This was forecast to be the Year of Labor, and it certainly has lived up to expectations. As grimly predicted, two of the four major sports leagues have shut down -- not because the players walked out on their game and, by extension, their fans, but because ownership decided to use its muscle to change its financial relationship with its players.
This, then, is not only the Year of Labor. It's also the Year of Dangerous Thinking.
The dangerous thinking follows two paths. The first is the notion that professional athletes are just common folk, employees like you and me, and thus do not have even a limited partnership in the big business of professional sports. The second is that the owners are the parties taking all of the financial risk.
It's not inaccurate to connect those mindsets to the broader anti-union, anti-worker mood running strong across the nation. Instead of employing a greater skepticism that might lead to more accountability from "the establishment," much of the public seems to be siding with it, and turning against anyone -- individual or group -- willing to stand up to it. It was a curious attitude during the crisis involving the "Too Big To Fail" financial institutions largely responsible for the downward-spiraling economy, and it doesn't seem like a stretch to draw a rough parallel to the big business of professional sports.
But there is an entity that takes a far bigger risk than the owners, and that entity is you, the public, the taxpayers. Team owners across all sports play in publicly financed, heavily subsidized facilities built at the expense of better bridges, youth baseball fields and basketball courts, highway lighting, and, yes, schools. Governments fearful the hometown team eventually will leave use the argument that the hundreds of millions it costs to build the stadium that will keep the franchise local do not come out of school or infrastructure budgets. In Washington, a common argument was that the redevelopment money that went to the Nationals (more than 95 percent of Nationals Park is financed by the public) never would have gone toward schools, but that is nonsense. Money can be allocated toward whatever project claims priority. Governments make laws. Governments change laws.
http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/stor ... -relations
Howard Bryant makes some excellent points that people are over looking....good read.