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You do not have to agree with every other member of your union on every little thing, and far be it from me to suggest such a thing. However, you are all on the same side, facing off against management, a fact that is true all the time but is at its truest at the bargaining table. Solidarity is vital here, especially as far as a public face goes: the bosses are always looking for cracks, for division, for fears to exploit. You cannot give them any of that; division is ammunition, and it will be aimed at you in short order.
And yet, WNBA stars Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart are both publicly speaking on union matters that should be internal only. The two, who are also vice presidents of the union’s executive player committee and therefore are in a position where it seems as if they are speaking for membership as a whole whenever they step in front of a microphone, spent the early part of the week discussing how the revenue-sharing progress made in bargaining to this point already feels like a win and that a strike simply isn’t worth it. That is a discussion to be had, sure, but it sure as shit ain’t one you have in front of a microphone with press around. That’s internal business.
Plum and Stewart did, in fact, make these points privately as well, in a letter to Players Association president Terri Jackson. However, the letter was also acquired by ESPN, and given the nature of said letter, there is only one way that it got into their hands, and that’s because a member of the executive committee sent it to them.
Given Plum and Stewart are openly discussing their personal opinions to the press and are the two responsible for the letter, per ESPN’s reporting on the subject, the most likely explanation is that one of the two of them sent a copy of the letter to the worldwide leader to ensure that even more people were aware of their current disagreements with union leadership. And that is, frankly, batshit.
Listen, Plum and Stewart disagreeing is fine. Expecting more from union leadership is fine — nothing they demand in their letter is negative, as it is about what they feel is a lack of communication and failure to deliver on promises and information that would better-inform both the executive committee and the membership. The existence of the letter itself is perfectly defensible and, honestly, encouraged — I am not going to reflexively defend a union just because it’s a union. They are staffed by people, and people make the wrong calls all the time. See: basically the entire history of the NFLPA, the NBA players being in favor of the second apron, even the MLBPA, widely considered the strongest of the bunch for years and a model for others, making its own future more difficult with its decisions over too long of a time in the late-90s and aughts.
This is all business that has to be handled internally, however, and showing that there is division on the possibility and utility of a strike, showing that there are players who could be uncharitably viewed as caring more about keeping checks coming in than about securing the best long-term future for membership and players who have not even been drafted yet, showing that the WNBA’s plan of just wasting as much bargaining time as possible and then hinting that the season won’t work out like everyone wants due to a lack of time if they don’t agree to a deal now, no seriously, now, also all your demands are unrealistic and we are moving just enough every time to avoid an NLRB investigation on whether our bargaining was in good faith or not… what the fuck, man? What are you doing? This is 101-level organizing and bargaining; how are you going to let Cathy Engelbert outmaneuver you?
Here’s a specific bit from ESPN that is making me lose my mind:
The two additionally expressed frustrations with how their concerns have been received by the players’ association.
“When we and other players have attempted to express concerns about negotiations, we have been made to feel as though we are acting against the interests of the PA,” the letter read. “Many other players across the league feel these same frustrations and have expressed them to us, but feel afraid or unable to speak out.”
Plum and Stewart said that this dynamic between union administrators and players “has begun to create unnecessary divisions at a time in which a united front and informed player body are essential to achieve maximum leverage.”
So the solution to this is to… leak the letter to the press to create even more division that can be even more easily exploited by the WNBA? What?
I want to leave open the possibility that it wasn’t Plum nor Stewart that leaked the letter, but that means it was another player on the executive committee, who maybe disagrees with the two and the letter and wanted to attempt to shame the two into stepping away from every mic they see. That’s a possibility, sure, and about as well thought-out as a potential Stewart or Plum plan for leaking it, but it just seems less likely, on top of not being as well-founded of a theory as “the two players who have already spoken up publicly about matters they should not have spoken publicly about are at it again.”
As Frankie de la Cretaz, author of the excellent Out of Your League newsletter, pointed out on Bluesky earlier this week, the WNBPA lacks a dedicated communications team to handle public statements and media relations training, and at a time like this it absolutely shows. Whichever player leaked this letter should have known better. Stewart and Plum should have known better than to publicly say anything about a strike other than the usual “no one wants a strike, but” rhetoric that has served unions for generations. Instead, the WNBA now knows that the union is vulnerable, its internal business become external, a strong bargaining position now made weaker.
This is salvageable, but it begins with Plum and Stewart and anyone else possibly involved in this leak learning that this was the wrong way to go about things, and that you don’t achieve solidarity by breaking ranks and acting in self-interest like this. Unions have problems, unions have disagreements, but they are to be solved by the unions, and not with the same kind of public politicking and media leaks that ownership would use to crush a sports union.
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