Press Action ::: Solidarity Forever (NHL-Style)

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Solidarity Forever (NHL-Style)

By Jordy Cummings

Everybody hates a strike. With years of anti-labor propaganda, in Canada and the States, a strike means rotting trash on the road (not sanitation workers being forced to work without a contract.) It means no after-school activities (not gym teachers being forced to work as coach, neigh therapist, for little extra dough.) It means no hockey season this year! Dooooood! Who do these guys think they are? I mean, they make millions, right?

For the most part, wrong, hockey players are like most athletes paid, even when millionaires, less than the revenue that they generate for the behemothic corporatized NHL. They’d probably be happy to be paid less in a less behemothic league, that old-schoolers think made a big mistake by expanding into the Sun Belt, and then adjusting for losses (remember that the bosses draw more revenue than labor) by trying to impose a salary cap.

A salary cap? Again—but these guys make millions! Even a union-man friend of mine said to me last night that he sided with management in this one, assuming that management were what they seem to be, lowly guys in cheap suit jackets, losing all of their profits to these jocks. In fact, nearly every hockey team is owned, and draws a great profit by various multinational corporations, investment banks and private individuals and holding companies of great means. It is true that individual teams lose money, in markets that any fool would tell you is not a good hockey market. Yet even these money-losing teams are owned by fat cats, and at worst, the operation is like the New York Post for Rupert Murdoch.

In fact, the means in which professional athletes are well-remunerated is close to exactly how a progressive, even syndicalist enterprise should operate. With the role of agents, basically individual labor reps, the operation can even be looked at as “par-economic.” The old French dictum, made famous by Marx, from each according to his ability et-cetera, is more or less adapted in professional sports, the ability being drawing revenue as well as scoring goals, hitting homers and inspiring sports fans. Thus, even in “really existing socialist” countries behind the “iron curtain” were athletes paid well. It is not a matter of whether they morally deserve it (justice and economics are two different sciences.) It is that they produce real capital when they score.

And herein lies the quandary. Even if they miraculously produced it, quite literally by being born and made with the luck to work in a high-paid—and high-stress —sector of North American society (note, I know a few pro-hockey players and they aren’t in it for the money), people don’t sympathize with them like they do with workers in other sectors. Instead of looking at athletes and cultural workers (Hollywood, Broadway, music, etc.) as models for solidarity producing major economic gain, the fetishization of poverty takes precedent in many the progressive’s mind. Why bother wasting time or energy or even thought on a buncha rich guys with mullets?

One would think that the left would take this opportunity to solidarize with these sports-workers. But the question of them being relatively well-off makes it less of a just struggle for many than janitors or some such. It is true that they would not be entering the poorhouse if they allowed a salary cap and other management gains. But it is also true that they would be setting a precedent for the entire labor force that just because a worker is well-remunerated means that their even better-remunerated bosses can take back their gains.

For NHL players to cave right now would be the equivalent of a professional sports Taft Hartley Act.

And sports fans, why not actually pay attention to college hockey for once? It is actually a more exciting game.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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