How NBA Players Became the World’s Highest-Paid Union Workers

Before debates on Hong Kong devoured the NBA preseason, the league's biggest controversy followed the rising prominence of player power. LeBron James recruited too much. Anthony Davis spoke too much. Chris Paul earned too much. This summer coaches, commentators, and owners fumed like smokestacks, puffing up a critique unheard of in the United States' economy—the workers had too much money and too much clout. The anomaly of pro-labor politics persists in the NBA largely because of the strength of the National Basketball Players Association.

Over the past 60 years, the NBPA collectively bargained professional basketball players into an average salary of $7 million, making them the highest-paid union employees in the world (the NFL and MLB also have unions, but they earn their members less take-home pay). Yet, over the very same period, millions of American workers saw paychecks flatline, jobs automate, and factories offshore. Today, as economic inequality drives debates both presidential and pedestrian, some economists argue that the decline of labor unions explains why workers receive a shrinking sliver of national income. Offering a blueprint to reverse this trend, the NBA players’ union shows how collective bargaining can help spread prosperity to workers in sectors beyond basketball.

"Prior to the union, the players had nothing," the NBPA proclaims. On their official website, a short video reel recounts how, in the early 1960s, the players had no pension, no health-care benefits, and a per diem of $7 a day. Boston Celtics Hall of Famer Bob Cousy portrayed the 1950s pre-union NBA as a sports oligarchy where “players had no voice" and "team owners took advantage of them." Even after unionizing in 1954, the Celtics' Gene Conley scoffed that owners were so stingy, they only conceded to give players "more soap in the shower room, and two towels instead of one."

Even if at first gains only dribbled in, the union eventually helped the players' prospects rise drastically. By the 1980s, salaries soared as the NBPA negotiated a 53 percent revenue share for union members. Yet the players’ climb to power during the second half of the 20th century also tracked descent for workers in the broader economy. While players like Magic Johnson made millions, American labor unions collapsed, besieged by a multi-pronged political and policy assault. Steelworkers lost health care as globalization threw them into competition against low-wage labor in China. Garment makers downgraded retirement plans as corporate executives automated factories. Civil servants took pay cuts as lawmakers contracted out public utilities. By the late 1990s, job seekers fell out of the labor force as opportunities for quality employment withered away.

By the time Steph Curry and James Harden were breaking records with contracts for hundreds of millions of dollars, the once mighty United Automobile Workers union had shrunk to 430,000 members, down nearly a million members from its peak in 1979. Currently, the share of unionized labor is lower than it's been in over 100 years, representing only 10.5 percent of all workers. Over the past half century, the fortunes of NBA players and American workers split. Today one group thrives, organized and powerful. The other languishes, ransacked and looted.

In his new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, veteran New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse argues that the "lack of worker leverage helps explain what might be called America's anti-worker exceptionalism." Greenhouse reports the United States is the only industrialized nation not to give workers a legal right to vacation, paid maternity leave, and paid sick days. "The decline in workers' bargaining power is of course closely related to the diminished might of American labor unions," Greenhouse writes.

But after decades of losses, American laborers are turning the tables. GM workers are on strike, as are Chicago public school teachers. Gallup public opinion polls show support for labor at nearly a 50-year high, increasing from 48 percent in 2008 to 64 percent today. Leading Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders back plans to increase union membership and sectoral bargaining. These measures would prevent employers from bypassing organized labor, force corporations to negotiate with their workers, and fortify unions against the legal attacks that have hallowed their ranks. If these policies pass, they stand not only to increase workers' pay and benefits but to decrease racial inequality as well.

In an interview with Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry noted that after fast-food workers in New York won their Fight for 15 campaign last year, they moved to address discrimination next. "People thought, Geez, I just won $15, what else can I win in my life?" Henry recounted. "New York workers put their elbows on the table and said, 'Let's end stop and frisk. Let's end deportation in our community.’ ”

As with the SEIU, the NBPA's worker power helps address racism. The players’ union and its foundation have funded historically black colleges and universities, nonprofits supporting voter registration, and initiatives tackling the school-to-prison pipeline. In 2014, when tapes emerged of then Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling using racial slurs, the union threatened to boycott the playoffs if the league did not fire Sterling. With nearly 80 percent of its members identifying as black, the NBPA has molded the league into a community that embraces civil rights and black culture like every month is February.

Today the NBA is a place where teams like the Sacramento Kings partner with local Black Lives Matter chapters and black history is celebrated with TV commercials playing negro spirituals like "Wade in the Water." During the offseason, All-Stars like Damian Lillard challenge Shaquille O'Neal to rap battles. On Martin Luther King Day, telecasters honor the slain civil rights and labor activist by touring The National Center for Civil and Human Rights. In the playoffs, Black Twitter explodes as Barack Obama and Drake dap. Whether you're looking at a mural in the Atlanta Hawks Stadium that replaces a Confederate Memorial with a portrait of the Migos or you're listening to commentators discuss the degree of Joel Embiid's thirst for Rihanna, the NBA’s exceptionalism is as mesmerizing as Zion Williamson's flight.

Thanks in part to this abnormal worker power, the NBA functions as a safe space for black men. Meanwhile, most of the American economy discriminates vigorously against them. The bias is so severe, researchers have found that black men without a criminal record receive less job opportunities than white men with one, and that black men are often locked out of the economy altogether..

Comparatively, the NBA’s economic and racial parity is deeply enviable. Yet for decades, we have been told that these unions, which have made the league what it is today, are corrupt institutions. Whether from the lips of “right-to-work” politicians or in PowerPoints from employer sponsored anti-union consultants, Americans have been force-fed anti-labor propaganda. The Obamas’ Netflix documentary, “American Factory” reveals the efforts that companies go to discourage employees from joining unions. In the film, Fuyao Glass America paid anti-labor consultants nearly $800,000 in 2016 to cast unions as expensive, ineffective, and a waste of time.

Yet this argument that similar anti-union employers like Wal-Mart and Amazon make against collective bargaining is hypocritical. These companies engage in collective negotiation themselves. No one believes that the “dues” that McDonald's pays to the National Restaurant Association or the money that Amazon pays to The Internet Association is ill-spent. Rather, when these companies unite with similar firms to collectively bargain for better terms in legislation with state and local governments, it's evident they believe cross-company cooperation makes businesses more powerful. Yet many of these same companies that join group trade lobbying organizations, spend millions to prevent workers from employing the same tactics.

The brain short-circuits attempting to imagine NBA Commissioner Adam Silver paying a “union avoidance,”consultant to try and convince players they’re better off without a union. They know better. Kawhi Leonard is to the Los Angeles Clippers' owner Steve Ballmer what you are to your boss: much less wealthy. The only way Kawhi, or any of the other NBA’s millionaire players can level the financial scales with the leagues’ billionaires owners is through worker solidarity. That’s just math. And the only way workers in all sectors across the country can elevate their workplace concerns is through unity. That’s just power. If there is one thing you learn from watching the NBA this season, let it be that the strongest, wealthiest employees in the world need unions, and that you do too.

Aaron Ross Coleman covers race and economics. His previous work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Buzzfeed, CNBC, Vox, and elsewhere. He is an Ida B. Wells Fellow at Type Media Center.

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