So those millionaires and billionaires finally resolved their differences? Now, don’t we all feel better?
I’m referring, of course, to the new collective bargaining agreement struck last week between the owners of the teams that comprise the National Basketball Association (the NBA) and the players who are paid handsomely by those owners to play the games many of us attend and watch and follow.
The owners had declared a lockout at the end of the last season, claiming that they could not begin a new season without a significant restructuring of the compensation system the old collective bargaining agreement (CBA) had provided. In the end, they pretty much got what they claimed they had to have, as the players gave up in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars in salaries in the new CBA.
The new agreement won’t exactly require any of the players to reduce their standards of living appreciably. Average salaries last year were around $3 million per player. They’ll still be right around that figure (if not higher) with the new deal.
The owners had claimed that some of their teams were close to bankruptcy, which is true only if you ignore the enormous wealth that all of them bring to the table just to become owners. None of them are anything close to “mom and pop” businesses, if by that term we mean businesses that barely get by from year to year and do so only because of the sweat of the owners themselves.
The owners of NBA teams are either exceedingly wealthy individuals (Mark Cuban, for example, owner of the champion Dallas Mavericks, is a multi-billionaire), or they are mega-corporations (Comcast Spectacor, for example, owns the Philadelphia 76ers, a sports cable network, a professional hockey team and the arena where both teams play their home games) for which the NBA team is just a single asset of their total holdings.
So the dispute over the new collective bargaining agreement was literally a fight between the exceedingly rich and the obscenely rich. Or, in terms that will resonate with the Occupy Wall Street movement, it was a fight between the one percent and the one-tenth of one percent.
And, as is often the case when this kind of thing occurs, it affected many of the 99 percent. From the standpoint of entertainment value, the NBA is a big deal in the United States. Millions of sports fans follow the game closely. If it isn’t the nation’s unofficial national pastime (that honor now belongs to professional football), it at least fills the gap from the end of the NFL season to the start of the baseball season.
But whatever its entertainment value, the NBA season has an even greater impact on the nation’s economy. To be specific, in the 30 cities where the teams play, thousands of individuals will be employed to work in the arenas where the games are played, or in the bars where fans congregate after the games, or in the hotels where the players and their entourages stay when they are on the road, or in the restaurants where fans will go before the games, or in the merchandise and sporting goods shops where fans will buy the memorabilia of the sports stars and teams, or in the grocery stores, gas stations, hardware stores, department stores and other retail outlets where everyone with a little more money that is generated because the games are played will go to spend that money.
If you catch my drift, you appreciate that the games create an economy, an economy that doesn’t exist if there are no games. That economy isn’t going to reduce the national unemployment numbers immediately, but it is the kind of economy that the country needs to recover from its current malaise.
I have long been an advocate of government control of professional sports, so let me take this opportunity to press my radical position on the subject yet again. Professional sports leagues (we’re talking the NBA, the NFL, hockey NHL, and, of course major league baseball) are de facto, if not de jure, monopolies. Simply stated, they exist in a competitive-free environment. New teams cannot form on their own and compete with the existing franchises in these sports. They aren’t legally forbidden from doing so, but they have no practical ability to exist.
Nor are rival leagues a plausible option. The current leagues control the marketplace completely and absolutely. They are to their games what Microsoft once hoped it might be in the computer business. And, lest anyone argue to the contrary, consider what the country experienced in the last six months. First the NFL threatened a cancelled season. Had it occurred, thousands would have been without jobs and millions of fans would have been left with nothing to do on Sunday afternoons.
Then the NBA came even closer to creating economic and psychic havoc for its workers and fans, only to avert complete disaster with the deal struck last week. That major league baseball was able to reach an early agreement (also last week) without the threat of a cancellation of any games must rank as a near miracle, but, of course, that sport has hardly been without its history of catastrophic labor strife (most notably the loss of the 1994 World Series when a dispute wiped out the last two months of the season and the first month of the following one).
These professional sports should be government-controlled. Private ownership should be sanctioned by the federal government with tight controls on all profits, to include the cost of televising the games. Ownership should be undertaken first and foremost as a public trust, much as ownership of television networks is supposed to be sanctioned. Players’ salaries should also be regulated and controlled.
The games are a national treasure. They belong to the people. Private ownership of them should be a privilege, not a right. And playing in them should be an honor that provides its own reward.