The Logic of the Boss

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The wildcat strike begun by the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks yesterday, in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, is one of the most important labor actions in my memory. The Bucks were set to wrap up their first-round playoff series with the Orlando Magic, when players decided in the locker room that it would be wrong to take the court for a game in the midst of so many cries for justice. They were prepared to forfeit a playoff game, though it was just postponed.

Solidarity spread amid the closed quarters of the bubble, transforming into a full strike. No basketball games were played last night, and likely won’t be played today. Los Angeles’s two teams, the Lakers and Clippers, reportedly expressed the desire to strike the rest of the playoffs in a tense players-only meeting, though the outcome is unclear. Other leagues like the WNBA and, shockingly, Major League Baseball, saw games canceled as well.

Basketball shed light on the coronavirus in March, when Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert’s infection led to the league almost immediately suspending the season, and gave part of the impetus for lockdowns nationwide. Their program in the bubble may have led to a testing breakthrough, as the league and its players association union funded a quick saliva-based test that got emergency approval from the FDA. Basketball has been as important an institution as we have in 2020, and now it’s raising consciousness on the destruction of Black lives.

The absolute last person you should ever ask about a labor action connected to racial justice is Jared Kushner. So of course CNBC did just that this morning. Kushner told Andrew Ross Sorkin: “The NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially.”

There’s an implicit logic of the boss embedded in here. The way you control labor is that you don’t pay enough to ever have workers be comfortable. You keep people reliant on the boss so they never get crazy ideas in their head like using their power for positive change, for themselves or the society at large.

In the 1960s, cheap college tuition and a lower cost of living gave space to young antiwar radicals to devote themselves to sustained protest. The diminishing of higher-education support and the rise of student loans weren’t exactly responses, but it was a nice side benefit. The cleaving away of labor from productivity, the skyrocketing of inequality, the breaking of the labor movement, a federal minimum wage that hasn’t increased since the second Bush administration—this all snuffs out personal agency and the ability to speak out. Keep someone dependent on their paycheck, and their health insurance too, and you’ve put a lid on mass action.

The NBA is leading the way together, and Jared Kushner wants to keep people afraid and alone.

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