Baselines and Picket Lines

This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.

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In their status as employees, American professional athletes are different from other American workers, and not just because they have more money. They can unionize, and they have. They can collectively bargain contracts, and they have. They can strike, and they have.

To be sure, American workers won all those rights in 1935, but those rights have been so eroded during the past 50 years that only athletes and an elect set of other employees can still exercise them. Like workers in entertainment production, hospitals, teaching, and other professional occupations, the special skills of athletes mean they can’t readily be replaced. Workers who can be replaced are routinely fired during unionization campaigns, which is a violation of that 1935 law, but one which incurs no real penalty. That’s one major reason why the rate of private-sector unionization has plummeted from more than one-third to a bare 6 percent in the past 70 years, while that of professional athletes in major team sports is effectively 100 percent.

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Management has certainly tried to replace athletes. During a 1987 strike, the NFL used replacement players for three weeks, made up of bouncers, bartenders, and firefighters; the then-Washington Redskins used a quarterback who had a work furlough from prison. It was an unsightly display, and both stadium attendance and TV ratings plummeted. The owners settled the strike.

During a baseball strike near the end of the 1994 season that stretched into spring training the following year—the only time the World Series was ever canceled since the agreement to hold one between the American and National Leagues in 1905—the teams’ owners threatened to employ minor leaguers and retirees as strikebreakers. “There ain’t no place in our game for replacement players,” retorted legendary manager Sparky Anderson, who then was helming the Detroit Tigers. “The only thing I have that will never leave me is integrity.” Tiger owners responded by putting Anderson on involuntary leave.

The inability to replace the best athletes in the world, and their role as the star attraction for any sports fan, gives them leverage to make sure they benefit from their own labor. At least, most of the time.

Thanks to their collective-bargaining agreements, major league baseball players make roughly 47 percent of total league revenues, NFL players make approximately 48 percent, and NHL and NBA players make 50 percent.

WNBA players make a bare 9 percent of league revenues, and their efforts to raise that to 30 percent have been rebuffed.

And then there are the players of the Women’s National Basketball Association.

WNBA players make a bare 9 percent of league revenues, and their current efforts to raise that take to 30 percent in a new contract have been rebuffed by their employers, who have offered the players just 15 percent of league and team revenues—a share that will actually decrease during the life of the three-year contract. The current contract expired January 9, and as I write, owners and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) remain far apart. In December, more than 90 percent of the players voted to authorize a strike if a more equitable settlement isn’t reached.

The WNBA fight is a signature one in the history of sports unions, which have always had to struggle to gain their fair share of the enormous profits they generate. In leagues where players turn over every few years and solidarity can be hard to find, big victories can be hard to come by. But given the cultural pedestal upon which sports is placed, those victories can reverberate across the entire labor movement. For working people today, all eyes should turn to women’s basketball.

THE WNBA AND ITS PLAYERS’ UNION are not new kids on the block. The league was founded in 1997, and the union in 1998. The players are hardly demanding comparable contracts to those in men’s basketball. The women players are merely seeking a rise in their share of the WNBA’s revenues—and even that, to a level well short of the level in the NBA.

Today, the average WNBA yearly salary is roughly $102,000, while in the NBA it’s $13 million, approximately 130 times greater. While Steph Curry and LeBron James each have yearly salaries over $50 million, the maximum permissible salary for the WNBA’s highest-paid stars is $250,000, one two-hundredth of their male counterparts’.

Benefits are skewed toward men’s basketballers as well. An NBA player with three years of service gets a lifetime pension, after nine years gets full medical coverage for life, and after ten years that blanket medical coverage extends to his family. The women, by contrast, get no medical insurance after retirement. “Over here they telling vets to pay for a flight to All-Star weekend to get checked by a doc in a pop up tent,” Washington Mystics forward Shakira Austin posted on social media in January.

And it’s not as if the WNBA’s fortunes are sagging; quite the contrary. The league has been projected to earn $1 billion in 2025, with steadily rising increases in attendance and viewership thanks in part to the boom triggered by generational superstar Caitlin Clark. Attendance at WNBA games increased by 16 percent from 2022 to 2023, and 48 percent from 2023 to 2024. Ticket prices have been soaring as well, with one ticket inventory company reporting that the average cost of a ticket rose from $50 in 2023 to $88 in 2024. The league’s new media rights deal raises its annual payment from $50 million to $200 million. Indeed, the value of every one of the league’s 13 teams increased by more than 100 percent from 2024 to 2025, to an aggregate total of $3.5 billion, with San Francisco’s Golden State Valkyries leading the pack with an assessed valuation of $500 million.

The one and only metric that lags behind this wave of increases is player pay. And the fans watching and tuning in to WNBA games aren’t doing it to see the league executives.

The meager salaries for WNBA stars have forced many to get second jobs in the offseason. The most notorious example of this is six-time All-Star Brittney Griner, whose side hustle took her annually to a Russian pro league. Before a flight to a game in 2022, law enforcement in Moscow found a vape cartridge in her possession with less than a gram of hash oil, something she had been prescribed in the U.S. as a pain reliever. Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison for this transgression, and was only released when the Biden administration negotiated a prisoner swap for convicted arms smuggler Viktor Bout, known as “The Merchant of Death.” In a very real way, Bout is a free man who continues to trade weapons of war today because the WNBA doesn’t pay its players satisfactorily.

Despite the sport’s growing popularity and the teams’ skyrocketing revenues and valuations, WNBA owners haven’t ruled out a lockout of their players if they fail to come to terms, just as the players haven’t ruled out a strike if they can’t get the owners to pay them a fair share of league revenue. At the league’s All-Star Game in Indianapolis last year, all the players took the court wearing T-shirts inscribed with the words “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”

“This is the biggest moment the WNBA has ever seen, and it’s not something that can be messed up,” Caitlin Clark has said. “We’re going to fight for everything that we deserve.”

Reflecting its demographic composition—young women, roughly 70 percent of whom are Black—the union has a history of social justice advocacy and rhetoric not found in the other athlete unions. One paragraph in its mission statement reads: “Through collective bargaining, protest, public service, community engagement and educational programming, we tirelessly challenge the workplace and societal conditions that stand in the way of our vision of what is possible for our lives and the future of basketball. Moving as one, we prevail.”

That history was chiefly on display during the George Floyd protests of 2020. The players dedicated their season to Black women killed by police, such as Breonna Taylor, with uniforms bearing their names. They established social justice councils in which they met with community members to discuss ways to combat racism and sexism. Players for the Atlanta Dream wore T-shirts with the words “Vote Warnock,” referring to Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic Senate candidate who was running (successfully) against MAGA Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was the Dream’s co-owner. Loeffler had previously complained to the league about players wearing “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” jerseys, to the point that the league itself suggested she sell the team to new owners more sympatico with the players, which she did after losing the election to Warnock. (She is now heading the Small Business Administration during Trump’s second term.)

Now the players are channeling this militancy into the cause of their own livelihoods. Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier said in September: “We have the best players in the world. We have the best fans in the world. But right now we have the worst leadership in the world.” She confronted WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, asking why stars like Clark were making so little. Collier reported that Engelbert responded, “Caitlin should be grateful she makes $16 million off the court, because without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn’t make anything.” (Clark’s Indiana Fever currently has her signed to a four-year, $338,000 contract.) Engelbert, when pressed, did not deny the statement.

Some WNBA players remain hopeful that the owners will come around to embrace the rather modest increases in pay that the union has proposed. If the owners opt to continue to hoard their revenues, however, the players appear determined to strike.

IT WAS JUST NINE YEARS AFTER BASEBALL’S National League was founded in 1876 that the first American athletes’ union took shape. John Montgomery Ward, who was the Shohei Ohtani of the 1880s as both a star pitcher and hitter, organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players in 1885. At the time, salaries were abysmal, and the owners actually required players to pay them rent for their uniforms. The players’ chief grievance was the reserve clause, which bound each player to his team with no option to move to another unless his owner sold him to a rival franchise. Nor did owners need their players’ consent for such sales, which almost invariably blindsided the players. The reserve clause would impede players’ freedom of movement for the next 90 years.

In 1888, enraged by the owners’ refusal to meet with the union, their blacklisting of union activists, and their stationing of Pinkerton agents to spy on them, Ward opted to create a new league. In the Players League, as it was named, each team was owned and run by a board consisting of four players and four investors. Most of baseball’s stars moved to the new league, which had no reserve clause binding them to a particular team. National League owners termed these defectors socialists, revolutionaries, and terrorists—and even worse, “overpaid.” But the NL owners wooed PL investors with promises of new teams that they could own, and the PL collapsed after the 1890 season, taking the Brotherhood down with it. Some small proto-unions popped up in the 1900s, ’10s, and ’40s, but none lasted very long or claimed significant membership.

In 1953—the year that union membership as a share of the overall U.S. workforce peaked—players formed the Major League Baseball Players Association, which exists to this day. The union was born chiefly because some players learned that the pension fund owners had established for them had almost no money in it. But save for its effort to restock the pensions, the MLBPA was singularly ineffective for its first dozen years, in large part because the attorneys chosen to run it were disinclined to take actions that might perturb the owners.

During this time, the closest thing to a labor action was the 1966 two-person strike threat from the two leading pitchers on the Los Angeles Dodgers, Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax (point of personal privilege: my boyhood hero). The Dodgers had won two World Series in the preceding three years despite being a light-hitting team; it was Koufax and Drysdale, the game’s pre-eminent pitchers, who led them to victory and filled Dodger Stadium’s seats.

After a string of record-setting seasons, they were seeking substantial raises, though the club had offered Drysdale a raise of just $5,000 and Koufax one of $15,000. Koufax and Drysdale decided to refuse to report to spring training until the club relented. While hardly a mass campaign, this holdout proved to be the only episode in roughly half a century when a threat to withhold labor compelled management to meet their players’ demands.

All this was to change within weeks of the Koufax-Drysdale holdout, when the players hired a new union leader who would change the trajectory of American professional sports.

Marvin Miller was a labor economist, the first sports union official who’d come up through the labor movement. He’d worked for the War Labor Board during World War II, and then as an economist for the Machinists, the United Auto Workers, and finally as the chief economist for the United Steelworkers of America, where he was deeply involved in winning record pay and benefits for USW members despite the opposition of the companies. Unlike his predecessors at the MLBPA, Miller believed that workers—even pitchers and shortstops—had to fight management for what was rightfully theirs, and he was determined to transform the union into an organization that did just that.

Before Miller arrived, the union was, pathetically, dependent on the owners for its funding. Miller worked a deal with Coca-Cola to provide funding in return for the use of players’ photos. With that added clout, he got the owners to double the pension fund and sign the first collective-bargaining agreement in the history of American sports. In that agreement, minimum yearly pay rose from $6,000 to $10,000, and player grievances, instead of being ruled upon solely by baseball’s commissioner, who represented the owners, were heard instead by independent arbitrators. Shortly thereafter, those arbitrators were also empowered to rule on salary disputes between players and their clubs.

Within two years of Miller’s arrival, fully 99 percent of the players had voluntarily signed dues checkoffs to the union, recognizing that they finally had a union that worked for them. (I draw much of this history from Major League Rebels, an invaluable study of baseball unionism and player activism by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias.)

In 1969, the MLBPA pressured the owners to establish a joint commission to study the reserve clause. The union proposed giving players the right to become free agents after three years with a team; the owners flatly rejected it. Later that year, the St. Louis Cardinals traded star outfielder Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies. They chose the wrong man. Off the field, Flood had been both a civil rights activist, traveling to Mississippi in the early 1960s to speak at rallies, and a union activist. Flood didn’t want to move to Philadelphia, which he termed “the nation’s northernmost Southern city.” He found more than a trace of the ethos of slavery in baseball’s practice of selling players as property to other teams, without the player’s consent. So, with the union’s backing, Flood refused to go to the Phillies, sitting out the season and filing a federal lawsuit against the reserve clause. The suit did not prevail when it reached the Supreme Court, but Flood’s actions made the clause vulnerable in the court of public opinion.

At the start of the 1972 season, the players walked out, the first strike in the history of U.S. professional sports. At issue, again, was underfunded pensions; the owners quickly realized that they were losing more money in canceled games than they’d have to pay to fund the pensions, so they quickly settled. The following year, the MLBPA signed a contract that allowed players with ten years’ experience to veto trades—the first crack in the reserve-clause wall.

Then, in 1975, Miller advised pitchers Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith to challenge the reserve clause in arbitration, and to the horror of the owners, the arbitrator interpreted it in a way that effectively abolished it. As the contract between owners and players was running out in 1981, the owners demanded new language that amounted to a reinstatement of the reserve clause. In return, the players took to the picket line on June 12, and didn’t return to the field until August 10, once the owners had abandoned their effort. The following year, Miller retired.

Through constant dialogue with players and an ability to convince them of their own power, as well as his sense of management’s vulnerabilities, Miller transformed the union into a unified and militant organization, and the sport into one whose prosperity was shared with its players. As Miller was later to write in his autobiography: “The difference between a ballplayer’s being required to accept whatever a club offered him, as had been the case almost from the beginning of professional baseball, and the new system of salary arbitration was like the difference between dictatorship and democracy.”

The major leagues in other sports all gradually shed their reserve clauses, more or less, and moved into the era of free agency. Miller was clearly the catalyst for liberating players across the sports landscape from rules that limited their earning potential.

The owners loathed him (and managed to keep him out of baseball’s Hall of Fame until he was finally voted in, posthumously, in 2019), but Miller had managed to make professional team sports a lucrative profession not just for its stars but for its journeymen as well.

IT’S JOURNEYMEN—AND JOURNEYWOMEN—who need unions. The Shohei Ohtanis, LeBron Jameses, and Babe Ruths can craft their own deals. In 1930, as the nation was plunging into the Great Depression with a federal government clueless about how to stop it, Ruth signed a contract with the Yankees for $80,000. When a reporter told him he’d become the first athlete to make more money than the president—at the time, Herbert Hoover’s salary was $75,000—Ruth famously and accurately replied, “I had a better year than he did.”

“A key issue for all unions is solidarity,” one longtime union strategist who is close to sports unions recently told me. In fact, while the average MLB salary had risen to over $5 million, boosted by contracts like Ohtani’s for $700 million over ten years, the median salary was roughly $1.35 million in 2025, a clear reduction from previous years. In consequence, the share of MLB revenues going to the players has declined over the past half-decade from 50 percent (its level in basketball and hockey) to 47 percent.

“The union is close to Scott Boras,” the union strategist said, referring to the agent for many sports superstars, “and it’s paid less attention to measures that would raise median pay.” The MLBPA’s current contract with baseball owners expires on December 1 of this year, with the expectation of an owner lockout; the main issue is not necessarily the shrinking median income, but the owners’ demand for a salary cap.

The 30 biggest stars in baseball, basketball, or football can set their own contract terms, just like the 30 biggest stars in the Screen Actors Guild. But actors tend to lean left, which isn’t necessarily the norm for the biggest stars in sports. It requires a militant and egalitarian sports union to exhibit true solidarity—that is, to focus on the material interests of the median players.

That’s a tall order. Superstars don’t have to worry about what they will do after retiring, but the average career length of a current MLB player is less than three years. For the NFL, it’s a little over three years; for the NBA, it’s close to five; for the WNBA, three and a half. It’s hard to maintain labor cohesion when so many players are cycling in and out, and those with the greatest longevity are stars who don’t really need the union.

The saga of the NFL Players Association illustrates what can happen absent the kind of leadership that Miller personified. Its former executive director Lloyd Howell was moonlighting as a consultant for private equity firm The Carlyle Group, which was seeking minority stakes in NFL teams at the time—sadly, not the only instance in U.S. sports history when union leaders have favored the interests of owners over those of their own members. Howell resigned last July. During his tenure, the NFLPA agreed to keep secret from players an arbitrator’s report showing that NFL executives encouraged owners to reduce guaranteed contracts in a seeming salary suppression scheme.

The one recent instance in which a sports union did focus on median players—and then some—was the MLBPA’s incorporation of minor league players into its ranks, and the life-changing contract it helped win for them, about which my colleague Emma Janssen writes in this issue. The chief organizer of that effort was attorney Harry Marino, who years ago was a minor league ballplayer in the Diamondbacks’ and Orioles’ farm systems, making a munificent $3,300 a year.

Once the minor league contract was signed and ratified in 2023, Marino began hearing from players in other sports who were considering going union, and he set up an organization, Sports Solidarity, to help them through that process. The group worked with the players in the United Football League (spring football) to build their union and successfully negotiate their first contract; quarterbacks sat out training camp until management came to the table. It is currently engaged in a similar effort by the players in major league rugby. And it would doubtless seek a role if the National Labor Relations Board ruled that college athletes were really employees and therefore eligible for unionization. (That was the position taken by NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo during Joe Biden’s presidency, though it is emphatically not the position of the Trump appointee who has taken her place.)

“The prevalence of unions in sports,” says Marino, “presents an opportunity for the labor movement. Some sports unions lean in on broader issues, using their platform as a way to educate the public on issues like racial equality and gender equality.” On labor and economic issues, no less than racial and gender issues, Marino says, “a sports union could move the needle for their fans, for workers.”

If there’s a sports union with the potential to do all of that, it’s almost surely the WNBPA, which makes the current struggle of the women basketball players all the more important, not just for themselves but for a much broader public, too.

This article appears in Feb 2026 Issue.