Posted by John, May 13th, 2010 - under Rugby league, Strikes.



The class struggle can erupt in the unlikeliest of places. Last week some rugby league super stars began talking publicly about going on strike.

First, a bit of background. For international readers rugby league is the dominant male winter sport in two Australian states – New South Wales and Queensland.

It has a salary cap system. Each of the 16 clubs can only spend $4.2 million on player salaries, with a little leeway for other payments totalling about $400,000 on top of that.

Each club has a squad of 25 players, meaning their average remuneration is about $180,000. Salaries in fact range from a minimum of a bit over $50,000 up to about $500,000. By comparison the average wage in Australia is a little over $60,000.

So while rugby league players might appear to be well paid compared to ordinary workers, the real story is who gets the major share of the rewards from the exploits of the players.

And surprise, surprise, the people who do the work don’t receive the full value they create. Their bosses do.

The National Rugby League has a television rights contract with a couple of media outlets. One of them is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports pay-TV. The other is the free to air Channel Nine, effectively owned by private equity group CVC Asia Pacific.

Rugby League is incredibly popular on both pay-TV and free to air. Its combined audience is over 120 million, roughly equal to that of the other major male winter sport, Australian football.

The TV deal the Australian Football League (AFL) struck with TV stations is $760 million over five years. The National Rugby League (NRL) deal, which ends in 2012, is $500 million over 6 years.

There are two ways in which the deal robs players. First the salary cap means that only just over $400 million of the $500 million is distributed to the players.

Second, the $500 million deal itself is much less than the AFL gets from media interests for an equivalent viewing audience. In other words Fox Sports and CVC Asia-Pacific make more profit on either attracting subscribers or selling time during rugby league games to advertisers than happens for AFL.

The Melbourne Storm salary cap scandal, in which that club spent more than the cap on players and won two premierships as a result, has bought the salary cap issue to the fore. So too have recent fairly high profile player defections overseas or to other codes.

The players are unhappy. They don’t believe they are being fairly rewarded.

The history of capitalism is the history of class struggle. If players want to win better rewards for themselves then the best way to do that is to do what many workers around the world know or have shown has a chance of winning – going on strike.

This cuts off the flow of the profits players make for the media and NRL clubs and would concentrate their minds on the need to reward those who actually produce the profits for the big boys.

As the Builders Labourers Federation used to say, if you don’t fight you lose.

And who knows. If the players were to strike maybe other workers could follow suit to improve their own wages and conditions.