By Harold Meyerson
February 10, 2026 The American Prospect
Superstar athletes are close to American royalty, but they still have to fight like other workers for fair pay.
In their status as employees, American professional athletes are different from other American workers, and not just because they have more money. They can unionize, and they have. They can collectively bargain contracts, and they have. They can strike, and they have.
To be sure, American workers won all those rights in 1935, but those rights have been so eroded during the past 50 years that only athletes and an elect set of other employees can still exercise them. Like workers in entertainment production, hospitals, teaching, and other professional occupations, the special skills of athletes mean they can’t readily be replaced. Workers who can be replaced are routinely fired during unionization campaigns, which is a violation of that 1935 law, but one which incurs no real penalty. That’s one major reason why the rate of private-sector unionization has plummeted from more than one-third to a bare 6 percent in the past 70 years, while that of professional athletes in major team sports is effectively 100 percent.
Management has certainly tried to replace athletes. During a 1987 strike, the NFL used replacement players for three weeks, made up of bouncers, bartenders, and firefighters; the then-Washington Redskins used a quarterback who had a work furlough from prison. It was an unsightly display, and both stadium attendance and TV ratings plummeted. The owners settled the strike.
During a baseball strike near the end of the 1994 season that stretched into spring training the following year—the only time the World Series was ever canceled since the agreement to hold one between the American and National Leagues in 1905—the teams’ owners threatened to employ minor leaguers and retirees as strikebreakers. “There ain’t no place in our game for replacement players,” retorted legendary manager Sparky Anderson, who then was helming the Detroit Tigers. “The only thing I have that will never leave me is integrity.” Tiger owners responded by putting Anderson on involuntary leave.
The inability to replace the best athletes in the world, and their role as the star attraction for any sports fan, gives them leverage to make sure they benefit from their own labor. At least, most of the time.
Thanks to their collective-bargaining agreements, major league baseball players make roughly 47 percent of total league revenues, NFL players make approximately 48 percent, and NHL and NBA players make 50 percent.
WNBA players make a bare 9 percent of league revenues, and their efforts to raise that to 30 percent have been rebuffed.
And then there are the players of the Women’s National Basketball Association.
WNBA players make a bare 9 percent of league revenues, and their current efforts to raise that take to 30 percent in a new contract have been rebuffed by their employers, who have offered the players just 15 percent of league and team revenues—a share that will actually decrease during the life of the three-year contract. The current contract expired January 9, and as I write, owners and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) remain far apart. In December, more than 90 percent of the players voted to authorize a strike if a more equitable settlement isn’t reached.
The WNBA fight is a signature one in the history of sports unions, which have always had to struggle to gain their fair share of the enormous profits they generate. In leagues where players turn over every few years and solidarity can be hard to find, big victories can be hard to come by. But given the cultural pedestal upon which sports is placed, those victories can reverberate across the entire labor movement. For working people today, all eyes should turn to women’s basketball.
THE WNBA AND ITS PLAYERS’ UNION are not new kids on the block. The league was founded in 1997, and the union in 1998. The players are hardly demanding comparable contracts to those in men’s basketball. The women players are merely seeking a rise in their share of the WNBA’s revenues—and even that, to a level well short of the level in the NBA.
Today, the average WNBA yearly salary is roughly $102,000, while in the NBA it’s $13 million, approximately 130 times greater. While Steph Curry and LeBron James each have yearly salaries over $50 million, the maximum permissible salary for the WNBA’s highest-paid stars is $250,000, one two-hundredth of their male counterparts’.
Benefits are skewed toward men’s basketballers as well. An NBA player with three years of service gets a lifetime pension, after nine years gets full medical coverage for life, and after ten years that blanket medical coverage extends to his family. The women, by contrast, get no medical insurance after retirement. “Over here they telling vets to pay for a flight to All-Star weekend to get checked by a doc in a pop up tent,” Washington Mystics forward Shakira Austin posted on social media in January.
And it’s not as if the WNBA’s fortunes are sagging; quite the contrary. The league has been projected to earn $1 billion in 2025, with steadily rising increases in attendance and viewership thanks in part to the boom triggered by generational superstar Caitlin Clark. Attendance at WNBA games increased by 16 percent from 2022 to 2023, and 48 percent from 2023 to 2024. Ticket prices have been soaring as well, with one ticket inventory company reporting that the average cost of a ticket rose from $50 in 2023 to $88 in 2024. The league’s new media rights deal raises its annual payment from $50 million to $200 million. Indeed, the value of every one of the league’s 13 teams increased by more than 100 percent from 2024 to 2025, to an aggregate total of $3.5 billion, with San Francisco’s Golden State Valkyries leading the pack with an assessed valuation of $500 million.
The one and only metric that lags behind this wave of increases is player pay. And the fans watching and tuning in to WNBA games aren’t doing it to see the league executives.
The meager salaries for WNBA stars have forced many to get second jobs in the offseason. The most notorious example of this is six-time All-Star Brittney Griner, whose side hustle took her annually to a Russian pro league. Before a flight to a game in 2022, law enforcement in Moscow found a vape cartridge in her possession with less than a gram of hash oil, something she had been prescribed in the U.S. as a pain reliever. Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison for this transgression, and was only released when the Biden administration negotiated a prisoner swap for convicted arms smuggler Viktor Bout, known as “The Merchant of Death.” In a very real way, Bout is a free man who continues to trade weapons of war today because the WNBA doesn’t pay its players satisfactorily.
Despite the sport’s growing popularity and the teams’ skyrocketing revenues and valuations, WNBA owners haven’t ruled out a lockout of their players if they fail to come to terms, just as the players haven’t ruled out a strike if they can’t get the owners to pay them a fair share of league revenue. At the league’s All-Star Game in Indianapolis last year, all the players took the court wearing T-shirts inscribed with the words “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”
“This is the biggest moment the WNBA has ever seen, and it’s not something that can be messed up,” Caitlin Clark has said. “We’re going to fight for everything that we deserve.”
Reflecting its demographic composition—young women, roughly 70 percent of whom are Black—the union has a history of social justice advocacy and rhetoric not found in the other athlete unions. One paragraph in its mission statement reads: “Through collective bargaining, protest, public service, community engagement and educational programming, we tirelessly challenge the workplace and societal conditions that stand in the way of our vision of what is possible for our lives and the future of basketball. Moving as one, we prevail.”
That history was chiefly on display during the George Floyd protests of 2020. The players dedicated their season to Black women killed by police, such as Breonna Taylor, with uniforms bearing their names. They established social justice councils in which they met with community members to discuss ways to combat racism and sexism. Players for the Atlanta Dream wore T-shirts with the words “Vote Warnock,” referring to Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic Senate candidate who was running (successfully) against MAGA Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was the Dream’s co-owner. Loeffler had previously complained to the league about players wearing “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” jerseys, to the point that the league itself suggested she sell the team to new owners more sympatico with the players, which she did after losing the election to Warnock. (She is now heading the Small Business Administration during Trump’s second term.)
Now the players are channeling this militancy into the cause of their own livelihoods. Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier said in September: “We have the best players in the world. We have the best fans in the world. But right now we have the worst leadership in the world.” She confronted WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, asking why stars like Clark were making so little. Collier reported that Engelbert responded, “Caitlin should be grateful she makes $16 million off the court, because without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn’t make anything.” (Clark’s Indiana Fever currently has her signed to a four-year, $338,000 contract.) Engelbert, when pressed, did not deny the statement.
Some WNBA players remain hopeful that the owners will come around to embrace the rather modest increases in pay that the union has proposed. If the owners opt to continue to hoard their revenues, however, the players appear determined to strike.
IT WAS JUST NINE YEARS AFTER BASEBALL’S National League was founded in 1876 that the first American athletes’ union took shape. John Montgomery Ward, who was the Shohei Ohtani of the 1880s as both a star pitcher and hitter, organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players in 1885. At the time, salaries were abysmal, and the owners actually required players to pay them rent for their uniforms. The players’ chief grievance was the reserve clause, which bound each player to his team with no option to move to another unless his owner sold him to a rival franchise. Nor did owners need their players’ consent for such sales, which almost invariably blindsided the players. The reserve clause would impede players’ freedom of movement for the next 90 years.
In 1888, enraged by the owners’ refusal to meet with the union, their blacklisting of union activists, and their stationing of Pinkerton agents to spy on them, Ward opted to create a new league. In the Players League, as it was named, each team was owned and run by a board consisting of four players and four investors. Most of baseball’s stars moved to the new league, which had no reserve clause binding them to a particular team. National League owners termed these defectors socialists, revolutionaries, and terrorists—and even worse, “overpaid.” But the NL owners wooed PL investors with promises of new teams that they could own, and the PL collapsed after the 1890 season, taking the Brotherhood down with it. Some small proto-unions popped up in the 1900s, ’10s, and ’40s, but none lasted very long or claimed significant membership.
CREDIT: Illustration by Cristian Mera
