Two Invisible Modes of Unpaid Work: Latino Youth Baseball and Big Time Collegiate Football and Basketball

• In Event: 4166 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. What if We All Just Co-operate? Examining Labor from the Worker’s Perspective

Abstract

Both Latino youth baseball and big time college football and basketball suffer from a common misconception, i.e. that they are sports and as such, they are not work and those that engage in those activities are players and not workers. Sport and work are viewed as incompatible concepts. This fact makes both types of endeavors largely invisible as work. Nevertheless, both involve almost unimaginable amounts of both physical and psychological effort. In Latino youth baseball, the focus is on Major League Baseball's recruitment of Latino youth and their training in academies for preparation for Major League baseball. Literally thousands of Latino youth are interned at these academies and in a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest contest, a few will survive to make it to "las grandes ligas." For American youth, the focus is on big time college football and basketball. For most Americans, the idea that playing college football or basketball is work is difficult for them to comprehend. To those who play those sports, however, and devote countless hours of time and effort to obeying the demands of their typically authoritarian coaches for what amounts to less than minimum wage while their universities and coaching staffs earn millions of dollars, sport as unpaid work may not be a difficult concept to accept. This paper will describe and analyze the "invisible" work of both Latino baseball players and American college youth playing intercollegiate football and basketball. A key analytic component of the paper will be to analyze the above misconception in the context of 21st century neo-liberal capitalism and its political-economic environment.

Author

• Joseph G. A. Trumino, St. John's University