NFL owners broke football players strike

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Professional football players remain the highest-paid slaves in the history of the world. In their battle with the professional football monopoly, the players were unable to win the right to work and were humiliated and forced back to work on the owners' terms.

The NFL is basically a cartel of 28 teams owned by multi-millionaires who control all of the products produced and equal shares of TV revenues grossing more than $35 million per year apiece. The games are the profitable sporting pastime of the idle rich leading up to the Super Bowl, which has become the winter pageant of the ruling class.

The players as a group are both the main product and the basic workforce at the same time. To the owners, the right to control the product supersedes the right of the players to their constitutional right to work. Although the players' average salary is $230,000 per year, basically no salary is guaranteed, and the players can be cut at any time along with their salary.

Injured players are discarded like worn-out machinery and replaced by new players produced by the colleges at no cost to the owners. The wear and tear of the games leave most of the players injured for lifewhich on the average only lasts 55 years. Most players only play three to four years.

Although the owners could well afford to pay the demands of the players, it was in their interests—as members of the ruling class—to maintain the overall offense against all workers and to make an example out of the players.

With typical capitalist disregard for the quality of their products, they proceeded on a strikebreaking course and organized scab games. With full support of the mass media, they waged a massive propaganda campaign against the players.

In spite of the media blitz, huge losses in income, and the defection of some of the highest paid superstars (like Joe Montana, Danny White, and Tony Dorsett), the overwhelming majority of the players stood firm.

The ruling class had a united front in their support to the NFL. They knew that a victory for the players would give SOCIALIST ACI confidence to the rest of the working class, and conversely, that a defeat would maintain the ruling class' austerity drive against the working class.

What was needed by the players was a united front to unite all workers and stop the scab games. A counter-offensive to the media blitz was necessary to point out that a victory for the players would have been a victory for the working class as a whole and set the stage for a reversal of the concessionary trend that started with the breaking of the PATCO air-traffic controllers strike of 1981.

Even a modest response-like the demonstrations in Philadelphia, called by the trade-union leadership, which closed the games down-would have greatly assisted the players if done on a nationwide basis.

Unfortunately, the national leaderships of both the union and the civil-rights organizations were far from equal to the task, and the players were forced to fight alone. N NOVEMBER 1987