San Diego’s Mike Tolbert
Sports Saturday
The NFL and the NFL Players Union are clashing again, this time over the remainder-of-the-year suspension of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson for excessively disciplining his child. More specifically, the union is upset that the owners won’t enter into a collective bargaining agreement on a new personal conduct policy.
A passage from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) supports the union’s argument that players must have a say in the process. Appropriately, the passage uses a football analogy.
Whatever one thinks of Peterson’s actions—I find them abhorrent—the union has a case that regular procedures must be in place, not only to protect NFL players but for consistency. As it is now, Commissioner Roger Goodell appears to be winging it. In the case of running back Ray Rice, for instance, Goodell decreed one punishment and then, when an elevator tape of Rice hitting his fiancé surfaced, changed it for a harsher sentence. While the commissioner justified the change by claiming that Rice lied to him about what he had done, witnesses argued otherwise and believe that the commissioner was moved more by the bad visuals than the merits of the case.
Some Americans, of course, have an animosity against unions and are perhaps satisfied with Goodell’s punishments, regardless of whether or not he followed proper procedure. But as Sinclair makes clear, unions are vital for protecting workers against greedy and insensitive owners. Without the threat of collective action, NFL players would be far more vulnerable than they are now and they are plenty vulnerable as it is, what with every player only a hit away from a career-ending injury or worse. The union saves them from Jurgis’ fate.
At the beginning of the book, the Slovakian immigrant doesn’t think he needs protecting. He has a magnificent body that he plans to use in the Chicago stockyards and revels in his physical superiority over other men. Think of him as the confident rookie who is impatient with the grumbling of veteran players:
Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterwards—stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. “That is well enough for men like you,” he would say, “silpanas, puny fellows—but my back is broad.”
Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannot get hold of. Then he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important occasion: for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company’s “Central Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month—yes many months—and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say, “but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms”—and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles—“that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”
Although Jurgis does very well at first, there is ominous foreshadowing. When I started rereading the following scene describing how cattle are slaughtered, I thought that, with a little imagination, one could see it as a description of the constant pounding undergone by running backs, linebackers, and linesmen. To my surprise, I discovered that Sinclair does indeed compare the killing floor to a football field:
Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the “knockers,” armed with a sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the “knocker” passed on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to the “killing bed.” Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There were fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple of minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then once more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in; and so out of each pen there rolled a steady stream of carcasses, which the men upon the killing beds had to get out of the way.
The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run – at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a football game (bold italics mine). It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his task to do . . .
Jurgis has gotten his job because another player—I mean worker—has gotten hurt. Tough luck, right? As fans, we focus on those who play, not those whose careers are cut short. Eventually, however, almost everyone gets hurt. Many athletes would readily identify with how Jurgis handles his own injury:
A time of peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose. Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck. Then there would be a yell of warning – the men would drop everything and dash for the nearest pillar, slipping here and there on the floor, and tumbling over each other. This was bad enough in the summer, when a man could see; in wintertime it was enough to make your hair stand up, for the room would be so full of steam that you could not make anything out five feet in front of you. To be sure, the steer was generally blind and frantic, and not especially bent on hurting any one; but think of the chances of running upon a knife, while nearly every man had one in his hand! And then, to cap the climax, the floor boss would come rushing up with a rifle and begin blazing away!
It was in one of these melees that Jurgis fell into his trap. That is the only word to describe it; it was so cruel, and so utterly not to be foreseen. At first he hardly noticed it, it was such a slight accident – simply that in leaping out of the way he turned his ankle. There was a twinge of pain, but Jurgis was used to pain, and did not coddle himself. When he came to walk home, however, he realized that it was hurting him a great deal; and in the morning his ankle was swollen out nearly double its size, and he could not get his foot into his shoe. Still, even then, he did nothing more than swear a little, and wrapped his foot in old rags, and hobbled out to take the car. It chanced to be a rush day at Durham’s, and all the long morning he limped about with his aching foot; by noontime the pain was so great that it made him faint, and after a couple of hours in the afternoon he was fairly beaten, and had to tell the boss. They sent for the company doctor, and he examined the foot and told Jurgis to go home to bed, adding that he had probably laid himself up for months by his folly. The injury was not one that Durham and Company could be held responsible for, and so that was all there was to it, so far as the doctor was concerned.
Jurgis got home somehow, scarcely able to see for the pain, and with an awful terror in his soul, Elzbieta helped him into bed and bandaged his injured foot with cold water and tried hard not to let him see her dismay; when the rest came home at night she met them outside and told them, and they, too, put on a cheerful face, saying it would only be for a week or two, and that they would pull him through.
Because he lacks workplace protections and injury compensation, Jurgis eventually loses his family and his home.
Over the years, football players have had to fight for everything they have gotten from the owners. Because they did so, they are now well paid and have good insurance policies. They also have generous retirement packages that help them through their pain-filled post-football days although, in this area, a judge found the NFL’s recent compensation fund for permanent brain damage to be laughably small.
But gains can always be reversed. I don’t think we’ll go back to the days of Jurgis, but hard battles were fought to build safety nets for his successors and there’s not reason to believe the NFL owners will be responsible if the players aren’t pressuring them. Disciplinary procedures are part of the package.
