The NFL Players Association Is Falling Apart When It Needs Solidarity The Most
Everything about the NFL Players Association sludgeslide seems so predestined and unavoidable. The usual predicament has been made worse by disgraced former union chief Lloyd Howell getting confused about what side he works for and former president J.C. Tretter misunderstanding how work stoppages are supposed to happen, but for as lurid and goofy as the details have been, and with all due respect to the innovation of holding four-figure team-building exercises at a strip club, none of it quite qualifies as surprising. In the broadest sense, this is just the sort of thing that conflicted and ineffective unions do.
If only life in the labor trenches was as easy as the WNBPA makes it seem. They figure out what they want in a negotiation, slap it on a T-shirt, and have every member wear one; at WNBA All-Star Weekend, that message read Pay Us What You Owe Us. The t-shirt is not the important part, though. The key here is the phrase “every member.”
The WNBPA’s greatest skill is in understanding what its members want, from social justice activity to collective work action. Neither is a new thing; the players threatened to strike in 2003 and caused both the start of the season and the league’s draft to be delayed, and successfully pressured Atlanta Dream owner Kelly Loeffler to sell in 2021 over her objection to Black Lives Matter protests by the league’s players. Each time, the players acted as a single, unified force, and despite the sports media’s new fascination for trying to pit players against the Caitlin Clark, the union has essentially maintained the solidarity of its members through more than two decades.
And herein lies the essential problem with the NFL players union. They have trouble getting past that solidarity part, because the jobs that its members hold are so brief and so perilous that few of the rank and file are willing to sacrifice the time it would take for the unit to sit down long enough to make their demands stand up. Giving up a chunk of one’s athletic career is a big ask for any union; this sort of thing isn’t just a matter of hitting pause while negotiations make their way forward. And it is far more difficult a navigation when that chunk of lost time comes out of a career that lasts barely three years on average; getting 1,500 members to think the same way is essentially ten times as difficult as it is with a bargaining unit of 156. For NFL players, a lockout is a real threat to a livelihood that unfolds entirely on a knife edge; a strike is a dealbreaker on its face. Everyone, on either side of the table, banks on that central truth to guide their behavior. It has delivered exactly the sort of status quo you’d expect.
And those are just the normal structural issues with the NFLPA. As president, Howell made things staggeringly worse for the players he ostensibly represented by working both sides of the street, with a heavy lean toward management. Tretter, the former NFLPA President who resigned as the union’s chief strategy officer on Sunday, was implicated neck-deep in Howell’s selection. “I think what I realized this morning when I woke up, after finally getting more than like two hours of sleep, is that I fell in love with the idea of what this place could be,” Tretter told CBS Sports. “And over the last six weeks, I’ve realized what this place is, and the delta between those two things.” On the other hand, Tretter and Howell were both casual about letting the membership know what they were doing in all cases, and particularly regarding the ruling in the owners’ guaranteed salaries case heard five months ago, which the two men agreed to keep from the membership. That’s disqualifying stuff, and it doesn’t even count Howell billing the union for those strip club forays.
There is supposed to be a Tuesday meeting of the union’s board of player representatives to vote on an interim executive director to replace Howell, who resigned Friday; Tretter was one of the two candidates for the job, along with fellow union executive Don Davis. Now, Tretter and Howell are both gone and the union is cracked almost beyond repair. The struggle for the NFLPA has always been an inability to galvanize a largely apathetic membership; without credible leadership, they’re looking a long way up at square one.
By superficial comparison, what the WNBA players want seems both clear and unifying. “Pay Us What You Owe Us” seems fairly obvious—a reasonable ask, phrased in legible language. There is some level of apples-v.-pomegranates with the NFLPA-WNBPA comparison here, to be sure, but the women seem to understand that, at the most basic level, a union runs on both solidarity and shared commitment to an agreed-upon cause. And if it doesn’t, then it isn’t really running right at all.
Regardless of your view re: Howell and Tretter, the NFLPA has rarely managed to get its membership to commit sufficiently to the idea that everyone in the membership really is in this together, while the WNBPA figured that out fairly early on. Even allowing for the various manufactured rivalry sideshows that define the WNBA discourse, that union remains solid and solidly forward-facing today. If nothing else, Terry Jackson and Nneka Ogwumike, the top two WNBPA officials, have evinced a fairly clear understanding of who they work for and what those duties require. If the NFLPA wants to figure out how to be a better union, a phone call to either of them would be an excellent place to begin. To be sure, they won’t have to worry about the delta between what they think the union should be and what it actually is.
