Standing on Business
At nearly 3 a.m. on a Wednesday in midtown Manhattan, a group of women walked into a hotel lobby, raised glasses of champagne, and toasted what they had just built together.
The WNBA and the Women's National Basketball Players Association had reached a new collective bargaining agreement. And the numbers are almost hard to believe if you haven't been watching this fight closely.
The salary cap: $7 million in 2026. It was $1.5 million last year.
The average salary: around $600,000. It was $120,000.
The minimum salary: over $300,000. That's more than the maximum salary was last year.
Revenue sharing is now tied directly to league revenue at nearly 20% across the life of the deal. That's the thing players had been fighting for. The structural change that makes everything else durable. The cap is projected to exceed $10 million before the agreement ends.
This is what solidarity looks like when it works.
"We Stayed With It Until It Did"
Let me take you back to how we got here, because the destination only means something if you understand the road.
In October 2024, the players opted out of their existing CBA. It was a deal signed in 2020 that locked in fixed salary increases while the league's revenue was quietly exploding. They saw the growth everywhere. New fans. New broadcast deals. Sold-out arenas. Caitlin Clark jerseys flying off shelves. College megastars driving a cultural moment unlike anything women's basketball had seen. And when the players looked at their paychecks, the math didn't match the moment.
So they triggered the opt-out.
What followed was 17 months of contentious negotiation, failed deadlines, and real uncertainty about whether the 2026 season would even start on time. Talks extended. Then extended again. Then again. Both sides entered "status quo," a period where either a strike or a lockout was legally possible. The season's opening hung in the balance.
Through all of it, the players held.
They wore "Pay Us What You Owe Us" T-shirts at the All-Star Game. They gave exit interviews calling out the league's leadership by name. And when the critical final week arrived, WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike, vice presidents Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier, and Alysha Clark, and treasurer Brianna Turner showed up to the Langham Hotel in Manhattan and sat across from league leadership for more than 100 hours.
Over eight days. In person. Until it was done.
"We opted out because what we were giving to this league and what we were getting back didn't match," Clark said in the lobby at 3 a.m. "You could feel the growth everywhere, but it wasn't showing up for the players the way it should. So we stayed with it until it did."
I keep returning to that phrase. We stayed with it until it did.
This Is What the Work Looks Like
There's a tendency in this particular cultural moment to celebrate outcomes without sitting with what produced them. We love the champagne photo. We share the salary numbers. We say "iconic" and keep scrolling.
But I want to sit here for a minute, because this is a civics lesson wrapped in a sports story.
The players won because they:
Built real collective power. The WNBPA didn't have a few stars negotiating on behalf of everyone else. They had a negotiating committee representing the full spectrum of the league. They had all-player conference calls. They voted democratically on whether to accept. The strength of their position was rooted in the fact that it was genuinely collective.
Understood the structural fight. The headline numbers are remarkable, but the more important victory is that salaries are now tied to revenue. That's not just more money. It's a fundamentally different relationship between players and the league. It builds automatically as the league grows. That's structural power, not a one-time windfall.
Were willing to hold the line even when it was costly. More than 75% of WNBA players entered this offseason as free agents because they deliberately avoided signing long-term contracts during negotiations. They bet on themselves and on each other. That kind of collective discipline is extraordinarily rare.
Named what was happening. Napheesa Collier's exit interview at the end of the 2025 season was a public reckoning. The All-Star T-shirts were a public reckoning. The players weren't quietly hoping something would change. They were building public pressure while simultaneously negotiating at the table.
WNBPA executive director Terri Carmichael Jackson put it simply: "player empowerment... players coming to the table and standing on business and being reminded of the collective voice and of what it means to be in a union and the power of this union."
What This Means Beyond Basketball
The National Women's Soccer League Players Association issued a statement after the deal was announced. They called it "a landmark achievement that reflects what is possible when Players remain united, disciplined, and clear-eyed about the future they are building together."
They also said this: "The gains secured through months of negotiations will not be contained to one league."
I believe them.
We are living in a moment when the language of collective action is being aggressively suppressed: legally, culturally, politically. When union membership and organizing are treated as adversarial to progress rather than foundational to it. When workers in every sector are being told that individual performance and market forces are the only legitimate levers of change.
The WNBA players just demonstrated, in real time and in vivid detail, that none of that is true.
They had something most workers (especially women workers, especially Black women workers) are routinely told they don't have: leverage. And they got it not by being individually exceptional, though they are, but by being collectively organized.
The minimum salary now exceeds last year's maximum. Let that land.
A Note on Who We Center
I want to name something directly: this victory was led by Black women.
Nneka Ogwumike. Napheesa Collier. Alysha Clark. Breanna Stewart. Terri Carmichael Jackson. The players who were part of that negotiating room, who held the line through 17 months of a fight the world wasn't always watching, deserve to be seen not just as athletes but as labor leaders.
The history of American labor is incomplete without the contributions of Black women organizers. From laundry workers in Atlanta in the 1880s to domestic workers advocating for the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights today, Black women have consistently been among the most sophisticated and disciplined organizers in this country, and among the most systematically denied credit for that work.
Watching Ogwumike, Collier, and their teammates stand in that hotel lobby at 3 in the morning, glasses raised, having just negotiated a transformational deal for themselves and every woman who will play in this league after them: that's lineage. That's legacy. That's the tradition continuing.
What I'm Carrying Into the Week
Every time I've been in a room where something hard was being built (a coalition, a campaign, a fund, a community) the moments that almost broke us were the ones where we almost convinced ourselves to accept something less than what we knew we deserved.
The WNBA players didn't do that. They stayed with it until it did.
Whatever you're building, whatever table you're sitting across from, whatever number you've been told is the ceiling, whatever timeline you've been told is realistic: I want you to remember this week.
Revenue sharing. One hundred hours. Champagne at 3 a.m.
They stood on business. So can we.
Rewind
Last week, we had Fake Spring.
Read
Upcoming
Rights x Tech : Wednesday, Apr 8
Data Centers and Democracy: How Policymakers are Pushing Back
Register here
If this landed for you, forward it to someone who needs to read it. And if you're not subscribed yet — welcome home.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media, and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.