by Shaun Scott

While Sunday football is for many an escape from the stressors of the workweek and the anxiety of an increasingly rancorous era in American history, a seldom-recalled episode in U.S. labor history once collapsed the distance between passive spectatorship and the country’s political state of affairs. Thirty-five years ago this autumn, players in the National Football League staged a high-profile strike against stingy owners and team management, withholding their very visible labor power in hopes of securing better pay, bigger pensions, and more freedom of mobility as workers.