A small provision buried within the Workers’ Compensation Act, a bill before the Illinois state senate, could wind up as a big headache for Chicago’s retired football stars. The provision would end disability benefits for professional athletes at 35, compared to 67 for the rest of the working population. Sources within the NFL Players Association traced the bill to a suggestion made by Chicago Bears owner George McCaskey – perhaps unsurprising, considering nobody else in the state of Illinois stands to benefit more from such a law.
“This bill being sponsored by [Illinois state senator] Christine Radogno is simply designed to target professional athletes and take away their right to health care that every worker in the state of Illinois is entitled to,” DeMaurice Smith of the NFL players’ union said this past Friday. “The Bears’ owners are behind it as well. To be blunt, it’s just another way to bankroll the coffers of the rich owners who own these teams at the expense of the players who actually do all the work. They’re pushing the bill. Our understanding is they are the people who have lined up a lobbyist to promote the bill.”
Most likely, this bill won’t be going anywhere. According to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, the bill is likely to die in committee, and it has not made any progress since it was added to the senate’s reading list on 25 January. But this story is worth noting. As sports leagues like the NFL take major hits in the courts, don’t be surprised if more owners like McCaskey target legislative bodies – many now heavily Republican – to solve their legal problems.
Even if this bill dies in committee, this is a distressing sign for those who care about labor rights in the sports world. This bill is a clear response to the major hits the NFL has been taking in court in recent years – specifically, the $1bn settlement in a class action lawsuit over concussions and the spectre of more legal action as research on brain injury and CTE continues to progress. Rather than change the league or the sport to ensure safety for its players, team owners like McCaskey are instead trying to head off these legal troubles by calling on their friends in high political places to give them special treatment.
The bill is not even about saving taxpayer money. Workers’ compensation is paid by employers – or more commonly, their insurers – not the state. Instead, as Radogno put it, it’s an effort to “respond to the concerns from the business community that workers’ compensation costs are too high.” In other words, this bill would throw workers – professional athletes and everyday laborers – under the bus in order to keep cash in the pockets of bosses.
The average NFL player has a career only three years long, and may exit the league and enter the workforce with debilitating injuries – not only the concussions, but also lasting injuries to joints and ligaments that prevent them from performing physical labor. Workers’ compensation laws vary from state to state, but rewards are typically limited to medical coverage, disability pay limited to under $100,000 per year, and/or payment for vocational rehabilitation. The wage loss benefits in particular are paltry fees for a corporation like the NFL, which pulls in $9bn in revenue yearly.
The real killer for the NFL and their insurers is the medical costs. Already, a large portion of NFL players are on disability, with hundreds filing claims in California alone. Many others who have suffered injuries have found themselves stymied by the NFL and the supposedly “neutral” physicians who affirm or deny players’ claims for benefits. Should a major scientific breakthrough like a test for CTE in living brains become available, those medical costs – and teams’ insurance premiums – could skyrocket. Fully aware of this possibility, McCaskey and the Bears pushed for this legislation to cover their backs.
The last decade or so has seen the professional sports world’s business model attacked in the courts. The Ed O’Bannon case threatened the NCAA’s amateurism by showcasing how the association profits off the images of college athletes. Concussion cases at every level of football have both damaged the public perception of the game’s safety and the pocketbooks of its executives. Major League Baseball has found itself under fire from multiple angles for its treatment of minor leaguers and amateur players.
McCaskey’s amendment is far from the only legislative approach leagues have attempted in response to these new judicial challenges. MLB has pushed to classify its players as “seasonal workers”, which would allow teams to legally pay their players sub-minimum wages (as they already do now). NCAA executives and college presidents have floated the idea of congressional action to codify the amateur model into law. One of the association’s biggest expenses over the past decade? Congressional lobbyists.
There couldn’t be a better political climate for sports leagues to make these plays. While sports welfare has been a bipartisan issue for much of American history, the Obama administration at least made attempts to curb tax and other government breaks for sports teams. Included in President Obama’s 2015 was a provision that would end the use of tax-free bonds for professional sports facilities, a practice that has allowed sports owners to avoid paying $4bn in federal taxes over the past 30 years.
Between the Trump administration and the Republican control of the federal legislature and a majority of statehouses, it’s hard to figure where the opposition to bills like SB12 will come from. Trump himself has been an avid supporter of sports institutions, even spending parts of three decades trying to buy his way into the ranks of NFL ownership. And the Republican party has never been the party of young men of color, who make up an overwhelming segment of the athletic population that will be affected by legislation like SB12. When the leagues and their lobbyists bring their cash to Washington and state capitols around the country, there’s no reason to believe the party of Trump won’t be happy to do their bidding.
Taxpayers, whether or not they care about the long-term health of athletes, should be incensed by the proposal in SB12. One in four NFL retirees requires a joint replacement surgery. They suffer from arthritis at five times the usual rate, and beyond CTE, they are four times likelier to suffer from ALS, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. These men are going to require medical care as they age. If their injuries are bad enough to prevent them from working, the vast majority who didn’t have long, lucrative careers won’t have the money to cover the costs. If these players are barred from making workers’ compensation claims and getting those costs covered by the teams they sacrificed their bodies for, that burden will instead fall on the rest of us.
But sports owners and their lobbyists are making a bet. They believe the American people have enough resentment towards top-level athletes and their high salaries that they will see anything that can be construed as a privilege – workers’ compensation in retirement, or payment for college athletes, or living wages for minor leaguers – as excess that must be curbed. Even if liberals don’t fall for this bait, they may see athletes’ rights as something that can be sacrificed to hold ground elsewhere. Although that logic is understandable in a world where social protections are being eroded all around us, there is no excuse for leaving these men to fight these injuries alone, without help from the employers who profited off their labor for years.
SB12 may be headed for an inglorious death in committee. But the bet American sports leagues are making is a sound one. Athletes have been making great gains through judicial action over the past decade or so, but thanks to an election that gave us Donald Trump and a Republican party with more power than it has had in years, sports leagues have a real chance to regain powers they have lost and strengthen powers that have been threatened. It may be a minimal fight compared to many that are being fought in Trump’s America, but just know that when athletes lose, they aren’t the only ones. The burden of caring for athletes in their twilight years falls on someone, and if teams skirt their responsibilities as George McCaskey and the Bears want, it will be squarely on our shoulders.
