Alzon Media.
Welcome to It could happen hear a podcast about unions falling apart, and in this case, how they're not being put back together again. I am your host, Bio Loong, and today we are telling a somewhat unusual story for this show. It's usual in the sense that it's a story about, you know, the replacement of democracy with bureaucracy.
If like the death spiral of business union of unionism, it's a story it's also as much about the defeat of the workers movement as it is like Lamar Jackson's counting stats, a thing that it also bizarrely is about.
And this is the story of.
The crisis of the NFL Players Association, which is the NFL's union. And it is so unhinged that the only way that this could actually be talked about reasonably is to bring in someone who knows ball, and that is Charles MacDonald of Yahoo Sports and the wonderful Football three o one podcast.
Welcome to the show. This is going to be a trip.
Yeah, thanks for having me. I've listened to a few episodes, so I was excited and you asked me to come on. Love your work, and uh yeah, this is this is gonna be a good rant because not even really a rant, because because because honestly, like when when you like when you start the Puel is back, it is really like a textbook case study from what we know on like just straight up organizational decay.
Like you get such a clear picture on how.
Just really a few people, in this case, thirty two NFL owners can just completely dictate the life of you know, thousands of people who are literally sacrificing their bodies to try and you know, escape whatever poverty they come from in their in their earlier life.
So it's, uh, it's fascinating, it's sad.
I mean, this is one of those areas that I have obviously because it's my it's my job. But it just like extreme cognitive dissonance sometimes. Like I love football, you know, I play from the time I was seven through college obviously, Like I do this work, it's kind of giving me like everything, and then you have to deal with just so much bad stuff that comes with me.
Yeah.
Yeah, Like I remember like covering the Colin Kaepernick season, which was ten years ago as of this.
God right Jesus years ago.
Yeah, and just like seeing how alienating that was just like just writing like a column saying, hey, you know, Washington, like they should work Colin Kaepernick out because they don't have a quarterback and this guy is a startable quarterback. And you would get like hate mail over that stuff. But I'm still tuning every Sunday, you know, Lamar Jackson stuff. I was on the front lines for that, but still.
Tuning in to get my racest slop every Sunday.
It's a fundamental issue here. Yeah, people will still do it immediately. I am mildly proud that I wasn't watching that era, but I wasn't watching that era specifically because the Seahawks lost Super Bolt to the Patriots and then I was like, I'm fucking out for like eight.
Well, I've been watching this stuff my whole life. Like I remember watching like college football with like my dad and his friends when I was like five and six years Old's like, I like, legit, just don't know anything else too, to be like, I had to use this sport as like my vehicle to kind of explore the rest of the world, like once I got out of college, just try to figure my shit out.
Yeah, And I think we have a good combination here to talk about this because you come at this from the football angle and then exploring out of the like, oh,
by god, this is so unhinged. Everything is broken, And then I come at this kind of from the opposite direction, which is one of the things that's been really frustrating about the coverage of this is that, like, like there's lots of very good coverage pubble Tory, who's done a lot of very good work about this, And it's like the guy who kind of instigated the whole.
Like instigator's kind of put in it is put in it lightly. I mean he got the union president fired basically.
Yeah, he got the union president fired after it was revealed that he was using union buddy to go to strip clubs.
That's like the tail end of this story.
Yeah, that's like the end of it. That's where it's showing, right.
But Like, the thing that's been frustrating to me about this is like the people covering this, and people have done a lot of good work. Is there not people who cover unions at all?
Yeah?
And like that's like.
What I do, right, And like I don't know, like I think as much as this episode is going to be us screaming about this union doing unhinged shit like we're obviously like pro union, Like I had my union that irethorganized on by show to talk about our contract against you.
It's like, yeah, I was a member of the first box union that yeah, just god damn.
That was almost ten years ago.
Now is Christ so old and look like I believe in this stuff, like I like, but with the strokegle of a pan not to put it that's blasically because obviously a lot of fight went to it, but with a strugle with a pen, like I was able to live in DC after Arry broke, you know, and it's crazy, like my salary went up to Liverpool age and nothing.
Died yep, right, you know, no one died.
It was it was it was business as usual, honestly, like nothing was weird. So obviously people who listen to the show, like you know that these people with the money like they're out to get us obviously for their own game. And it's so just brazenly clear through like this union story, especially through the past twenty years, which is where I think you kind of have to start it.
I mean, just systematically stripped down. And the one thing that even Pablo on his most recent episode because he talked about it last week because J. C.
Tretder was elected director.
One of the villains of this story the store, right.
And you know, one thing about like Pablo and Mike Florio, who have really been on this more than like any other national journalist, is like, yeah, we still don't know a big component of like the why and the how this is happening, because you know, well, we gotta get into because basically it feels like there's two two or three guys kind of acting as liaisons to the owner while also trying to respect and you know, run the union,
which are obviously just two completely incompatible ideologies when you're trying to work that out.
Yeah, I guess that's actually a way to start talking about this kind of going back to there there used to be a time when the NFL union would go on strike, like they did pickets, like they fought scabs outside of the gates of football stadium. This was a thing that happened like regularly. Like but there's there's a whole bunch of stories of like umw A guys and like guys from like the auto unions like on these pickets with the NFL players and you know, like one of one of the sort of.
Upshots of this God.
Okay, that's a terrible punt, I'm realizing now because this.
Okay, we gotta talk about Gene, you know, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, one of one of the guys who led this union was Gene Upshaw, who was a player for a long time and then was like ran the union for most of its history.
And he's you know, he's running an actual union.
Like they go on strike, they organize, they like do shit, and you know, Jane like over the course of this runs into like they start losing strikes, which is just like a nightmare, and then.
He just like dies in two thousand and eight, Like this is.
Really horrible thincreatic cancer.
Yeah.
So so like not only like like Jane, Jane was a Hall of Fame offensive lineman. Yeah, like like when you think of the Raiders in the in the past, like he was kind of like the start of that era where the only basically the only area where we still think of the Raiders.
As like you know, an entity.
Yeah that should be respected, right, right, not a joke because well, because you know it was it was a different time in the league. Like especially when we see what the Seahawks sale ends up looking like yeah, and we've seen like the Broncos and the Commanders get sold within the past decade.
These teams are now being run by people who don't have football backgrounds.
Like when you think of you know, even even someone as despicable as Jerry Jones, like you can't you can't doubt at his heart that you know, he loves this sport and will be an advocate to the sport, even in ways that can be harmful to the sport at times. But now we we kind of have like this influx of people who don't have football backgrounds, but they have the capital to kind of get in and that that has also been a shift I think just from an
ownership perspective over the last few years. But when you look at where Gene was coming out as a player after he retired, and think in the early eighties, he kind of set the standard for you know, he was elected he was elected executive director of the union I think, I think in the eighties and he held that position until he died in two thousand and eight.
So yeah, he died in office.
Like that's a long time and it's a lot of trust. And also I think Gene kind of solidified the idea, which is important now that players should run this union, which I agree with. You know, yeah, that's what the union is, right, That's that's what the union is. And I would say even just like as someone who played football byself, like it's kind of a cult when you're in there and you don't really really trust the outsiders to understand like what is going on here on a
day to day basis. And also when you look at like the start of this union back in the fifties, training camp used to be free for the owners. They didn't get paid for training camp. Well preseason games they played. They played six free preseason games. Yeah, and didn't get paid for training camps.
Unreal, unreal, Like you can like you can get serious, like people every single year get really really seriously injured, like trading camp and preseason games.
And there was no free agency, right, so like the team that drafted you, like they own you until you know you're ready to call it quick till they trade you somewhere else where they cut you and you kind of got to figure it out. But like the idea that you could just like have this agency and leave and your contract expires, you can go side with someone else.
That was not a thing.
So obviously, when when you think about where football is now, like what I tell people is like why when they ask, like why should I care about this union?
Okay, think about how bad it is now? It can get worse.
It was worse.
Yeah, it was worse. It was significantly worse.
But you know, you have like this idea that and it's a correct idea because the players are the basis of it that this person in charge of the union needs to be a player. And Gene, like, coming from his background with the Raiders, we were talking about proud football organization. Like the very like material basis of being an NFL player was extremely important to Gene. So you know, up until he passed away in two thousand and eight, I mean he is you know, he's like you said, he's leading strikes.
He's fighting for more revenue.
He's fighting for you know, more benefits on the back end after guys retire, and it kind of culminates in the two thousand and six CBA. I would say this is kind of like the Empire strikes back moment for the owners because in two thousand and six, the players in the owners. They signed a CBA that on the surface granted the players a sixty percent sixty percent revenue share against the owners forty percent. When you start actually digging through the numbers.
And yeah, that's not fuck like it was fake.
It was fake, right, So I'll say this. It was fake in the sense that there was something called like a revenue credit or a revenue attack or something that the owners took off of the pie before it went down to like the sixty forty split, right, So you know, and it's it started, you know in two thousand and six, Like I think the first time they cut it it was like, you know, eight hundred million dollars and then you know, with in two years, they were taking well
over a billion dollars before it got passed down onto the player. So you know, the players that got sixty
percent of the total revenue. But by the time you know that they the owners took a second look at that CBA and they used their opt out clause in two thousand and eight, it was functionally like a fifty one to fifty two percent split in favor of the players, which the owners deemed completely unacceptable, right, yeah, Like and it's so funny because like this is this is like the first part like where you start to see like, at least in this era of football, you get to
see how greedy these people are right where you're already taking a top off of like this quote unquote total revenue and then you're you're pulling the clause in two years to get out of this. So in two thousand and eight, the owners say, we are going to get out of this, and now the CBA instead of like the ten year clause is going to expire at the end of the twenty ten season, so they had two seasons to kind of figure out what was going to
happen next. But unfortunately, in two thousand and eight, Gene Upshaw gets pink out of cancer and I honestly just like just deteriors pretty quickly and passes away right before the season. So, hey, listeners of this podcast probably know what do billionaires do when they see a power vacuum at the top of their labor force that they are actively you know, fighting against, They pounce and you have
this vacuum of leadership. And then Damor Smith gets voted the executive director of the NFLPA and the owners at the end of the twenty ten season, they locked out the players, and that's where things really starting to hear it. You're dealing with that amount of greed where they're already taken off the top, and then they say that's not enough, so we're going to rip up the CBA. And the funny part was the twenty ten season like the last
year of like the ripped up CBA. Since they didn't have an agreement on the next year, there was no salary cap for the twenty ten season, and Jerry Jones, owner of the Tabloys, and Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington football team.
Oh god, what what are the worst people ever? By the way, this is we can we don't time to do this right up for like.
One of the worst people ever.
So like if you play Madden before, you know, sometimes you might turn off the salary cap, and what do you do you spend? And because Jerry has always been like, it's my money. Yeah, I'm gonna spend as much of it as I want to if I please, like within the rule as the salary cap. No salary cap, Jerry's gonna stand and the other owners punish those two with fines after the season. Yeah, for spending recklessly. That's how
committed they are to like this consolidation of power. They will publish each other over it, which.
Which by the way, is unhinged because like so one of the fundamental like issues of the NFL is that it is a monopoly.
Yes.
Now, the way they get around this is a they have the union and be the teams are supposed to be quote unquote competing with each other and they are not supposed to quote unquote collude right against the players.
And it's like, okay, you can fight guys for paying people.
Like right, like you find each other for the pain.
Yeah, which is like just unreal. It's just like the Boy's collusion if.
You look across like to the NBA, where like the Kawhi Leonard and Steve Balmer stuff.
Is oh my god, another party but.
Another politic exclusive.
But hey, there's a reason why they are aggressively going after this, you know, because the other billionaires don't want people rummaging through their ship either, so you know, and ultimately they like the Microsoft guy being part of the gang, so they're not going to do anything. And that's when you see like, oh wow, there's so much power here that these guys have. And but going back to the NFL, like the twenty eleven CBA is.
By the way, CBA is collective bargaining agreement. It's just there to collective bargaining agreement right between the union and the league. Right, So if there's no agreement, then like they can't play football games. Yeah, because you know, like you said, like the NFLPA sunctly just exists so the NFL doesn't get sued for like anti trust stuff, which
takes us right back to the next point. So going back to twenty eleven, the players are trying to figure out, like what are we gonna do about like this lockout situation because they need to work. Honestly, you know this, this is a career that you can only do for most guys like two or three years, and the idea of missing a season is not really feasible, which the owners, you know, they take advantage of all the time, like they know that these guys are on short like short clocks.
If you if you get to like year five of an NFL.
Career, you are in a very very small group of players that like, honestly just represent the elite of the elite of people who have ever played football like in this country.
And I think everything about this too is like that's really important. This is an unbelievably unbelievably skilled labor force.
Yes, and in order to develop these skills, you have to devote your entire life to it.
Yes.
And then what you get from devoting your entire life to this thing that is killing you because you're getting injured constantly and you're getting head trauma from all of this every single time. Like, so we started from like high school, you're starting to get brain damage from concussions, and from like you're starting to get CTE. Yeah, and then you have a couple of years to make money from having devoted your life to this thing.
Right, so think about like it's March of twenty eleven. Now Gen upshaws and passed away. For a couple of years, they were in the Folly in the Demor Smith, in the the Moore Smith reign of union leadership. And the first move that the owners make, like now that the CBA is officially over following the twenty ten season, they lock out the players, which, as we just said, if your career is two years, the idea that you missed one of those years is kind of unfathoous. Yeah, you're
earning power is just like demolished. And let's say you're you're twenty four years old, you got to play two years in the NFL. You're walking out with let's say a million in your bank account. You still got to get a job, bro, you know, like you like, you still got to find something else to do. So like, this isn't money that's going to set you up for the rest of your life for most of these guys, even though it does give you like a nice cushion to fall off to, even if you're someone who struggled
a little bit. And shoot, I know when I was twenty four, I would have loved to have like seven hundred thousand dollars in my main account. Things would have things could have turned out, you know, maybe a little bit different. Probably still would have found something some way like where I'm right here. But but honestly, it's a good start. So what the Union did was a decertified as a union in twenty eleven, led by Tom Brady
and Drew Brees. I'm a Falcons fan, and I will say this part has given me so much justification on my hatred Drees. It's like it went past the football into like the like the material realm of like real life.
You you you guys messed up here.
They tried to you know, challenge the league by DECERTI finance a union and arguing, uh, you know that now this.
Is an anti trust situation. Blah blah blah blah blah.
Get down to August the time of the twenty eleven CBA in August of twenty eleven, so like this is a month, a month before the season, and the concessions that were made after like after getting locked out for what six.
Like five months.
Yeah, and you decertified that, you go through all this work to try and get a deal done, and they gave up so much. So we said before you have the total revenue split at you know, sixty forty, but functionally it was closer to you know, fifty one to fifty.
Two percent in favor of the players.
That dropped to like forty seven percent in the twenty eleven CBA. So now the owners are back in charge, you know, like fifty percent revenue split in favor of the owners. So like you're you just gave him back at billions of dollars like over the course really really just like a couple of years, but over the life time of a ten year CBA.
I mean that that's that's egregious and also unbelievable amount of money.
Another thing that changed was Roger Goodell has now like full autonomy over player punishments. I don't know why you gave that up either. That's unhinged, right, right.
That's like that that's the kind of thing that like the like, the only kind of unions that would sign something like that are like, like I don't even think the organized crime unions would sign it. I think that's just like literally the fascist unions and the unions that are directly controlled like the yellow unions that are directly controlled by corporation, or like the only ones that would sign that, even even those ones probably would want to
still have like some involvement in that. That's like unbelievable for a union contract, just like right, nonsense.
Right, And And what's changed here is like these players are not willing to go on strike, like to not play these games, to not have a situation like in the eighties where you know, Donald Trump has built up the USFL and saying, hey, why don't you strikeing players that come play over here, and you you have some some guys who were like NFL Hall of famers who have briefly played in the USFL during you know, during the strike stuff that that doesn't happen here.
And the think about the timing.
Yeah, August was it August fourth, twenty eleven, one hundred and thirty two day lockout. They signed this deal, so so I can imagine, And I was like, I'll give them this. It's hard out here, man, like you're about to You're looking at like the consequence of you know, I'm about to not have checks and I maybe have a lifestyle where I am still should be getting you know, these weeks to be paid checks. That's kind of a tough,
tough draw. So I will give them like the small grace of saying at that point, man, okay, fuck it, just let's just go just get something signed. But what they gave up, I'm not sure like they were fully aware of what they gave up here. And the part of the biggest thing that where they gave up was
part of the biggest thing. After they after I say they gave the money back to the owners, they gave Roger Goodell they made him dictator in terms of like the punishment workforce, but the rookie wage scale, Oh my god, a massive, holy shit, massive concession to ownership because they they as in like Tom Brady and Drew Brees more so Drew Brees from what I've gathered, kind of framed this as, hey, why are these rookies getting all this
damn money? Like this is something that should be going towards the veterans, and ownership was like, oh, you see it, you think like you think that's an idea, like we can agree, we can agree to that. And what they got back was like less practice time, so you know, you know you don't have to have as many two
a days. That's worth billions of dollars. Really, like in terms of like what you what you guys can set yourself up with and what the what the veteran players who were on board with this, what they thought was, oh, okay, well if the rookie wages, if the rookie wages deal, like if that gets capped at a certain amount, then that's more money for us. So like a prime example is in twenty ten, Sam Bradford was a number one overall pick to Saint Louis Rams. He signed a six year,
eighty four million dollar contract. So the next year, Cam Newton is the first overall pick to the Caroline Panthers, and after this lockout ends, his contract was four years, twenty two million dollars fully guaranteed. She's christ you lost sixty million dollars in terms of value from the year before. So what the players, what the veteran players thought was, oh, okay, well, now there'll be this influx of cap space to sign veteran players. What do billionaires do when they suddenly have
access to a cheap workforce. They just loaded up on rookies, right, So these veteran players they sold themselves on like the fallacy of trickle down economics and got themselves replaced out of the league. So the only people that this benefit really was people like Drew Brees, people like Tom Bray who don't need it, right and but also are so indispensable to their organizations that they can eat up the camp space that was left over from the rookies getting signed.
So that's like, that's when you start to see like the quarterback contracts balloon up. Where you know, you go from like in twenty fifteen, eleven years ago or twenty sixty, I think Cam Newton signed a contract that made him the highest paid quarterback in NFL history at five years, one.
Hundred million dollars.
Oh my god, you know, and now that number is what like I think, man, who's the high paid?
Is Joe Burrow the highest paid right now? At like feel like it's Burrow?
Yeah that sounds right.
But now like that deal is worth you know, closer to eighty million, you know, seventy million dollars a year than it is to anything like closer to twenty Yeah, so you gave up so much and you got this whole middle class of the league just decimating, and and yeah,
like that that's still tangible today. You can just go on over the caap dot com or stop track dot com and just look at like like average money like per year, and there's a top and then the middle class is literally like a couple players and for quarterback it's like two or three guys like you have like that announced like a Malik Willis or a Daniel Jones, like forty as crazy as to saying like forty four million dollars, like that's outside the top half of what
guys are getting paid and then it's.
All rookies yep, like all.
Rookies and guys on rookie contracts. There's no middle classic that that's gone from the NFL. And with that, like you lose some of like, but personally this is d like you lose some of like the wisdom that comes with that of guys who have played in the league because now they get now they're getting turned out so fast because the contract is so cheap. Yeah, I'm not going to extend you because honestly, this game beats your body up so bad that it's better just to get
a fresh body in there. And these people, they have no attachment to the sacrifices that have been built over a long time. So you kind of build this player force that doesn't know what's going on.
And I say that with a grain of.
Salt now because I used to be one of these guys like, oh, you know, they don't care what's going on, And there is a good chunk that don't care what's going on. But I think now it's more clear there's like an obvious force stopping them from getting like information about, yeah, what's going on with this union stuff, which is the meat of this, like the recent stuff is just like the ultimate just fucket.
I guess we're ponds of the ownership stuff.
You know. I think the arc of this is like it's the arc of sort of unionism in America. You know, you go back to like your early nineteen hundreds unions, right, and those unions, you know, they're unbelievably powerful.
They're extremely dangerous.
You know, you get to a point where like the IWW will show up to a town and like the bosses in the town will show up with guns and shoot them because they're that well organized, they're that dangerous, they're that capable of striking, they're that committed, and they're that able to tap into all of their members and have everyone in the union be a part of the union and do things with the union.
And that's you know, how you can actually do collective action.
And then and you can watch this with sort of like with the ability of the NFLPA, like obviously like that's a much weaker union. Then you're like, yeah, I don't know, you're like nineteen thirty CIO or whatever. Yeah, but you can watch it like sort of decay into this sort of you know what you call like a service union where instead of it being run by the players, there's like, okay, we're we have some people.
They're going to go they're going to do everything for you.
They're going to sometimes talk to you about it, but you know, like they're going to be the runs, like managing all of the contracts and all of the negotiations and like right, and as it like information circle gets tighter and tighter, you know, that makes it way easier
for things to just get completely fucked. And then you know, and this is one of the things that you see in the nineties is the complete dominance of business unionism where it's like, nah, fuck it, we're a union, yeah right, the us of the employers actually have the same interest and we're gonna work with him to make money. And it's like, how is that going for you guys like I eh? And then that's what this sort of turns into.
And one of the issues here, and you were talking about this with like the information control is what once you get into this situation where you know, a really really small number of people, like we're talking maybe thirty people, and then the executive committees even smaller than that are the ones who are you know, One of the things that happens in the later part of this is so J. C. Schretder, who's like the guy behind the scenes for like the
executive the search for like the executive director, the guy who.
Like completely truly was like.
The most hideous guy I've ever had running this union. He changed the process so that it was completely confidential, to the point where the thirty two guys on the board who were supposed to be voting for the executive director didn't know the names of the candidates until they walked into the meeting, right, what the fuck?
And to me, like that point is like so crucial because that's where iveship from. Oh, it's not that these guys don't care about this, Like they don't know what's going on.
Yeah, it's being hidden from them. They can't know.
They can't know.
And I will say, like, part of what makes this difficult if you are someone in there who does care and wants to wants to fix things, is they're just the truth that like even the bottom rung players are comfortably living like off of their salary. So when you start to get to guys who are veterans, like man like even if you don't take the best deal shit, Like what, I'm still making fifteen million dollars a year, Like ultimately, I'm still good. And that's what it's hard
to like get people galvanized about this sometimes. But yeah, I think that that part about like players not caring has kind of been overrepresented a little bit because I think if you're paying tension now, there's so much murkiness.
And I think when when you get to the like the recent CBA is like in twenty twenty, the COVID year one, So now that's like the more Smith and J. C. Trader who was playing for the Browns and then he was the president of the NFLPA as they enter like this this twenty twenty CBA at the end after the end of the twenty eleven ten year run where for ten years they locked themselves into owners Chasepion to extract like as much value, yeah, as as it seemed like
they possibly could at the time. And then twenty twenty comes and the owners are basically just like, hey, there's gonna be another lockout unless you guys agree to a seventeen game, which you should say that okay, cool, because there's no circumstance where you you can lock the football and note how the horrible this game is for your body, and say we are going to play more football without like major concessions. Yeah, because I remember when that was
going on. You know, I was talking to some older guys who weren't in the unit anymore, but they were looking at it like, man like if they're if they're gonna say seventeenth game, like we need something massive like giving back to us on the other hand, because that's just straight up a revenue play to get more games on TV and make these TV contracts a little bit more lucrative.
And that didn't.
Really happen, you know, like no, like they just gave up the seventeenth game and they got I think one percent more in terms of like the rev share, so it got to like forty eight or forty nine percent.
It's like yeah, like that's it, you know, share for adding Like what what what's the percent added to the season, like right, And and.
Like there were some concessions made to like players made at like at the bottom rung of the ladder, so like like the veteran minimum salaries like they got boosted. They the practice squads got a little bit longer, and now you got into the space where you see, like veterans can be on a practice squad instead of guys who are within like three years of uh you know,
accrued years in the NFL. But the seven teenth game while still having inequity in terms of the revenue share, I mean, the owners, they'll sign up for that every single time. Oh we got to throw your crumbs, yep, and we still get to keep our billions. And they timed it up right so that seventeenth game being inserted to the schedule was lining up with new TV contracts with ESPN and NBC and Amazon everyone. You see, like throwing cash is so understated, Like if not throwing cash,
like billions of dollars is going to the NFL. Yeah, through these TV deals. Like it's funny. I had a friend, you know, one of these Shador Sanders stands.
He was arguing.
He's like, oh you know he was he was like, oh, you know, like the Browns like they took Shador because they need the jersey sales. I'm like, dude, Chador could have the number one selling jersey in the NFL and Jimmy hasn't didn't care about that. That's a drop of a drop of a drop in the market for like where the money's actually coming from, and that's the TV deal.
So to get that seventeenth game is huge, and this term is for ten years again, so in twenty thirty they can look at, you know, renegotiation trying to figure it out. But in the meantime, like to even call this a union is so far away from like how it's actually functioning now. Now it's getting to the part
like where it's kind of murky on what's happening. Because obviously, like if you're in a union and you know, like my coworkers, like they've dealt with J. C. Tradder, like I've seen him speak before, if you're in a union, obviously, like you don't want too many people outside of the union to know what's going on. Like it's just not good from a standpoint of like leverage and power. But JC Tredder like he plays off of that by keeping everything a secret.
You know, yeah, which is a terrible idea.
Which is a terrible idea, Like yeah, well it's good for him, right right, right, Like maybe you don't want to tell me a reporter of like what's going on, but you should tell like the other people within your union, what's going on. Like when you see like a lack of information about or any information about like what's going on with these with these elections, it's because no one's being told what's going on these elections. And that's how you end up with Lloyd Howe, which is just dude.
Oh god, okay, okay, let let's let's talk about Lloyd Howell, who is oh my god, yeah, one of the worst people to run a union I have ever seen.
Yes, but it's purposefully bad, you know, like, yeah, the Lloyd Howell like secret election, Like it's not not even to say, like I was, you know, somewhat somewhat of a secret now a secret of election.
Basically to get Lloyd Howell hired. What what do you somewhere for Booz Allen Man.
Yeah he was.
He was the CFO of Booz Allen Hamilton, Right, Like his background was in busting unions.
Uh huh, right, that's his background.
And this but this is where you get like such a look at the ideology of someone like Jacy Tratterer who also studied labor unions in college.
That's what you guys, degree labor labor relations and labor rangement from Harvard. Yep, yeah, you're not.
You're not doing the labor relations degree to like being a union. Like like the people the people who like organize for unions are like fucking grad students who you know, have like a I don't know like they have they have some random degree. And then they were like, fucking I organize my graduation. You know, I'm gonna go organize the field. This is not what you go into that way you go into this union busting.
Yeah. But so J. C.
Tredder and you know, the people around him, they viewed that experience from wood Howell busting unions as a positive because you know, there's this train of thought like, oh, well, you know, well, if we know someone who knows how to destroy us, if we hire them, surely they will change their ways and they will start to help us. Like we're gonna get inside knowledge on how to bust a union, so maybe we could weaponize that and turn it back the other way. Man, that's dumb as hell.
Why would you like? That's oh my god? Right, And not only that, but but but how who who?
Who is elected the executive director of the union is also a part of a hedge fund that is investing in NFL teams in minorities six yeat the Carlisle Group.
Like you, you're an executive director of the union works for hedge funds that are extracting value from these teams like like two players.
Yeah, that's that's disqualifying, Like it should be disqualifying.
She's on camera.
The union posted a video of him on camera talking about how he was talking to the owners about letting about letting the investment group in.
Yes, it's unbelievable.
It's as close as I've ever seen outside of again, a union that is literally run by the bosses to like my union guy works for managements.
Like it's like baffling.
I don't know, it's like it's it's like state integrated CCP shit, right, Like it's like.
Dude, yes, you have a corporate consultant.
Yeah, is your union liaison to thirty two billionaires and Roger Goodell? Like yeah, it's completely incompatible on like a basic like ideological level. And then you start getting to like, well, okay, well now he has like direct control over people's lives and the funds of the union, which, as ESPN and Paulo Torrea found out, he was using to go to the goddamn strip club in Miami. Yeah, and to spend on other stuff. And also he was sued for sexual
harassment while he was at Booz Allen. So he's hidden like the check marks for everything you see, like corporate sociopathy, right, yeah, and they're like, that's our guy, that's our guy. Once all this stuff comes out about how he spends his money and and you know how he's misappropriating funds, that was what got him out, more so than like the material practices that he excepti FI while he was running the union, which involved hiding the fact that the owners were colluding against them.
It is completely unhinged, and unfortunately, the other thing that's unhinged is that's going to be all for today. However, come there is more to this story tomorrow as we finish part two of this interview, and oh my god, holy shit, somehow the worst is yet to come. So join us for part two tomorrow, in which question mark there seems to be good evidence of the NFL paying a guy specifically to be able to keep control of the union.
Oh dear.
So, if you want to find more of Charles McDonald's work, you can do so at the Football three oh one podcast and at Yahoo Sports, where he writes the column for verts.
It's quite good. You should listen to it and.
Yeah, dear God, I don't know foreign unions. If you're in unions that suck, make better ones.
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