“We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” With those emphatic words at an NFL owners meeting in New York on October 18, 2017, Houston Texans owner Robert C. McNair set off a firestorm. His all-pro receiver DeAndre Hopkins skipped practice in protest, and the entire team threatened a walkout that was averted only by a 90-minute team meeting in which head coach Bill O’Brien managed to settle them down. Texans players described McNair’s comments as sickening and horrible. McNair, the 80-year-old billionaire energy magnate — he’s ranked 186th on the Forbes 400 list, with a net worth of $3.8 billion — is not used to apologizing, but he had to do so on October 27, when ESPN Magazine broke the story. In his “apology,” he asserted that when he said “We can’t have the inmates running the prison,” he hadn’t meant “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work so well. So he offered up another, even sillier apology the next day — asserting that he actually wasn’t referring to the players, even though it couldn’t be more obvious that he was. The owners meeting and his comments were a reaction to the anthem protests — players kneeling or raising their fists during the national anthem in protest against police shootings of black men — that have been increasing in intensity during the 2017–2018 NFL season. Provocateur-in-chief Donald Trump brought even more attention to the protests on September 28, when he asserted about the NFL owners, “I think they’re afraid of their players, if you want to know the truth, and I think it’s disgraceful.” The political frenzy heightened even further a week later, when Vice President Mike Pence walked out of an NFL game in a protest of the protest. And fans have shown up at games waving signs aimed at the players (“Protest on your own time, not on my dime“) and the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell (“Goodell stand up for the anthem”). Politicians, team owners, and fans alike seem baffled and perplexed by what the players are doing. I am not. While the heart of the issue is the complicated topic of race and American policing, that core issue has gotten all tangled up with another one: NFL players as “workers” who are “employed” by owners and fans. I predicted there would be increasing intensity around the rights of certain employees in my 2003 HBR article with Mihnea C. Moldoveanu: “Capital Versus Talent: The Battle That’s Reshaping Business.” During most of the 20th century, capital and labor battled for the upper hand in the economic battle for the spoils of their joint effort, with labor having the upper hand between the 1935 passage of the National Labor Relations Act and 1960, the peak of unionization in America. Between 1960 and 1980, capital battled back by moving to right-to-work states, mechanizing, computerizing, and starting to outsource globally. Republican president Ronald Reagan drove the definitive stake into the heart of organized labor when he fired the air traffic controllers (the defunct PATCO union) in 1981, and the system functioned flawlessly without them despite their dire warnings to the contrary. While capital had won decisively over labor by the time of the PATCO action, it failed to notice that a new challenger had arisen to take labor’s place as its primary competitor. This force was the uniquely talented individual, without whom business could not operate. The difference between labor and talent is that labor has skills that are largely interchangeable, while talent has unique training and experience and is indispensable. Beginning in the mid-1970s, talent asserted its rights to both a bigger slice of the economic pie and more control over its joint activities. Whether CEOs, investment managers, actors, musicians, artists, or athletes, talent no longer treated capital with the utmost deference and respect — but rather increasingly went toe to toe with capital with tactics such as strikes and aggressive gain-sharing structures. Old-fashioned labor organizers might find irony in the Houston Texans players, who have an average annual salary of $3 million, threatening to walk out of their workplace. But that is the new world of talent management. Owners are going to have to get used to talent, not capital, being on top of the heap. The smarter owners, understanding just how weak their hands are, are wisely employing the strategy of murmuring warmly that they feel the players’ pain and trying to avoid any confrontation. But many owners, like McNair or the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, came of age while capital reigned supreme, and are rattling their sabers with righteous indignation. They will feel their own pain, because in the modern economy capital needs talent more than talent needs capital. In football, the owners need the players more than the players need the owners. And indeed, despite admonitions, threats, discussions, and pleadings, a full 80% of the Houston Texans took a knee during the national anthem in the first game after McNair’s comments. I am looking forward to seeing Goodell navigate this crisis. His job as NFL commissioner is to work on behalf of his 32 capitalist owners to keep the player talent in line. But he has much more in common with the players than he does with the owners: He is an extremely highly paid member of the talent class, having reportedly earned $212 million in salary since 2006. As with all modern managerial talent, he gets paid by capital to suppress talent (and labor while he is at it). I wonder if he understands the irony, and how he will navigate the tricky battle lines between his capitalist bosses and his fellow travelers in the talent class.
