As I was reading through the various articles about Gene Upshaw’s passing a stat popped up that made me choke on my gum:  Upshaw helped shepherd the collective bargaining agreement that saw the union players take home 59.5% of NFL revenues.  Baconpowder?  In 2006 the NFL’s receipts totalled over $6 billion dollars.  59.5% of that is just over $3.5 billion.  Dollars.

If football were construction, I’d call the players on the field the labor.  Their work makes the product, the product in this case being the action of the game.  In construction, a profitable company likely spends 25% or less of all their revenues on labor.  A poorly run company might be closer to 33%.  Get up to two-thirds, and the carpenters are pulling up in Hummers, masons in Benzes.  Who am I kidding - the carpenters are still pulling up in beater pickups, only difference is the bed would be filled with empty Labatt’s instead of Milwaukee’s Best.  And one more thing?  They’d all be on unemployment because the contractor would never get any work, having to charge so much just to pay the ridiculous wages for his help.

As I understand it, the expiration date of the current collective bargaining agreement is coming soon.  Nobody wants to relive 1987 again, but seriously?  Nearly two-thirds of all NFL revenue goes to the manual labor?  That’s gotta change.  I’m not gonna be the guy that says Jerry Jones needs to be able to afford more plastic surgery on his sagging face, but this arrangement is as unbalanced as Pamela Anderson’s, uh, marriages.

By the way - did you know that Milwaukee’s Best had Milwaukee’s Best Girls, too?  I think I could tap that.

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