gracchusdixit

For its speedy decision to ban for life Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, the National Basketball Association was instantly and almost universally praised.  Sterling had, of course, been “caught on tape” making blatantly racist remarks regarding African-Americans, who, unluckily for him and his fortune, comprise the overwhelming majority of NBA players.  The players were outraged, and so was nearly everyone else.

The NBA’s decision was not only quick, it was sweeping.  Along with the ban came a steep fine and the announcement that Sterling may be compelled to sell the franchise to someone else.  Whether this will eventually happen, we do not yet know, since it is likely that Sterling will oppose such a decision in the courts when, or if, it comes.  Nonetheless, the announcement itself was greeted with widespread approbation and relief: the NBA had acted decisively, it had acted quickly, it had done the right thing.

We have subsequently come to learn that the NBA may have had little choice.  It seems that the players were determined to act if the NBA itself did not.  They were prepared to walk off the court just as the end-of-season play-offs were about to begin.  If that had occurred, the economic damage to the owners, to the television networks that broadcast the play-offs, and to the advertisers who support those broadcasts, would have run into many millions of dollars.  It now seems that the NBA’s action may have been less the result of virtue than of economic calculation.

Imagine for a moment how things might have turned out if one of the Walmart heirs had been “caught on tape” voicing similarly racist views.  Could that heir have been fined and, if so, by whom?  Could that heir have been “banned for life” from participating in the management of Walmart?  Can we even conceive of the possibility that he (or she) could have been compelled to sell his (or her) interest in the corporation?  The answer to all these questions, of course, is no.

Which raises an infinitely more important question: why, in the face of blatantly unacceptable behavior, can the owner of an NBA franchise be dealt with decisively all the while we cannot even imagine a similar outcome for the members of America’s corporate elite?

There are three answers to the question.

The first—most obvious—answer is that the business of professional sports is uniquely public and therefore publicly exposed.  When the owner of a national sports franchise is revealed to be a blatant racist, trouble inevitably follows.  What we are prepared to accept or overlook in the world of “private” business, we are less prepared to countenance in the public world of professional sports.

The second—and equally obvious—answer is that professional athletes are a rarified breed who bear no resemblance to the powerless and anonymous greeters, checkers and stock clerks who work for a company like Walmart.  Athletes are highly, albeit narrowly, skilled; they are in some cases famous; and they are, one and all, precious economic commodities.  That gives them clout, and the risk of offending them carries a high price.

The third—but largely overlooked—answer is that professional athletes are unionized.  Not only are they unionized, but they belong to arguably the most effective and powerful unions in the country.  Without a powerful union to back them, it is highly unlikely that America’s professional basketball players would have been able to persuade, let alone compel, the NBA to act as it did.  For all their wealth and fame, the players of the NBA would have been as powerless as the wage-slaves who work for Walmart.

There is, in this, a lesson for the rest of us.  In the last 30 years, unions have been demonized, diminished, and all but destroyed by Republicans espousing their free-market ideology.  They have told us that unions are single-handedly responsible for the decline in our country’s manufacturing base, the exportation of millions of jobs, the purported deficiencies of our public education system, and just about every other evil known to man.  The truth is otherwise.  Without strong unions, workers cannot negotiate “freely” with monolithic employers, they cannot defend their human dignity or preserve their self-worth, they cannot get even a fair hearing.

The unionized players of the NBA have shown us what it is like for employees to be able to act with integrity and without fear.  We should pay attention and learn from their lesson.