One area where I wish liberals would get involved is sports. There are unions in sports, as it turns out, and there issues of sexism, and classism there as well.
Just look at the Bowl Championship Series in American NCAA Division 1 Football:
The Bowl Championship Series will distribute more than $174 million from its five bowl games, an increase of 22 percent over what was paid out last year, and a slightly higher percentage this year is going to the Big Six Conferences, according to Michael Smith of SportsBusiness Journal.
http://aol.sportingnews.com/...
Not a single dime of that goes to the athletes themselves! This money is distributed over a wide network of administrative agencies in the football programs: where do you think strength coaches, 3 extra defensive coordinators, and new stadiums come from?
Recruitment is also terribly corrupt, and was the underlying disease that cost SMU their football program:
The Southern Methodist University football scandal was an incident in which the football program at Southern Methodist University was investigated and punished for massive violations of NCAA rules and regulations. The most serious violation was the maintenance of a slush fund used for "under the table" payments to players from the mid-1970s through 1986. This culminated in the NCAA handing down the so-called "death penalty" by canceling SMU's entire 1987 schedule. To this day, SMU has had the most allegations and violations in NCAA History. SMU was only allowed to return to the abbreviated 1988 season, but opted to sit that season out as well after school officials determined it would be impossible to field a viable team.
Now what's even worse than not getting paid?
Well let's just say you play your ass off, and you only lose one game, and the rest of the time you and your whole team has dominated in every victory.
Tough shit! Says the NCAA: if you're not a part of the SEC, or one of the MAJOR conferences, then good luck playing in a national championship game. You might get lucky and go to the capital one bowl that pays out a good nine million dollars, or you can just sit on the sidelines like Ohio State and bitch about how the system is not fair no matter how much you normally benefit from it.
Right now the BCS National Championship Game will be played betweenLSU and Alabama, two teams from the same conference and the same division that already played each other once this year in a boring affair that involved as many missed field goals as there were points on the board.
Stanford University? Oklahoma State? west Virginia?
Tough. Shit.
Not only can you not get paid, even if you do manage to be the best, your school of choice might have doomed you to never being able to play for the BCS national championship game!
I think this is only solvable by including more liberal voices; the NFL has enough problems with letting Rapistburger play football, and Michael Vick too, but hardly anyone talks about the almost slave-labor like conditions in the BCS specifically and the NCAA at large. I go to a Div 1 school and I know Div 1 athletes, and the program prevents them from meaningfully employing themselves, and the amount of time they have left for studying pretty much dismisses most technical degrees though this will depend on the prestige of the sport, in football and basketball you don't have time for math. This is definitely something we should not ignore.