The assessment has become total cliché: “The (insert league here) work stoppage is just another example of millionaires fighting with billionaires.”
While it is true, this perspective is useless, so we may as well find some other way to analyze it all.
Just because the rest of us don’t make nearly the salaries that athletes do does not mean we should dismiss their demands off-hand. While it is true that salaries have now reached the point that an extra million here or there does not make much difference in real life terms, it does make a difference in sports and business terms.
Players’ salaries are what they are because players think (correctly) that they deserve a cut of the millions of dollars that owners make thanks to their performance.
Obviously, that’s the basis of business in our capitalist society: business owners provide a service for consumers and consumers pay whatever fee they are willing to (or are charged) to enjoy the benefits of this service. Generally a business owner can’t supply all the necessary services on his own, so he hires others to help. That service is rewarded with a wage.
This is all that goes on in professional sports; the profit and pay scale is just astronomically higher, and, therefore, we in the regular world think we should look at it differently.
Maybe the players and owners, who are earning ten or more times more money than they really need to live comfortably, should not look at it that way. Maybe they should just take what they can get and be happy with it (the rest of us, as we moralize, certainly are sure we would, right?).
But who are we to tell them what to do with their money?
They are not going to spend it any differently anyway. So, since they aren’t going to care, we may as well stop pointing out what they are arguing about.
It’s a waste of our breath, ink and time.
