This week’s I’ve Ben Thinking is a bit different than usual! I’ve always been intrigued by the potential for sports to drive political and cultural movements with far more significance than the literal game taking place. Athletes are the highest-paid unionized workforce in the world, and player’s unions have won significant gains copied by unions of all kinds, including lifetime healthcare benefits and post-career financial counseling.
With the Supreme Court and National Labor Relations board signaling they may soon grant college athletes employer status, I wanted at first to write about the influence of entertainment unions (Hollywood and Broadway are both broadly unionized as well) on more traditional workplace labor rights.
But then I started thinking about the experiences of sports fans in both my hometown of Central New York and adopted home of Oakland. Bills fans were held hostage by the Pegula Family, while the Raiders abandoned Oakland for Las Vegas and the Warriors sought green…
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