Originally published at: Will college football and basketball players be given the right to unionize? | Boing Boing
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Will college football and basketball players be given the right to unionize?
If they are waiting to be given the “right to unionize”, they might be doing unionizing wrong.
All the best to them, though.
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What kind of hellscape is this, you need to ask your boss “please sir, can we have a union?”
That’s not what’s happening. Anyone can form a union. However, this is about getting official recognition from the NLRB, which confers a set of rights that wild cat unions do not get under American law. This was the system set up during the New Deal era that dominated the era of the liberal consensus. It gave labor unions a seat at the table in shaping economic policies during the mid-century, but it also gave some labor unions more legitimacy than others. That’s problematic, obvious, but it did give many American workers a much higher standard of living and helped to fire the engines of economic growth in the mid-century, which contrary to the modern neo-liberal “wisdom” was more widely shared by the average American. It created a massive growth in the American middle class.
You can certainly argue that this is more about the state and corporations controlling unions (or maybe just “taming” unions). But it’s less about “please sir, can we have a union” especially in the current, post-Reagan, post-liberal consensus environment.
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Thanks for the explanation. 
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