disputes you could read about without mining the archives of leftist webzines. It seems like that's changing, if ever so slightly, and it's a good thing if stories like the NBA lockout get pushed to the sidelines as a result.
Recently, the lockout saga grew new legs after Bryant Gumbel referred to NBA president David Stern as a “plantation overseer” in response to Stern's attempt to convince the league's largely black workforce that it doesn't have the ability to understand the nuance of the pro sports business. Gumbel's bold critique is not off target. The NBA is a racialized system of exploitation in which poor communities of color serve as de facto player development systems for power-hungry owners. Moreover, the players aren't dumb; they understand this, and have raised the issue repeatedly in previous labor disputes. The piggishness of the owners in this regard makes it tempting to overlook the ambiguities of this conflict, and anoint the players as some sort of radical vanguard. Who on the left wouldn't like to see black players stick it to white owners? But what then? Where does this anti-racism leave regular workers of color, provided the players triumph? It leaves them pretty much where they were before the lockout: with systemic racial inequality on the rise, papered over by neoliberal apologists who point to the success of black athletes as evidence of the “post-racial” moment. It leaves many of the 99.97% of high school basketball players who never get a look at the NBA to languish in poor communities of color forced to bear the brunt of the Great Recession. This is not to say that we should accept the behavior of racist owners, but rather that on its own, a successful challenge to this behavior won't alter the NBA's larger commitment to profits over people.
Macaray's take on the lockout brings to mind the difficulty the left often has dealing with ambiguity, and the way in which the rush to take sides often obscures more than it reveals. Considering the possibility that unionized athletes are not a progressive social force probably makes many leftists feel uncomfortable, especially given the politics of race at play in professional sports. This discomfort encourages kneejerk support for the players, but a victory for the players union won't stop NBA franchises from pillaging local economies or pricing out working fans. So, yes, if you have to take a side, listen to critics like Macaray and side with the players. But maybe instead of arguing about which side we're on, we should ask ourselves why we care in the first place.Sean Dinces is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Brown University, where he is currently researching the urban politics of sports stadium development. He can be reached at [email protected] .
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