“Is that enough? Keep you happy. Is that enough? You know I do it and I know that you just love that expensive stuff.”
Lyric from: Is That Enough from the album Here, My Dear
Written by: Marvin Gaye
Performed by: Marvin Gaye
Once upon a time in a nightmare…
You were sitting in your office at work. You were playing around on Facebook to help pass the time until it was your turn to un-mute the conference call you were half listening to and give your weekly status update. Suddenly your CEO walked in with a matter that demanded your immediate attention.
You logged out and hung up.
Your CEO proceeds to tell you that you would have to take a 30% pay cut in order to insure that the company doesn’t close the year out in the red again.
Outrage ensued.
The End.
NBA Commissioner David Stern said this week that if a deal is not done by Tuesday when owners and players meet with a federal mediator there will be no basketball on Christmas. Public outrage on top of outrage continues to ensue. And in other sad news, Kobe Bryant recently told this story http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wizards-insider/post/kobe-bryant-has-a-kwame-brown-story/2011/10/07/gIQAgsdnSL_blog.html#pagebreak about Kwame Brown to help himself pass the time during the lockout.
While waiting in line at a sandwich shop a couple of days ago I overheard a guy say “greedy bastards” to his buddy during an obscenity filled rant. I couldn’t make out the rest, but since he was looking in the direction of a television that was on ESPN and flashing a picture of Derek Fisher at the time, I felt comfortable assuming that they were discussing the lockout. Or wait, maybe they were discussing recent pay cuts in their office that came with the expectation that they would do the same work with less pay.
And with that, I wish to welcome you to the dichotomy of the increasingly inflammatory cause for debate that is the NBA lockout.
In this economy, no one is safe. Not even millionaire ball players are spared the possibility of a pay cut. And dare I say that even they have the right to find it unsettling. These guys are staring a 30% reduction in pay in the face. But us mere mortals are unwilling to sympathize.
During this current recession we have been bombarded with news of layoffs and staff reductions, bonuses eliminated and salaries being cut. In most cases we side with the everyman, the guy who has to figure out how to manage through this with mouths to feed and bills to pay. In our minds that person is not the CEO. The CEO can’t be an everyman. He is a millionaire and probably made more money last year than we will make in a lifetime. The CEO is a bully who should be willing to cut his millions in salary in order to keep the company afloat instead of causing distress to his employees who are actually doing the work. The millionaire is the bad guy, especially during a recession. Just ask President Obama.
But here’s the thing with this lockout, the CEOs are billionaires and the workers are millionaires. Instead of the blame game being hopelessly deadlocked in a tossup due to near incalculable wealth on both sides, we know exactly who’s at fault-the players. Interesting reversal of the trend here. The players do the work that drives the revenue. They are the NBA’s frontline employees. More often than not, the general public usually feels that frontline employees aren’t paid enough. Yet, we call the NBA's frontline greedy bastards and spare the owners the rod.
I wonder if the real issue is that we don’t think the players deserve their money. After all, all they really do is dribble a ball and make it go in the basket with an occasional exciting dunk. Many of them didn’t finish college. Some of them came from backgrounds where it would have been a miracle to make $20,000 in a year much less a million. They party ‘til 3 AM on random weeknights when the rest of us are sleeping to prepare for work at our real jobs the next day. They’re just people with freakish athleticism. They got lucky.
In your nightmare the CEO should have managed expenses more closely, shouldn’t have invested so heavily in products that showed great potential but in the end were complete busts, shouldn’t have moved the headquarters to that fancy new office building and shouldn’t have spent so much money trying to lure top talent away from competing agencies. And he has the audacity to make you pay for his mistakes with a 30% pay cut. You wish that all of your co-workers would band together and speak out against this injustice…
But I guess these NBA players should just be thankful to have a job. Greedy, lucky bastards…
I think the point that is almost over looked in debates like this is comparing the players to every day employees that work ordinary jobs. That is not a not fair comparison and to be fair about it you cannot use that as an argument (generally speaking). I am enthusiast of cars and high tech devices. If the Apple corporation and its employee's as an example had a dispute which would somehow delay the progression of their products and lets say this Christmas we would not have any Apple devices to purchase for gifts, I would not look at the iPad any different from I have before but I may be a bit sore at the two parties for causing this issue. This would be same feeling if I wanted a new BMW and because of labor disputes 2012 productions would be missed and we would perhaps have to wait on the 2013 models. I would not be upset with the product but again maybe not to happy with the company (CEO down). The players are the product... bottom line and before we jumped to name calling we really need to understand the dynamics in whole.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the sad thing is that the longer this goes on, the egos will likely get more and more powerful and folks will become more attached to being right as opposed to finding a solution.
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