The protracted industrial dispute between the National Rugby League and footballers organised through the Rugby League Players’ Association (RLPA) has come to a head, with the decision of the RLPA to place a work ban on players’ media obligations. At minimum, this means no pre-game, post-game and halftime interviews. The work ban will encompass State of Origin III, one of the biggest media spectacles in Australia.

Predictably, this led to the NRL CEO Andrew Abdo putting on a brave face and declaring that the NRL “won’t be bullied or we won’t be threatened”. It also provoked the NRL media into a frenzy. The media, chief among them News Corp/Fox and Nine/Fairfax, are by far the largest financial contributors to the NRL through their eye-watering broadcast rights deals, and hurting them is a roundabout but effective way of targeting the NRL.

The thin veneer of journalistic independence on the part of the press has given way to an all out assault on the RLPA. Witness the usually jokey Matthew Johns suddenly turning serious on his Fox talk show, and mourning that the player boycott “will only hurt the fans”. In his mind, they are desperate to watch his contrived banter; in actual fact, most of them despise the NRL media. The most reasonable – and revealing – media comment on the dispute came from Matthew’s brother Andrew, when he stated on a poorly-watched web series that the work ban was being driven by the players, not the RLPA board.

Opponents of the RLPA point to the high salaries and celebrity lifestyles of some of the players as proof that their position is untenable, to try and convince ordinary people not to sympathise with or support the players’ demands. The RLPA is adamant that it is looking out for the current and future interests of the players. What’s actually going on?

What is the dispute about?

The dispute between the RLPA and the NRL is over the details of the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). The CBA is an agreement between the NRL and the RLPA representing the players, who are formally employed by their specific clubs on a variety of contracts. This will be the first CBA to be active in the period of the most recent NRL-broadcaster agreement, which provides for around $115m in funding per annum until the end of 2027.

The NRL is a non-profit body, but that doesn’t matter very much. Like all entities under capitalism, it is afflicted by a desire to make as much money as possible. Like other businesses, it has a competitor driving it to be more aggressive: namely, the AFL, who have advanced beyond the NRL by signing a much more lucrative deal with the broadcasters. In other words – the dispute is no different in essence to any other dispute between employers, who want to work their employees harder for less, and employees, who want to work less for more.

The dispute has largely progressed beyond salaries: by the RLPA’s own admission, it has not asked for “a dollar more” in wages since accepting the NRL’s modified proposal on the matter in December of last year. Instead, the dispute has revolved around different issues, including a proposed hardship fund for injured players whose medical needs extend beyond the year of support guaranteed by the existing set-up. The RLPA is also pushing for the first CBA for women footballers.

Class war is a power struggle – and it’s no different within rugby league. The details under contention should not be taken in isolation, but in the context of a much wider dispute between control over the future of the sport. Indeed, several of the RLPA’s key demands relate to footballers being incorporated into administrative decision-making. The NRL naturally resists this since it knows that its interest in making money will necessarily conflict with the interests of footballers.

Footballers: workers in uniform

It’s certainly true that professional footballers earn a lot of money. The top players can earn beyond $1m a year and the minimum wage for first grade players is currently $120 000 (the RLPA wants it to be $150 000). This amount of money insulates them from immediate cost of living pressures and allows higher earning players to buy property, amass investments and launch businesses that will sustain them after they retire.

However, this needs to be put into context. The average professional footballer is not a star – the average NRL career is less than forty five games, which is around two seasons. Most commonly, a professional footballer will spend a few years floating around reserve grade, play a few years worth of first grade, and then float back to reserve grade or the English competition before effectively re-entering the working class life they tend to come from. This isn’t even getting into the many more players at youth level and in the lower grades who don’t even come close to getting into the NRL.

Every professional rugby league player is acutely aware of how their careers can be cut down in a flash, rendering them not just unable to play football but to work altogether. All footballers know about Mose Masoe, whose spine was crushed in a freak tackle, and was nearly left paraplegic. All footballers know about Alex McKinnon, who was crushed in a similar tackle and was left paraplegic.

That’s just the extreme end, but all footballers suffer aches and pains of varying intensity. Injections of painkillers during games are routine, and a significant number of footballers rely on more painkillers and sleeping pills in order to actually rest. As the players retire and age, many are so stricken by pain that they turn to heavier, addictive, opioid-based painkillers.

The brain condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) looms large over all professional sports, and rugby league is no exception. Awareness of CTE in the past decade or two has risen drastically, and lawsuits filed against professional sports bodies by players and players’ associations have terrified sports administrators into cracking down on things like high tackles and punches to the head. Now, practically all contact to the head of the player is penalised, and the impacted player is usually taken off the field for a head injury assessment. If they fail the assessment, they cannot return to the field.

However, the implementation of these sorts of game-changing rules may well end up being pointless. The largest study of CTE to date was recently published, and it concluded that the cumulative force of impacts was the key factor in predicting CTE, not concussions. In other words, it’s not knocks to the head that matter, but knocks in general. That puts the hit-up, the basic building block of rugby league, into question. Financially, it may even render contact sports unviable, as the costs of insuring players rises above the amount of money available.

A certain number of footballers are absorbed into the cluster of rugby league related jobs, as coaches, developmental officers, player welfare managers and so on, but most go back to civilian working class life. NRL juniors are now required to undertake a trade or attend university, but this is hardly an effective means of getting out of the working class!

The limits of the RLPA

In the past year or so, the RLPA has been able to project its voice louder than it has in the past. This isn’t just an outcome of the fracture in its relationship with the NRL, but a reflection of years of growth. While players previously regarded the RLPA as not doing very much, it now has a strong degree of support. The RLPA possesses an extensive delegate structure with multiple representatives in each club, at least in first grade. Its smaller scale efforts at mobilising – like the coordinated flooding of Instagram with blank teal tiles earlier this year – are adhered to by players en masse.

In other words, its current strength is a reflection of its ability to organise the players. However, this strength is only relative, and it is a fraction of what it could be. This is due to the limitations of the RLPA itself – rather than being a trade union, it is classed as a professional association, and is seen as such by its officials.

The shift away from a union model to a professional model was decided in the mid-2000s, after the RLPA concluded their first CBA under the tenure of former Newcastle prop Tony Butterfield. Butterfield, who had the RLPA registered as a trade union, worked with the rest of the union movement, and fought a hard campaign to secure the first CBA, was followed by Matthew Rodwell. Rodwell reversed course and instead signed a sweetheart deal with the NRL – the key component of which was the provision of direct funding to the RLPA by the NRL in exchange for the deregistration of the association as a union.

You read that right: the RLPA derives a substantial portion of their income (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year) from their employers. This fact explains why the RLPA, until now, has been unwilling to undertake industrial action, despite constant rhetorical “threats” of strikes. It also explains some of the stranger tactical decisions made, like the “peace offer” given to the NRL, whereby any revenue sharing agreement for forecasted profits would only kick in after the NRL raises $300 million in assets – or until the CBA enters its fourth year, whichever comes first. This is not just an industrial olive branch, but a product of the RLPA’s “professional association” ideology: a desire to collaborate with employers in the running of their business, for the good of profit.

It’s clear that the RLPA has serious drawbacks, but two facts are clear: the NRL is relating to it as if it were a trade union, and the players themselves are relating to it as if it were a trade union. As Andrew Johns said: the industrial actions are being driven by the players themselves. The officials of the RLPA, like the officials of any other union, are caught between their desire to work with the employers, and the pressure of hostile workers from below to get better pay and conditions. Reading between the lines of the statements from RLPA CEO Clint Newtown and Chair Deidre Anderson, it may even be possible that the escalating industrial actions are effectively being forced upon the RLPA by the players.

Where to now?

At present, the class conflict is confined within the limits of the RLPA as is, but it may not stay that way. In 2007, player hostility to the RLPA went public when Willie Mason, of all people, advocated for a wildcat strike during State of Origin and declared himself willing to lead it. “How can we expect the RLPA to represent our best interests when it is partially funded by the NRL?”, wrote Mason. “The money has compromised our union… the RLPA’s relationship with the NRL leaves us with one weapon – to strike.” 

Could this kind of sentiment lead to change within the RLPA? The creation of a separate union body? Extra-union industrial action, like the strike of Nigerian women’s soccer players that may soon occur? 

For now we will limit our speculation and conclude with the obvious: that in a conflict between workers and their employers, we don’t have to think about what side to take. Fuck the NRL and their sponsors – the players deserve to milk them for all their worth. If the players are able to accomplish that, then the working class NRL audience may well be inspired to apply that ethos in their own workplaces.

Class war is baked into rugby league. The sport was founded in England as a working class breakaway from rugby union, and for decades was joined at the hip with the labour movement in Australia in a number of ways. The dynamics of the wider working class influence the development of rugby league – but if the players’ industrial campaign succeeds, then it could be rugby league that influences the development of the wider working class.