Report: NFLPA to oust Upshaw

Collective bargaining will provide any group more than its members could achieve individually, from farm workers to baseball players. How much more, of course, becomes a function of the scarcity of the skills.

I agree with this. I have a problem, however, with the way the issues are portrayed publicly.

I side with labor in almost every labor dispute and have taken the labor side of the issue in every thread on such topics, so that's very observant.

However, when I say "unchecked greed" I'm talking about the football media's absolute failure to adequately analyze the obvious differences between and relative merits of the positions being taken in this process. The public is consequently ill-informed about these negotiations.

Of course, the same media members will come back and fault the union when 10 or 20 or 30 years from now yet another group of NFL retirees has lousy pension and health benefits.

Exactly.

 

I don't understand the comment that players should be responsible for capital costs. Outside of New Jersey, Washington, Dallas and New England did NFL owners put up any appreciable money for thier new stadiums. Taxpayers have been responsible for most or all of the stadium costs elsewhere. I would feel a lot more sympathetic for the owners if they had paid for those stadiums.

 

I think the NFL is rightly coming to the conclusion, at least temporarily given the economy, that municipalities will be far less willing going forward to build enormous venues that are used eight times a year not including monster truck rallies.

 

Public opinion is 90%+ against pro sports player unions. Obama has an election coming up in another year.

He'll roll. So will the Justice Department under his charge. Congress is completely in the owners' pockets.

The owners will get everything -- EVERYTHING -- they want.

That's the reason they want to force an impasse: so they can throw out the players' proposals completely and impose a solution more draconian than anything either side ever dreamed.

 

Starman, you keep saying stuff like this but it's wrong. The NFL will not get an anti-trust exemption as it pertains to labor and the NFLPA will surely decertify and take the battle to court before it allows work rules to be imposed unilaterally.

For Congress to give the NFL an anti-trust exemption specific to labor it would need to do a 180-degree turn on the issue as it was legislated in the Curt Flood Act of 1998, which carves labor disputes out of baseball's anti-trust exemption. It just won't happen.

 

The owners will try to get the 1922 Federal League ruling applied across the board to all "major league" professional sports.

That ruling, of course, basically said, "major league baseball owners don't have to follow antitrust laws because they're major league baseball owners."

With the current Supreme Court, they can probably do it. Needless to say Congress, which will happily ram through any legislation necessary to make it stick.

 

You're delusional if you think Congress is going to reverse the Curt Flood Act and extend Holmes' ridiculous 1922 decision to cover all sports.

 

In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the NFL could face an antitrust lawsuit over an exclusive apparel contract they signed with Reebok. The court reversed the decision of two lower courts, which had dismissed the lawsuit of American Needle.

This ruling was made in early 2010. If the Supremes were inclined to give the NFL balnket antitrust exemptions they would have done it in this case.