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Are NFL Running Backs the New Face of America’s Labor Movement? Jeff Bloodworth

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Pittsburgh Steelers running back Najee Harris during an NFL football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Carolina Panthers. (John Byrum via Getty Images)

In 2021, running back Najee Harris, a University of Alabama senior and first-round National Football League draft pick, signed a four-year, $13 million contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

In both seasons with the Steelers, Harris, now 25, scored ten touchdowns.

He leads the NFL with 694 “touches”—the number of times he’s actually laid hands on a football during a game.

And he has the most rushing yards—2,234—in a player’s first two seasons in Steelers history.

But when his contract is up in 2025, Harris is unlikely to secure another long-term deal in the NFL, which kicked off its 104th season on Thursday.

That’s because running backs—whose job includes receiving handoffs from the quarterback, catching passes, and blocking—are getting pummeled like never before by bigger, stronger, faster NFL players. Which means that when their contracts are up, running backs are more damaged than they used to be.

What’s more, the drama has shifted: running backs used to score a lot, but now the action revolves around quarterbacks and wide receivers. 

That explains why team owners are increasingly hiring rookies to be their running backs and, instead of investing in them long-term, replacing those rookies with other rookies at the end of their first contract.

So, running backs—having suffered tons of concussions, ankle sprains, and other injuries—never see the big, second-contract payday other NFL players land. Like the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ $450 million contract or the $120 million deal wide receiver Tyreek Hill signed with the Miami Dolphins. 

All of which explains how Harris has become a leading advocate for a running-backs-only union—and the unlikely face of the new American labor movement.

“I agree with my running back brothers around the NFL—history will show that you need running backs to win—we set the tone every game and run through walls for our team,” Harris tweeted in July, after three of his fellow running backs failed to secure long-term deals with their teams.

The new union, which would be separate from the NFL Players Association, was first proposed in 2019, when the International Brotherhood of Professional Running Backs filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board.

When Harris was asked in June what he thought of the idea, he said: “I’m open to it.”

He is joined by Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry, 29. Known as King Henry, he tweeted in July: “At this point, just take the RB position out the game then. The ones that want to be great & work as hard as they can to give their all to an organization, just seems like it don’t even matter. I’m with every RB that’s fighting to get what they deserve.” 

Granted, professional running backs, with an average salary of $1.8 million, make a lot more than nurses, pilots, public school teachers, and everyone else in a union, but the money is declining, and they increasingly feel as though they’re being exploited by management at the same time the NFL is seeing record success. In 2023, the NFL secured $130 billion in new media deals. Of the top 100 network television broadcasts in the country last year, the league accounted for 82, and that figure is going up. On top of all that, game attendance is nearing an all-time high

Mounting anger among running backs comes at the same time that workers across the country are organizing and pushing back against their corporate overlords in greater numbers than at any point in the past half-century.

Carlos, a UPS worker in Manhattan, delivers packages on his daily rounds on July 24, 2023. (Spencer Platt via Getty Images)

In July, the 340,000 UPS workers represented by the Teamsters secured wage increases, with the average driver slated to earn $170,000 in salary and benefits. The Hollywood writers’ strike, which started in early May, shows no sign of ebbing. In July, actors joined the writers in solidarity.

“We are being victimized by a very greedy entity,” Fran Drescher, the actor and president of SAG-AFTRA, recently said, adding that streaming and AI had “disemboweled the industry that we once knew.” (Lest anyone smirk at the thought of all those Hollywood A-listers picketing alongside their UPS brothers and sisters, it’s worth noting that the average actor in La La Land makes just shy of $69,000.)

In 2022, union activists successfully organized an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, and two Starbucks locations in Buffalo, New York. Today, 355 Starbucks locations with nearly 9,000 employees, from Oregon to Utah to Texas to Florida, are organized.

Also in 2022, about 20 quality assurance testers at Activision Blizzard’s Albany location unionized, meaning Microsoft, in the midst of acquiring the company, will soon be a union employer.

Meanwhile, unionization efforts are afoot at Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, Apple Stores, and Grindr.

The dynamic at all these places appears to be the same, more or less: as company profits have skyrocketed, worker pay has stalled or declined. 

Jefferson White joins SAG-AFTRA members on the picket line outside of Netflix and Warner Bros on July 20, 2023, in New York City. (John Nacion via Getty Images)

This sense of unfairness seems to be pushing workers—and, in fact, all Americans—to reassess their attitudes toward unionization: From 2019 to 2022, there was a 41 percent jump in the number of hourly workers open to unions. In 2022, there was a 52 percent increase in the number of strikes. And 67 percent of Americans now support unions. That’s slightly lower than the year before, but it marks the fifth year in a row in which union support has surpassed its long-term average of 62 percent.

What’s more, most Americans increasingly back labor over management when it comes to disputes about salary and benefits. That’s not only true of the United Auto Workers, who enjoy the support of 75 percent of Americans, but the Hollywood writers, with 72 percent of those polled in the writers’ corner versus 19 percent backing the studios.

All of these recent developments—which, taken together, mark a sea change that will be felt across the economy, in our politics, culture, and the way we live—are not just about money. In fact, that’s the least of it.

Today’s working stiff bears only a faint resemblance to the coal miners, machinists, and steelworkers of times past. He’s not necessarily blue-collar, and he’s just as often a she (“The new unions will have more women bringing home the bacon,” Michelle Valentin Nieves, Amazon Labor Union’s vice president, told me), and they come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and from across the country—our biggest cities, our suburbs and exurbs and all the places in between. They are often college graduates (in no small part because today’s American workforce is over-credentialed), and many come from the upper middle class. They are not convinced, as Boomers once were, that their upward mobility is inevitable.

But the question that most interests me, as an American historian who has spent years studying the labor movement, is why now. Why, in the second decade of the twenty-first century—after a half-century of declining wages and eroding political power in the face of the globalization juggernaut—is the American labor movement having a moment? And is this just a moment, or is that moment going to become something bigger?

Marx would have us believe that growing proletarian misery is the seedbed of revolution, that the rebirth of American working-class consciousness is the scientifically determined outcome of centuries of oppression. What else, he would say, would you expect of the masses (blue-collar or other) after years of economic subjugation capped by a pandemic that left millions unemployed, atomized, furious with the powers that be? 

I humbly suggest that Marx is dead wrong. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

What’s happening now is the result of rising expectations. The people leading the unionization charge have not been beaten down by decades of closing factories. They’re mostly in their twenties and thirties, and they have grown up in an era of remarkable liberalization and technological progress: the election of the nation’s first black president, the arrival of gay marriage, the explosive connectivity of the internet. They expect more, because they were born into a world in which more was possible.

Chris Smalls, the founder of the Amazon Labor Union, is 35. Starbucks union leader Laura Garza is 23. All of the running backs agitating for better pay are in their twenties. And then there are the Silicon Valley developers pushing for change—all of whom only recently entered the workforce. (It’s true that Fran Drescher is 65, but she runs a guild that’s been around for ages. The current labor movement is mostly being forged by people creating something new.)

Starbucks workers including barista Kat Ramos stand in solidarity with striking members of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) in Los Angeles. (Mario Tama via Getty Images)

Young Americans today expect a world that conforms to the one they were promised. The olds—myself included—may question their politics, their pronouns, their self-righteousness. But they are, in fact, doing little more than giving voice to the aspirations of America—making the modern workplace less hospitable to sexual harassment, more meritocratic, more respectful of our differences. They are doing what Americans are supposed to do. And all of us, especially those who have yet to be born into this glorious, heartbreaking country, will have them to thank for it.

That includes professional football players. 

“Any and all activism helps,” Valentin Nieves told me. She added that she recently met a man organizing minor league baseball players. “I definitely feel solidarity with NFL running backs and all athletes.”

Ultimately, this new labor movement “will redefine what work and community will look like,” said Maria Noel Fernandez, the executive director of Working Partnerships USA, which helps organize workers in Silicon Valley. 

She continued: “A fast-food worker gets up in the morning. If they have a union, they have one dignified job—not three. They can go to their kid’s soccer practice. They can be engaged as citizens and address what their parks, schools, and communities look like. They can be who they want to be and what they want to be for their families and communities.”

Jeffrey Bloodworth is the author of Losing the Center: A History of American Liberalism, 1968–1992. Read his last Free Press piece, What Two Iraqi Teenagers Taught Me About America, and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @jhueybloodworth

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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors

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The Trump Bible, Kamala’s coconut tree, and J.D. Vance’s couch. The Free Press nominates symbols that sum up this insane race.

(All images via Getty, illustration by The Free Press)

The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.

(Evan Vucci via AP)

The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.

But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —Kat Rosenfield


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This is America Judd Legum

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Former President Trump has recaptured the presidency. He is poised to win all seven swing states and, for the first time in three tries, a narrow victory in the popular vote. 

For tens of millions of Americans, the result is distressing and confounding. How did a man who incited a violent insurrection, was convicted with dozens of felonies, and based his campaign around a collection of lies win a majority of votes?

There will be plenty of debate about this question. But there is one thing we already know for sure: This is America. 

Right now. 

What will America look like in the future? What kind of country will it be in 2029 or 2039? That will depend on how we react to this moment.

This was a long campaign; many people will need time to process what happened on Tuesday. That is more than reasonable. 

But, whenever you are ready, Popular Information will be right here — digging up the facts, rooting out corruption, and holding the powerful accountable. We do not do this work because progress is linear, reliable, and guaranteed. We do this work because it is not.

Today, I’d like to hear from you. How are you feeling? What are your hopes and fears for the future? I’ll be reading your responses in the comment section below.

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Trump Wins. And Reality Bites. Bari Weiss

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(Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)

We’re sitting down to write this at 2 a.m., and by now it’s clear: Donald Trump is set to be the 47th president of the United States, and on track to win the electoral college and the popular vote. It is a stunning comeback.

The red wave that wasn’t in 2022 came crashing down tonight. Republicans have retaken control of the Senate. Control of Congress is still in the balance.

Going into tonight, Nate Silver ran 80,000 simulations of what could happen. In 40,012 of them, Kamala Harris won. Every pollster and pundit said the same: It was gonna be a squeaker. Too close to call. We wouldn’t know for days, maybe even weeks!

That’s not how it went down. Not at all.

Trump had won Pennsylvania before the night was out. And by 2:30 in the morning, he was onstage, surrounded by his family and Dana White, delivering his victory speech in West Palm Beach. 

Tonight at our election party, the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said he hadn’t seen a comeback like this since Charles de Gaulle. But perhaps the only American echo of tonight is Richard Nixon. As Commentary editor John Podhoretz wrote on Twitter: “This is the most staggering political comeback in American history. Period. Nixon has held the comeback trophy for nearly 60 years. No longer.”

Why Trump won so convincingly—and why Kamala lost so fully—are themes we’ll cover over the coming weeks. But for now, enough from us. 

Somehow, after livestreaming for six hours, we have a packed Front Page on this historic day beginning with our Eli Lake on How Trump Won. 

Here’s Eli:

Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed—Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake—all went down in flames. In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case. This past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments. Overall, he has faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State attorney general is trying to punish the Trump Organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties. 

And yet here he is: America’s 47th president. 

How did he do it? 

Read Eli Lake: “How Trump Won.” 

Kamala Harris supporters react to the election results. (Angela Weiss via Getty Images)

“We Blew It, Joe” 

This race was the Democrats’ to lose. And they blew it. Badly. As of 2 a.m., there wasn’t a single county in the country in which Harris outperformed Trump. What went wrong? Peter Savodnik has some ideas. 

“They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money,” writes Peter. “They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.” 

And above all else, they lost because they lied. “They seemed to think that Americans wouldn’t mind that they had pretended Joe Biden was ‘sharp as a tack,’ that they actually orchestrated a behind-the-scenes switcheroo, that the party that portrayed itself as the nation’s answer to fascism nominated its standard-bearer without consulting a single voter.” 

Last night, the truth caught up with them. 

Read Peter Savodnik:We Blew It, Joe!

We’re Going to Be Okay

Deep breath. In the run-up to last night, we heard a lot about how this was going to be the last American election—from both sides. Oprah Winfrey, speaking Monday evening at Kamala’s last rally in Philadelphia, said: “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to cast a ballot again.” Elon Musk tweeted to his more than 200 million followers: “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election.”

We call bullshit.

America is going to be okay. 

Read our editorial: Repeat After Us: This Is Not the Last Election.”

The presidential race was only one of last night’s shocking stories. Here are some of the others: 

  • After four years in the minority, Republicans have regained control of the Senate—as many expected ahead of the election. Their new majority was solidified as Republican Jim Justice won Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia, political outsider and MAGA whisperer Bernie Moreno defeated incumbent Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Ted Cruz won in his third competitive race for reelection, and Deb Fischer secured reelection in an unexpectedly close Nebraska race.

  • The battle for the House may not be settled for days, but it’s possible the Republicans could cling to control, setting the stage for a unified GOP in Washington. Here’s a smattering of the closest races that may hand the House to the Republicans: In Iowa, Rep. Zach Nunn held on to his seat in a race Democrats viewed as flippable; and in the increasingly red suburbs of NYC, New York Rep. Mike Lawler staved off a challenge from progressive Democrat Mondaire Jones. 

  • In a scene reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s distraught voters in 2016, Harris’s supporters left her increasingly dour election night watch party in tears as the candidate delayed her address until Wednesday afternoon. Biden did not attend the party, according to White House officials, in yet another indication of the distance placed between the incumbent and his vice president: “Tonight, the president and First Lady will watch election results in the White House residence with longtime aides and senior White House staff.” 

  • Florida’s abortion amendment failed, leaving the state’s six-week ban in place. The current law, supported by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, has exceptions for rape, incest, human trafficking, and the life of the mother. The amendment would have enshrined a right to an abortion any time before viability—roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy—and any time after when recommended by a healthcare provider. Abortion advocates outspent their opponents 8 to 1. But they needed 60 percent of the vote. In the end they got 57 percent, with 43 voting against. (ICYMI: Read Olivia Reingold on “How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP.’ ”) A separate amendment to legalize marijuana also failed in the Sunshine State.

  • New York passed Proposition 1, ostensibly a bill to enshrine abortion rights, but really a Trojan horse allowing biological males into female spaces. (ICYMI: Read Josh Code for The Free Press on what this anti-equality measure means for the Big Apple.)

  • Massachusetts failed to pass a ballot measure that would have legalized psychedelics, including psilocybin (mushrooms) and DMT. If the ballot measure had passed, the state would have joined Oregon and Colorado as the third state in the nation to legalize the recreational use of psychedelics.

  • Ann Selzer ate her words after she hung her reputation on an especially optimistic Iowa poll this weekend that showed Harris leading the state by three points. She told The Daily Beast: “I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me.”

Dasha Nekrasova, Anna Khachiyan, and Joe Nocera. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

If you missed our Free Press livestream—thanks to the hundreds of thousands of you who tuned in!—you can watch it here. There were a lot more people in the green room, and we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get them on the record on the burning issues. . . 

Who will win World War III? 

“America, baby.” —Coleman Hughes

“Trick question. There will be no World War III.” —Michael Shellenberger 

“Israel.” —Dasha Nekraskova 

“China.” —Jesse Singal 

“I’m hoping that Donald Trump becomes president, and we don’t find out, because I don’t think it will happen if he’s president for four years. But there’s one thing that the democracies have shown—that they’re very slow to recognize threats—but once they are mobilized, they win.” —Matt Continetti 

“Assuming we get India on our side, the Western world.”
—Brianna Wu

What have you changed your mind about since the last election? 

“I think Trump’s gotten creepier since 2020. I think he’s gotten more vengeful. I think he’s gotten angrier, even though I think he’s got more reason to be angry.” —Rikki Schlott

“Tech censorship and the danger it poses to democracy. I think in 2020 I was a little bit more accepting that the tech companies as private entities had the right to police discourse. But in the years since, I’ve seen that they wield an almost government-like power that I think needs to be held in check.” —Matt Continetti 

“In 2020 I was like, oh, the Democratic Party is just the party of the professional managerial elite, but Bidenism has been interesting economically.” —Sohrab Ahmari 

“I’ve decided not to panic over the possibility of a Donald Trump victory because I did that in 2016. I can’t really get there emotionally this time. I just feel dead inside.”
—Kat Rosenfield

 

On what the next president should do to unite America: 

“Chill the fuck out.” —Jesse Singal

“Make clear he doesn’t hate the other half of the country.”
—Coleman Hughes

“Focus on posterity instead of populism.” —Peter Meijer

“Promise to protect pet squirrels from government overreach.” —Kat Rosenfield

“Lower taxes.” —Adam Rubenstein

 

The biggest gaffe of the election? 

“Kamala Harris choosing Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro.” —Nellie Bowles

“Kamala lying about working at McDonald’s.” —Dasha Nekrasova

“Tony Hinchcliffe and Joe Biden had the biggest impact on this election—other than the names on the ticket—because by not bowing out gracefully sooner, he set her up in a position to look dishonest no matter what she said.” —Noam Dworman 

“The Biden campaign.” —Rikki Schlott

What do you make of our vice president–elect? 

“J.D. Vance is one of the most pernicious and pathetic figures in American politics and culture.” —Nick Gillespie 

“J.D. Vance is a thoughtful, conscientious, patriotic, decent person who learns, adapts, and course-corrects.” —Reihan Salam 

“J.D. Vance is disturbingly hot.” —Brianna Wu

“J.D. Vance is held back by his loyalty to Trump.” —Coleman Hughes 

“The only person at Yale worth knowing.” —Catherine Herridge

 

Why did Trump win? 

“The more you learn about Kamala, the less you like. Maybe she should have been hiding in the basement.”
—Catherine Herridge

“Immigration. He’s the strongest anti-immigration president we’ve had in decades. At the same time, we had the biggest immigration crisis we’ve had. So 2 + 2 = 4.”
—Coleman Hughes 

Maybe because of the border. Maybe it’s because of Kamala’s personality. And she also did kind of a terrible job at being vice president.” —Josie Savodnik, age 9 

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