Is Now the Time for the PGA Tour to Unionize?

Considering current events in men’s professional golf, including a massive drop in trust with PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan, now may be the time for the tour’s players to unionize.

This is far from the first time this idea has been floated over the years. Efforts to unionize include those by Mark Brooks, a 7-time winner on the PGA TOUR including the 1996 PGA Championship, who served as treasurer on the now-defunct Tour Players Association in the 1990s. That group broached the possibility of tour players collectively bargaining to protect their earning potential, however those efforts went largely unanswered.

In the years that followed, seemingly any situation that arose to the detriment of tour players was met by the question of unionization. For example, when Vijay Singh was locked in his 2013 legal battle pertaining to his use of a banned substance (remember that whole deer spray ordeal?), murmurs of how players lack protection once again circulated.

An earlier example in 2009 saw Doug Barron getting suspended by the TOUR for using testosterone and beta blockers, two banned substances per TOUR anti-doping policy. Both substances were prescribed to Barron by his doctors, who had little to no defense in the matter due to a gaping hole in player protection.

Enter LIV Golf and all the madness that has ensued over the last two years.

If we’ve learned anything recently, it’s that PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan does not have the best interests of his players in mind at all times. We’ve also been reminded multiple times that the PGA TOUR as an entity serves as judge, jury, and sometimes financial executioner for its players. This has been especially true once a viable competing TOUR suddenly appeared.

As Golf Channel’s Rex Hoggard reported in the days following the announced “framework partnership” among the TOUR, DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund, players are once again contemplating the benefits of forming a union. This is especially true for players who opted for loyalty to the PGA TOUR, turning down hundreds of millions of dollars just to see their leader, Monahan, pull the financial rug out from under them months later.

The benefits of a players union would be abundant. Financially, players could reach a collective bargaining agreement with the PGA TOUR to set such things as “league minimum” player salaries and other protections. This would mirror the model enjoyed by the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball players for decades. Legally, a union would also offer additional protections to players who may run into conflicts with the Tour’s many policies, including those related to banned substances.

Above all else, the formation of a players’ union could finally clarify the blurriness around how much oversight the Tour should have over its players.

As Ron Sirak pointed out on this topic back in 2008, while professional golfers are often referred to as “independent contractors,” it would seem this is more of a technicality and not an accurate representation of the PGA TOUR’s relationship with its athletes:

“One of the most misleading things in sports is the notion that PGA Tour players are independent contractors,” Sirak told ESPN. While it is true the players do not work for teams, the fact is they work for the PGA Tour. Now technically, the PGA Tour is the players, but that is not the way it actually works. Perhaps part of the problem is that the players do not pay enough attention to what is going on concerning issues that directly effect them. But if they were unionized, they would have a greater sense of obligation to those issue.

Let me ask you this: If the players are independent contractors, how come there is a minimum number of tournaments they have to play each year? If they are independent, how come they have to get tour permission to play in conflicting events? If they are independent, how come they have to pay a rights fee to the tour when they appear on TV in a non-tour event? And if they are independent, how come they had to agree not to sue the tour over the final results of a failed drug test? Seems to me these are all issues on which a union could get the players a better deal than they have now.”

The concept of “independent contractors” has gone through changes itself in recent years. As Forbes described in a 2022 piece on the idea of a PGA TOUR players’ union, “the Biden Administration rescinded rules issued by the Trump Administration to make it easier for someone to work as an independent contractor. In fact, one of the current rules used to discern an employee versus an independent contractor states that independent contractors must be allowed to seek out other business opportunities.”

Having a union to protect the best interests of players might allow for those business opportunities (and financial gains) to occur more frequently and with minimal interference from the PGA TOUR. While hindsight is 20/20, it may have also prevented what just occurred to PGA TOUR loyalists earlier this month.