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From SI....
PLAYERS UNION LOADING UP THE WAR CHEST. Over the last eight days, since the NFL put its new anthem policy in place, there have been discussions on social media of players banding together to fight one thing or another. In trying to ascertain how credible any of it was, I dug up an interesting nugget. The players are actually preparing for a brewing fight. What will that fight be for? Themselves.
What few people know—and I didn’t until this week—is that players actually come close to breaking even on their union dues. The annual dues, which come directly out of their checks, will run them $18,000 (it’s 3.75% of the rookie minimum, which is $480,000 this year) in 2018. On the flip side, as part of the union, the players enter into a Group Licensing Agreement (GLA), and each player gets $16,200 per year from that. So their dues are partially covered by their images and likenesses being used in things like the Madden video game and trading cards.
Until now, at least.
At the union’s meetings in March 2017, they voted to withhold the GLA money from every player’s paycheck starting this year, to prepare for a potential work stoppage in 2021, so each guy who’s still in the league then will have a sort of rainy-day fund waiting for him. If a new CBA is struck before then, the money will be released. But this is at least one example of the NFLPA going further in on the kind of efforts it made in 2009 and ’10, ahead of the 2011 lockout. The advantage the owners had over the players then was a bet that the players—given the lack of guaranteed contracts and overall job security in the NFL—would never sacrifice paychecks to leverage a better deal out of the owners.
That’s a bet NFL owners had made before, and profited from before, and it’s no mistake that the union pushed the last dispute just far enough to where it would bleed into the season. If the union is going to get a better deal this time around, it needs to find a way to make the threat of games being canceled real—which is much harder to do in football than it is in basketball or baseball, because players’ careers are shorter, they make less money on average, and there are a lot more of them. This seems like a step in that direction. And if there’s any fight that NFL players are likely to unify over (and history says even this will be tough), it’s absolutely this one.
PLAYERS UNION LOADING UP THE WAR CHEST. Over the last eight days, since the NFL put its new anthem policy in place, there have been discussions on social media of players banding together to fight one thing or another. In trying to ascertain how credible any of it was, I dug up an interesting nugget. The players are actually preparing for a brewing fight. What will that fight be for? Themselves.
What few people know—and I didn’t until this week—is that players actually come close to breaking even on their union dues. The annual dues, which come directly out of their checks, will run them $18,000 (it’s 3.75% of the rookie minimum, which is $480,000 this year) in 2018. On the flip side, as part of the union, the players enter into a Group Licensing Agreement (GLA), and each player gets $16,200 per year from that. So their dues are partially covered by their images and likenesses being used in things like the Madden video game and trading cards.
Until now, at least.
At the union’s meetings in March 2017, they voted to withhold the GLA money from every player’s paycheck starting this year, to prepare for a potential work stoppage in 2021, so each guy who’s still in the league then will have a sort of rainy-day fund waiting for him. If a new CBA is struck before then, the money will be released. But this is at least one example of the NFLPA going further in on the kind of efforts it made in 2009 and ’10, ahead of the 2011 lockout. The advantage the owners had over the players then was a bet that the players—given the lack of guaranteed contracts and overall job security in the NFL—would never sacrifice paychecks to leverage a better deal out of the owners.
That’s a bet NFL owners had made before, and profited from before, and it’s no mistake that the union pushed the last dispute just far enough to where it would bleed into the season. If the union is going to get a better deal this time around, it needs to find a way to make the threat of games being canceled real—which is much harder to do in football than it is in basketball or baseball, because players’ careers are shorter, they make less money on average, and there are a lot more of them. This seems like a step in that direction. And if there’s any fight that NFL players are likely to unify over (and history says even this will be tough), it’s absolutely this one.
