The National Football League Players Association... is the labor union of players in football's National Football League.
If it's the players union, why is it not weighing in on the side of the players? I don't recall the United Mine Workers siding with the mining companies against those poor miners dying of brown lung. But here's what Soboroff writes about what the investigation by MEN'S JOURNAL discovered about the Players Association.
What emerges is a picture of a labor union whose officials use their power not to advocate for their members but to protect the assets of the NFL's 32 owners.
How does that happen? What's going on here? I can imagine that the brevity of the average player's career makes accountability to the members less secure than in other industries, where members work for decades. But I still don't get why the players would tolerate this. And I still wonder just what's transpired between the league and the union that the union would side with the league against these former players in such dire straits.
And I still wonder: is there something revealed here about the spirit of our times? Does it not mean something --something that goes beyond the level of the immediate and concrete and gets into the level of forces and patterns, animating spirits-- when not just individuals here and there, but whole organizations behave this way?
