unions Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

NFLPA Response: With These Benevolent Owners, Who Needs A Union?
After our editorial urging NFL players to form a union ran yesterday, we received the below reply from NFLPA Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs George Atallah....

NFL Players Should Unionize
The National Football League had its way with Marshawn Lynch this week, reportedly threatening to fine the Seattle Seahawks running back $500,000 if he didn't speak to reporters. This is just one more in a series of incidents in which the league has threatened players with disproportionate penalties...

Cleveland Cops Demand Apology, Call Activist Browns Players "Pathetic"
Browns receiver Andrew Hawkins wore a shirt demanding justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford before today's game against the Bengals, and the act so infuriated Cleveland cops that the city's police union president is now demanding the team apologize—calling Hawkins's statement (and one previously ...

Northwestern Goes Union-Busting
Tomorrow, Northwestern football players will vote on whether or not to form a union, a right given to them by a National Labor Relations Board ruling last month. NLRB rules stipulate that no meetings can be held today, the day before the vote, to decrease the risk of outside influence—which doesn't ...

Here Are Nebraska Coaches' Talking Points About Unionization
How are other Big Ten schools handling the tectonic movements set off by the Northwestern football players' unionizing campaign? Very, very cautiously, it seems, to judge by the talking points handed down to Nebraska coaches by an associate athletic director....

How Would An NCAA Union Actually Work? A Guide For Perplexed Pundits
The real triumph of the decades-long propaganda war against organized labor isn't best seen in the ever-declining rate of unionization, or ever-increasing income inequality, or even the way the word "union" functionally works as an epithet. It's seen, instead, in the fact that so many otherwise smar...

The NCAA Should Pray That Players Are Able To Form A Union
Originally published in Bloomberg View....

Northwestern Football Players Are Trying To Unionize
In the opening shots of a major new assault on the NCAA's amateurism model, an "overwhelming majority" of Northwestern football players have filed to be recognized as members of a union. Their endgame, if successful, would be college football players officially being classified as employees....

Should LeBron Try To Save The NBA's Players Union?
ESPN's Brian Windhorst reports that LeBron James is "considering" running for president of the NBA Players Association, which he says "is in bad shape right now." But should LeBron hitch himself to something that will never operate in his best interests?...

How America Commie-Baited A Baseball Hero
MLB executives and owners feared Marvin Miller, but they weren't the first. FBI documents reveal that the federal government, at the height of the Red Scare, undertook an embarrassingly extensive investigation into Miller's liberalism to determine whether or not he was a loyal citizen of the United ...

Basketball Players Spent Their Wild And Crazy All-Star Saturday Meeting For Three And A Half Hours And Voting To Dismiss Their Union Director
Wojnarowski reports that Billy Hunter's dismissal, widely presumed to be an inevitability after the myriad scandals that recently punctured his cocoon of power, was voted on and affirmed by a group of NBA players this afternoon. A bit more on the meeting that sealed his fate once and for all:...

NBA Players Association Tells Its Corrupt Boss To Go Away
NBAPA head Billy Hunter, lately revealed to the general public to be a nepotism-loving, watch-gifting union boss in the Tammany style, is on indefinite leave as of yesterday. The NBAPA hired outside counsel, likely in advance of an attempt to oust Hunter permanently, while Hunter declared the NBAPA'...

NBA Players Association Head Billy Hunter Once Used $22,000 Of Union Funds To Buy Derek Fisher A Watch
The NBAPA's board recently commissioned a independent review of the record of noted nepotism-abuser Billy Hunter, who has been union head for 16 years. Though the review found that his actions fell short of illegality, it did reveal a few odd pieces of information about the judgment of Hunter, the m...

Minor League Baseball: The Last Bastion Of Acceptable Exploitation In Professional Sports (Not Counting The NCAA)
For every top-flight prospect apprenticing in the minors after receiving a multi-million dollar signing bonus, hundreds of players are drafted every year and get $1,000, tops. Salaries start at $1,100 a month, and the checks only come for half a year. As Lily Rothman says over at Slate, most of thes...

Rick Reilly Goes Union-Busting
Rick Reilly popped another reheated turd out of the microwave. It's a variation on his standard deification of golf as the world's most perfect sport. But here's the twist: this time those blue collar heroes of the links are contrasted with the greedy millionaires of the NBA and NFL....

Today In Dumb Anti-NFLPA Spin
Florio has a pretty good rundown of the NFL's coming labor apocalypse, but there's one point he makes that I really hope doesn't catch on, even though you can be sure it will....