First of all, it's not a boycott. It's a strike. And a wildcat strike to boot. When the players on the Milwaukee Bucks chose not to play in the NBA playoffs -- joined by their baseball counterparts, the Brewers, with other teams quickly following -- they became part of a tradition that reaches back to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, to Muhammad Ali, to Carlos Delgado, all the way to the present, to Maya Moore and Colin Kaepernick. The striking NBA players are part of Black Lives Matter. They are part of the present-day civil rights movement. But they are part of something else, too. They are part of the labour movement. Professional athletes are workers. They may be wealthy -- though all are not as wealthy as the top earners -- but their working life is perilously short, and throughout history, has been awash in exploitation. If some earn huge salaries today, that's because so many people are profiting from their labour. Strike vs boycott So why is this action a...
Comments
Post a Comment