When Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier calmly sat down and told a group of assembled local media the WNBA is helmed by “the worst leadership in the world” on September 30, she likely did so with a full understanding of the potential impact of her words.
Collier—who launched Unrivaled, the women’s professional three-on-three basketball league alongside the New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart in 2023—is the granddaughter of Gershon Collier, who served as Sierra Leone’s representative in the United Nations in the 1960s. She understands the impact of the right words.
And the words she chose forced the in-house negotiations between the WNBA and the players’ union, the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association (WNBPA), fully into the public eye.
“I think it’s time that people know what’s happening—the way that the league is not valuing us the way that we need to be valued,” Collier said.
WNBA players opted out of their current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) last year, and since then the clock has been ticking: after missing the October deadline, the WNBA offered players a 30-day extension, they agreed; the new deadline is November 30.
“[The players] are at the center of everything we do,” Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said speaking to reporters on October 3. “If the players in the W don’t feel appreciated and valued by the league, then we have to do better, and I have to do better.”
The WNBPA’s current fight is one that hails from a long lineage of women-led labor strikes and disputes. UC Santa Barbara’s Dr. Eileen Boris, who specializes in labor studies as well as gender, race, class, and women’s history in the university’s Feminist Studies department, told Fast Company that there is a “big history of women organizing” in the United States.
“Women have never been passive in the workplace,” she says.
We’re seeing that play out yet again—and in the case of the WNBA, on one of the biggest public stages possible.
