NBA players went on strike for racial justice. Here's how labor power has shaped the NBA.

by Greg Morton

In June 2020 ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski published a story about Kyrie Irving, one of the NBA’s top players and Vice President of the NBA Player’s Association, openly calling for an NBA work stoppage when millions of retail and service workers were forced to go back into work in the middle of a global pandemic. According to Wojarnowski’s report, Kyrie Irving spoke passionately about the players’ chance to act as community advocates in a time of mass social unrest after a string of particularly heinous murders by police. He argued that NBA players should use their leverage to end the NBA season to send a strong message about their anti-racist values and force the NBA’s billionaire owners to live up to those values. Wojnarowski called Irving a “disruptor,” a label that could easily get a retail or restaurant worker fired. A little over two months later, much of the league’s players hit the same breaking point as Kyrie had in June.

The Thursday afternoon after police in Kenosha, WI shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take the court for their scheduled playoff game against the Orlando Magic. This wildcat strike spread to the rest of the league, into other professional sports in the United States, and would captivate and polarize a global audience. Suddenly, instead of discussing the playoffs, basketball pundits and fans were talking about double consciousness and the players potential demands. The shock and exaggerated reactions to the NBA’s work stoppage belies a hidden truth: many of NBA players’ labor gains have been defined or brought about by strike or the threat of a strike.

In the autumn of 1949, players, coaches, owners, and fans assembled for the first season of the newly formed National Basketball Association in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Syracuse. Instead of going to the movies, a worker could make an after-work detour to see stars like George Mikan and Dolph Schayes compete in the growing game of basketball. Looking on from packed stands, working fans had no way of knowing that they probably had better working conditions and benefits than the superhumans on the court. Those workers enjoyed increased pay, benefits, and union membership because of the postwar labor demand and the tireless struggle of a generation of union activists; in contrast, NBA players were subject to unpaid exhibition games, unpaid public appearances on behalf of their teams, and unofficial “whispering fouls” that allowed refs to impose off-the-record fines for in-game behavior.

In the years since the first NBA season, the positions of the working people in the stands and the NBA players on the court have reversed. At the height of organized labor, years before the NBA unionized, more than one in three Americans was in a union. Today that number is about one in ten. The journey from 1949 to 2020 was long and painful, but the mechanisms that would lead to the rise of the NBPA and the fall of the labor movement at large were already in place when the very first NBA game tipped off.

Eleven years before the start of that first NBA season, Buddy Jeannette, who would play and coach for the first Baltimore Bullets team, was a student athlete at Washington & Jefferson College. Despite being one of the best players on his team, he had little expectation of becoming a professional basketball player. Basketball during the first half of the 20th century was characterized by a series of short-lived leagues and barnstorming teams like the Original New York Celtics and the Harlem Globetrotters, who entertained audiences but hardly provided career stability and had very little turnover.

When the Depression sapped American households of excess income, the idea of basketball as a primary career seemed so unimaginable that despite an All-American Honorable Mention during his senior season, Jeannette was planning to become a history teacher. But after graduating, he couldn’t find work. Out of necessity, he signed a short term contract with the Warren Penns of the National Basketball League. For regular workers, the Depression and the war years were transformational. At the start of the Depression, the right to organize was not yet guaranteed by law and the social safety net not yet built. Going on strike meant not only losing the prospect of any benefits, but there was also no unemployment insurance to subsidize lost income. By 1945, when the war and its aftermath caused a surge in labor demand and Jeannette was on his way to his second National Basketball League (NBL title), over 5 million workers marched on picket lines as they sought to secure some prosperity after years of poverty and war.

In 1950, Chuck Cooper and Earl Lloyd broke the NBA color barrier, paving the way for a generation of Black stars and labor leaders like Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson. NBA TV deals had the dual effects of transforming basketball into a pop culture fixture and growing the NBA’s revenue pie. It became increasingly clear that the NBA was the league that could turn basketball into a career. At labor’s peak in 1954, when nearly 35% of workers in the U.S. were unionized, Bob Cousy sent out a letter to a player on each team that eventually led to the formation of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA).

In its early years, the NBPA projected a more constrained, conciliatory attitude than many of its contemporaries. The players’ list of demands was initially quite modest; an end to the unofficial “whispering fouls”, a slight increase in per-diem, and moving expenses were among the players’ only demands. In contrast, workers around the country were winning health care and retirement plans. As strike numbers spiked in the early 1950s, the NBA players chose to play even when their first list of formal demands was rejected. But after Bob Cousy threatened an AFL-CIO affiliation and a player’s strike, the owners not only recognized the NBPA, but came to the negotiating table to start meeting the players’ demands.

In the following years, NBA players won a long list of labor victories with the threat of strikes as that tactic became less and less effective for regular workers. With the addition of television revenue, player demands like pensions for aging former players like Jeannette seemed more realistic and the optics of striking more favorable. The signature moment in the pension fight was a work stoppage ahead of the 1964 All-Star Game engineered by Tommy Heinsohn and the NBPA. Ahead of the NBA’s first televised All Star Game, its most valuable stars presented a last second ultimatum: give us benefits or embarrass yourself on the national stage. The game went on 15 minutes late, but the NBA adopted a pension plan under the first Black NBPA President, Oscar Robertson.

In 1983, less than two months after Reagan broke the air traffic controllers strike, the NBPA used the threat of a strike to force NBA owners to adopt the first clearly defined revenue sharing plan in professional sports. Ensuring the players right to their piece of the NBA’s ever growing revenue pie for generations to come in a move that can be credited with the steady growth of NBA salaries from that point to the present. In 2014, players went as far as using their power to remove an NBA owner, when the Clippers used the threat of a work stoppage in the midst of a playoff campaign to force the NBA’s hand in removing their racist owner Donald Sterling and by insisting that the NBA’s culture be one in which racism is not tolerated.

As one of the most powerful and visible unions in America, the NBPA has an important role to play in the modern labor movement. While new money ownership has been too often credited with the NBA’s reputation as “the progressive league”, the NBA largely owes its culture, values, and working conditions to leaders from Bill Russell to LeBron James. In a moment when basketball represents a welcome distraction for many in the midst of a global pandemic, the NBA and WNBA both stood up to demand better, not just for themselves, but all of us. The August 26th work stoppage in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake is the first league-wide wildcat strike in league history. In a moment where we desperately need both labor leadership and moral leadership, the NBA players and WNBA players have provided us with what will surely be one of the most publicized moments of collective action in sports history. It is up to the players to decide what to do with that movement.

For an example of what they can gain from sitting out, players need look no further than Buddy Jeannette. In 1993 when a near fifty-year wait for the Basketball Hall of Fame ended in yet another disappointment, he told a Baltimore Sun reporter, “I’m getting my pension now, and that’s more important.”

Greg Morton (@invisibae) is a retail worker, musician, and Economics student at Howard University in Washington, DC.

AdminSeptember 2, 2020