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What’s the Problem? Ever since the blackball conversation began in March, when the Bleacher Report‘s Mike Freeman reported that roughly 70 percent of NFL teams were deliberately snubbing Kaepernick as punishment for his politics, owners and analysts have repeatedly reminded fans that the league is allowed to choose whom it employs. Most often, that right is justified in meritocratic terms: Kaepernick simply isn’t good enough to be on an NFL roster (or, in some cases, he’s too good). The implication being that team owners only employ players whose talent, skill, and work ethic fit their top priority: winning (or to be more precise, winning for the sake of profit). This arguably explains why, for example, certain players who have been accused or convicted of sexual assault continue to find employment in the NFL. Because the ensuing notoriety doesn’t negatively affect their wins column or overall profit margins, teams are willing to look the other way. But the win-at-all-costs explanation appears to reach its meritocratic limit with Kaepernick, whose controversial case is political rather than criminal, and is said to create too much of a “distraction” for team management to tolerate. And so it appears that Kaepernick’s pariah status has little to do with the question of merit itself and much more to do with the double standard that has historically beset athletes of color who speak out. Ultimately this analysis returns to the bottom line: the NFL’s allergy to Kaepernick, some argue, is another example of “business as usual” — a cowardly attempt by the owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell to avoid the possible backlash from fans and sponsors. “It really has nothing to do with what’s right or wrong,” Philadelphia Eagle Malcolm Jenkins said earlier this month in support of Kaepernick, “but what affects dollars.” Many of Kaepernick’s opponents have acknowledged as much. They defend the NFL on the grounds that his protest doesn’t fit the league’s all-American brand. As the National Review’s Karol Markowicz put it this summer: “The NFL wants to be America’s organization, playing America’s favorite sport — patriotism is woven right in. Kaepernick wore T-shirts emblazoned with depictions of Fidel Castro: It wasn’t the right image for his employer.” This view, which relies on the corresponding claim that Kaepernick shouldn’t have used the national anthem as his platform, only reiterates the belief that the league is within its right, as Kaepernick’s employer, to sanction him for his political speech. In effect, the message isn’t “shut up and play,” but “say what you want if your boss is on board, but don’t blame the First Amendment if your boss is not.”

The Problem Is Work Of course, this message lays bare the underlying nature of the capitalist workplace: it is, as Elizabeth Anderson argues, a domain of “private government” where employers exercise broad control over workers’ lives. Consider: in many US workplaces employers can enforce a dress code, read your emails, record your phone conversations, inspect your personal belongings, subject you to random drug tests, forbid casual conversations with fellow workers, prevent you from using the bathroom, and penalize you for any infraction of these rules. They have authority not just over wages, benefits, and hours but the technology that will be used and the products that will be produced. And thanks to at-will employment — the standard in American labor contracts — they can terminate you for everything from posting on Facebook or failing to exercise to having premarital sex, being too attractive, or engaging in political activism. Yet because these autocratic decisions are typically viewed as the result of an especially unfair boss — as a case, say, of wrongful termination — their basic foundation in the capitalist economy goes unexamined. The essential problem here isn’t that an employer might treat their workers unfairly: it’s that an economic relationship in which employers call all the shots makes a mockery of the question of fairness itself. It’s that employers hold all the cards, whether or not they act with magnanimity. Because of the property relations that form the basis of capitalist power, workers get to keep their jobs only so long as the boss decides, for whatever reason, not to fire them. Short of that, management can deploy any number of punitive measures — demotion, pay cuts, bad hours — to discipline workers who step out of line. Which brings us back to Kaepernick.