MR. KOJO NNAMDIWelcome back. If you're the kind of person who likes to spend Sunday afternoons watching football for the precise purpose of getting away from the politics that dominate the Sunday morning talk shows and Sunday editions of newspapers, this is not the fall season of your dreams. And if your favorite NFL team has been getting its share of bad calls lately, this may, in fact, be the fall season of your nightmares.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIA divisive labor dispute has locked out the league's referees for the first three weeks of the season, thrusting labor politics into the Sunday sanctuaries of football fans throughout the entire countries -- throughout the entire country and replacement referees onto the gridiron.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIBut Dave Zirin says this dispute is about a lot more than a collective bargaining agreement for refs, that it's about whether our leaders in the political and business worlds are required to follow the same rules as our workers and that the same principles at stake in the labor disputes of professional sports were also at the center of the teacher strike in Chicago earlier this month.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIDave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He's written several books, including his most recent with John Carlos, "The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World." Dave Zirin, welcome.

MR. DAVE ZIRINGreat to be here, Kojo.

NNAMDIYou wrote earlier this month that the underlying issues of the NFL referee lockout and the National Hockey League's lockout and the Chicago teacher strike are the same, that this is about rules and whether the game is rigged against workers. How so?

ZIRINWell, absolutely. It's about the question about whether the rules that are prescribed for the rest of us, the people who make those rules are also -- also feel compelled to follow. The part of the Chicago teacher strike that I found the most gobsmacking and also that I found the most under-discussed is that the very model for public education that was being pushed by the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, was the absolute opposite of the kind of education he was providing for his own children.

ZIRINSo he was purposefully sending his children to schools that did not have high-stakes testing and that did have an extreme emphasis on things like art and music and physical education. And yet when it came to the public schools of Chicago, it was more testing, longer hours, less so-called trifles like art, music and education, so a gap between what he saw as what the rules should be for our children in terms of how they learn and what he saw for his own children.

ZIRINSimilarly, with the National Hockey League lockout, we hear so much that there's nothing more sacrosanct in America than the contract. And yet so much about the NHL lockout was about getting the owners the space to not have to actually fulfill the contracts that they had signed for particularly very high-price players that they had signed in recent years as they've gotten television contracts and high revenues.

ZIRINAnd the last gap -- and this is the one that relates directly to Sunday NFL ticket and us crowding around our TVs -- is that we've heard so much in the last year about the importance of health and safety for players. The NFL owners have gone out of their way to mount a PR offensive that says how much they care about the health and safety of the people on the field who endanger their lives every Sunday.

ZIRINAnd yet here they are, putting on the field the people who they have called the first responders on the issues of health and safety who have no training whatsoever. I'm talking about the replacement or scab referees who have no training whatsoever in terms of how to actually respond to issues like concussions, head injuries or the like.

NNAMDI800-433-8850. What parallels do you see in the labor disputes taking place in the National Football League and National Hockey League and the one that just took place with Chicago's public school system? 800-433-8850. You can also send us a tweet @kojoshow. How does the leverage, Dave Zirin, of the referees' lockout right now compare to the leverage the NFL players had in their recent lockout?

ZIRINOh, that's a terrific question. I mean, the main difference between the two is qualitative, and it's about dollars and cents. It's about money versus ideology. When it came to the NFL players, you're talking about a league that's a $9 billion a year business, that saw its revenues growing to 20 to $30 billion over the next several decades. And the question of how you divide that revenue, of course, has huge implications for the bank accounts of the players versus the owners.

ZIRINThe referees, it's very different. It's driven by ideology. The last figures that I saw -- and these are not partisan figures -- show that each team would have to pay an extra $60,000 a week to settle this thing right now, $60,000. That's basically, you know, like several dozen families what they pay in parking and refreshments going to the game every week. And so NFL owners are willing to compromise the very integrity of their sport.

ZIRINAnd that's not an exaggeration, as anybody who saw last night's Baltimore Ravens-New England Patriots game will tell you, which saw the Baltimore Fans, for 60 solid seconds, chanting a profanity at the officials on national television -- like, I don't use that word lightly -- that it actually compromises the integrity of the sport. And yet they're willing to do it because, ideologically, the owners are driven towards a lockout.

ZIRINIt's no coincidence that in the last year, we've seen lockouts of referees, NFL players, NHL players and NBA players. It's not conspiracy theory. It's the same law firm and the same lawyers who have represented the owners in each and every case. It is a conscious strategy that's being pushed from the beginning because they believe that because players have limited resources in terms of how long they're going to be able to play, how much they can earn, that they have leverage in this process and that they'll always win a lockout.

NNAMDIWell, in an article -- and I'm trying to remember -- well, it doesn't really matter by whom -- that was attempting to compare the referees and the owners and essentially saying that they were both being too strongheaded characterized the referees as guys -- these guys in striped shirts who travel first class and are well paid for doing the least work on the football field every week.

ZIRINHmm. Hmm. Well, it's roughly -- it's $8,000 a week, which is roughly 300 times less than what Peyton Manning makes as quarterback. So we're not actually talking about people who are living that high on the hog. I'm also not trying to compare them to coal miners either in the -- in West Virginia. They're not the Joad family in the Dust Bowl either. I'm not going that far. But what I am saying is that I actually do think it matters to anybody who cares about the dignity of labor and organized labor and the future of organized labor.

ZIRINThe fact that on this very elevated cultural platform on a week in-week out basis, you have the so-called replacement referees out there on the field, delivering an inferior product to a national audience, I think that degrades unions. It degrades the importance of pensions, which is what this is really all about. And it shows, I think, the arrogance of the owner class in the National Football League.

NNAMDIHere's Gary in Washington, D.C. Gary, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

GARYHi, Kojo. You know, in the media in general, these labor disputes are often being characterized as strikes when, in fact, they are lockouts. And it seems that there's a real desire to blame the workers and to uplift the owners as if, you know, regular working people. And, you know, I guess not all NHL players are regular working people, but a lot of people aren't really making the big money that we see in the front pages of the sports page. So I just want you to comment on what's going on there.

NNAMDIOK. Well, before Dave Zirin comments, Gary, and thank you for your call, I'll go to Andrew, who, I think, has a comment along similar lines. Andrew, your turn.

ANDREWI was really wondering why in the media, in all of the media outlets, the strikes and lockouts, although we know there's a difference, are covered -- and very much what the last caller said, they are very much being covered in the same way, that somehow this is the workers' responsibility. And I'm -- and I am going to pick names a little bit here.

ANDREWBut, for example, Fox News with the teacher strikes, which we -- it's a fact that they were not going to take the teachers' side. But it's all -- everything that's been going on is being put on workers who usually have contracts that were supposed to guarantee them something.

NNAMDIDave Zirin.

ZIRINExactly. And that gets to the NHL parallel to the Chicago teachers, this idea of the sanctity of the contract and how that's degraded in all of these things on a very high cultural platform, and that's -- it says something about the degree to which that these contracts are only worth something if the people who are responsible for paying out on them are willing to honor them. Now, what Gary said about strikes and lockouts is very important because a strike is, of course, something that is very time-honored in the United States.

ZIRINIt's part of labor law, the right to strike. It's something that is seen as being responsible for having built up the -- both the middle class in this country and the ability to actually have an industrial workforce that was able to feed itself in the history of the United States. Strikes are a key to that. A lockout has always been known in history as an incredibly aggressive tactic, this idea that you were going to as an owner, lock the doors and effectively starve out whoever has any sort of complaint against you.

ZIRINIt used to be seen as something like the third rail of labor management negotiations, yet the number of lockouts in the United States has actually doubled since 2010. It's become a much more used tactic. And it's become a tactic, like I said -- I think this is provable -- that the sports bosses have had as a conscious strategy from the start of negotiations. I interviewed DeMaurice Smith, the head of the NFL Players' Association and I asked him about, like, why is it when negotiations break down, they turn to the lockout instead of more negotiations?

ZIRINAnd DeMaurice Smith said to me, he said your first mistake is describing the lockout as the result of when negotiations break down. They're actually the result of the very beginning of the process, as they aim towards a lockout to be able to get their demands because the ultimate cudgel they have over players is that the typical NFL player only plays 3 1/2 years. The typical -- in other sports, it's actually not much longer, five, six, seven years. And it's the ability to say, OK, you're -- we're going to remove as much as a third of your life's earning potential if you don't come back to work.

NNAMDIWhat influence does public opinion have on the NFL referees' situation? And I think I'd like to extend that to the Chicago teachers, too. In the case of the NFL, after three weeks of the replacement referees, a lot of fans are getting angry. And, to some extent, the way in which the teacher strike was covered, the way in which teacher strikes are always covered, is the inconvenience of people having their kids at home and their kids not being educated.

ZIRINI think one of the most underreported parts of the Chicago teacher strike was the amount of support they had among parents of Chicago students. I believe it was 67 percent, I believe, the last number I saw was because they understood that it was not this gap between the teachers' union and the teachers but that the teachers were the teachers union. They had voted by over 90 percent to strike and that they were actually striking for things that they eventually won, like hundreds of more gym teachers and art teachers.

ZIRINAnd there was a way that the parents really did understand it. It'll be better for my kids if the teachers win this strike. Similarly, with the referees, as it's going on and more and more fans taste the brunt of this, you know, what's a fascinating thing is the difference between the way the network NFL announcers are broadcasting the games and then what you hear on sports radio the next day.

ZIRINIt seems like the NFL announcers have electrodes attached to parts of their body, that if they say anything bad about the referees, they're going to get a shock from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's New York City headquarters. And oftentimes, when I was watching the Washington-Cincinnati game yesterday, it just seemed like, every time there was a controversial call, they would either break to commercial or not show a replay and certainly not discuss it.

ZIRINIt was like watching Soviet-era television in the 1980s. And yet when you listen to talk radio the next day, it's, like, when you hear the real complaints. And people are increasingly angry.

ZIRINAnd when you get a situation like yesterday, where Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, actually physically grabbed an official for what he thought was a wrong call, when you have tens of thousands of fans chanting profanities on national television because of the quality of calls, when you have a coach like Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers, who yesterday managed to talk a replacement official into giving him an extra challenge flag and then an extra timeout just by looking at him sternly, you develop into a situation where the center will not hold, where people feel there's no integrity to the product.

NNAMDIAnd who is that putting pressure on, the referees who have bee locked out or the owners?

ZIRINWell, I think it puts pressure on the owners in a big way because of public opinion. But the only people who can really end this, the only exterior force -- and I wrote about this today and I've been giving this a lot of thought -- is the NFL players themselves. If they decided that -- if they held a 10-minute press conference, the NFL Players' Association, saying that they would not be there on Sunday to play unless the officials were there, the strike would end faster than RG3 could run a 40-yard dash. That's how quickly it would end.

ZIRINAnd yet, as fans, we have to realize in this process that, other than complaining, we don't really have a lot of power. I mean, people say, well, you can just turn off the TV. But, Kojo, if I -- this is how big the NFL is. If I organize the greatest fan revolt in history and got a million fans to pledge that they would not watch NFL games, it would not make a micro-dent in the profits of the National Football League. And organizing a million people is very hard. Yet if you only had two players from each NFL team, 64 people step up and say our team will not be there, it would end in a flash.

NNAMDIThe NHL also locking out its players, National Hockey League. This is a league that canceled an entire season because of a labor dispute only a few years ago. What do you think is at stake for hockey right now? And have they even recovered yet from the season they lost back in 2004 and 2005?

ZIRINWell, the irony is that they have recovered from the lost season. They've had record revenues. I think the advent of HD television has helped immeasurably and they've gotten -- 'cause you can actually follow the puck on television. The advent of a national television contract as well has helped immeasurably. They've had record revenue. The split in the NHL is not really between owners and players. It's between owners and other owners because there are about 20 teams that are doing very well in the National Hockey League and about 10 teams that are losing money hand-over-fist.

ZIRINWhy are they losing money? Because the NHL over expanded. It sent teams from Canada into the south of the United States because they were offered hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. And, big surprise, it didn't last. This would be like if the people of NASCAR said I see the future of our sport, and it is Saskatchewan. It wouldn't quite work so well, and, big shock, it didn't work. And these teams are losing money hand-over-fist, yet management is -- and this is going to sound very familiar to people who follow labor issues.

ZIRINThey are trying to extract the profits that they lost from the salaries of players. And once again, doing it by the lockout, I would argue, is a very nefarious tactic.

NNAMDIWhat do you feel when you read the headlines about whether or not the Washington Nationals are going to foot the bill for late-night Metro service to games? You literally wrote the book on what bad ownership decisions can mean for cities and the fans who support professional sports franchises.

ZIRINGiven that the taxpayers of Washington, D.C. forked over $1 billion for that stadium and given that a big portion of the Nationals' audience actually doesn't even come from the District but comes from outside the District -- in Maryland and Northern Virginia -- it is shocking to me that the Lerners, that the ownership group of the Washington Nationals is not paying the freight for these cities so fans can go to and from the stadium in safety and peace.

NNAMDIDave Zirin, he is the sports editor at The Nation. He's written several books, including his most recent book with John Carlos, "The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed The World." Dave Zirin, always a pleasure.

ZIRINMy privilege, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.