By Erik Brady and Bob Nightengale, USA TODAY
The NFL is on the brink of labor war. The NBA could face the same after this season. And the NHL appears to be girding for a collective bargaining showdown in 2012.
By Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY
The crux of the current NFL labor negotiations is how the owners and players will slice the revenue pie. MLB appears to be the most stable of the four major leagues, with baseball's last work stoppage more than 16 years ago.
By Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY
The crux of the current NFL labor negotiations is how the owners and players will slice the revenue pie. MLB appears to be the most stable of the four major leagues, with baseball's last work stoppage more than 16 years ago.
The only major team sport that seems to enjoy labor peace these days is baseball, more than 16 years removed from the start of a deeply damaging work stoppage that wiped out the 1994 World Series.
"We came to realize there is a lot of pie to be sliced," former All-Star first baseman Mark Grace says.
Never in the history of team sports has a pie been as richly filled as the NFL's, which runs to roughly $9 billion in annual revenue. Yet this week, owners and players are at an impasse over how to carve that pie in a way that satisfies both.
The NFL's collective bargaining agreement runs out Thursday at 11:59 p.m. ET, and the NFL Players Association is expected to decertify ? put itself out of business ? before then so that its members can pursue antitrust remedies.
Currently, the league and its owners get the first $1 billion of revenue, and the rest is shared with players. Owners want to exempt a second $1 billion.
And that raises a question: Would MLB owners dare ask baseball players and their union to give back gains on a scale as grand as that?
"I think if they would have asked such a thing of (former MLB Player Association executive directors) Marvin Miller or Donald Fehr that they would have told them in very colorful language to go pound salt," says Bob Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois School of Labor & Employment Relations.
Baseball's union has made small-scale concessions over the years, such as increasing the years needed for salary arbitration before lowering it again.
Of the major sports unions ?�NASCAR does not have one ? football is the only one that does not guarantee its contracts.
"MLBPA is the strongest" union, says Gabe Feldman, director of the Sports Law Program at Tulane University Law School. "I think that's fair to say."
Reasons for that are based on history (attempts to unionize in baseball date to the Civil War era) and grit (Miller was once dubbed "most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis" by Studs Terkel, the populist historian).
Power Brokers for Labor Peace
USA TODAY's Erik Brady looks at the major team sports' union leaders:
Donald Fehr
NHLPA executive director
Age: 62
Started: Dec. 18
Quotable: "The history is clearly different" between the hockey and baseball unions, "but the players are capable of holding it together and achieving it just as much."
Billy Hunter
NBPA executive director
Age: 68
Started: 1996
Quotable: "I've been here before. I'm not new to the process. I can assure you that while they make their moves, we're making our moves as well."
DeMaurice Smith
NFLPA executive director
Age: 47
Started: 2009
Quotable: "We will always take the steps we need to protect ourselves and to protect our interests. ... (We) tell our players to prepare for the worst even while you're hoping for the best."
Michael Weiner
MLBPA executive director
Age: 49
Started: 2009
Quotable: "This union has never looked for a work stoppage, but what we've done is identified what we thought was fair and we've done whatever it took to achieve a fair agreement."
"The strength of the players association, dating back to Marvin's time, has always been the players themselves," MLBPA executive director Michael Weiner says. "There's a history, a connection with generations of players, and this generation understands that well."
The NHLPA has a new executive director in Fehr, an old lion who sharpened his teeth with 26 tumultuous years as Miller's successor with the MLBPA.
"That certainly suggests that NHL players are thinking about a more aggressive posture," says Geoffrey Rapp, a professor of law at the University of Toledo College of Law.
Fehr's original plan when he left baseball was to help NHL players work on their constitution: "If you had asked me if I had intended to work full time, the answer would have been no."
But the union has lost three executive directors and other key management figures since the lockout erased the 2004-05 season. When the latest search committee couldn't find the right fit, it asked Fehr to step in. "If I had thought I couldn't make a difference, I would not have done it," he says.
Now Fehr must prepare for negotiations with the NHL in 2012. NBPA executive director Billy Hunter is in the early stages of talks with the NBA, where owners want a hard salary cap, shorter contracts, rollback of salaries and less guaranteed money.
"I'm going to tell my guys to be prepared for a lockout," Hunter says. "We're going to make every effort to negotiate. ? If you don't give us any choice, and the only alternative is to fight, we'll fight. And that's where we are."
Fights over free agency
NFL fans enjoy the complexity of blindside blitzes and zone blocking schemes; they aren't as keen on the complexity of decertification and antitrust. The NFLPA last decertified in 1989 on the heels of the players strike of 1987, which failed when 89 players crossed picket lines to join so-called replacement players.
Court proved more successful. Wins in a pair of antitrust suits (Freeman McNeil v. the NFL and Reggie White v. the NFL) led to a collective bargaining agreement in 1993 that established free agency (good for players) and a salary cap (good for owners).
NFL free agency came a generation after baseball players won that right. NFLPA officials say that isn't a sign that baseball has a stronger union.
"It's apples and oranges," NFLPA counsel Richard Berthelsen says. "We had to go to court and file an antitrust suit to get free agency. They were able to first win arbitration, where the decision was final and binding, with no appeal.
"The difference to us was that we had long, hard-fought court battles to get free agency. That's not to diminish the deal that Marvin Miller got. But that doesn't make us any better or worse."
Miller, MLBPA's first executive director in 1966, was previously chief economist for United Steelworkers.
"He came from a traditional labor background and believed just because you're an athlete doesn't mean you're not a union man just like a steelworker," Toledo's Rapp says. "And he played hardball with the owners."
Decertification was not an option for Miller because of baseball's antitrust exemption. Paradoxically, that advantage to the owners actually hurt them in the long run, Tulane's Feldman believes, because it helped to unify the players.
Today, baseball players have the same rights as players in other team sports in terms of antitrust, thanks to the Curt Flood Act of 1998, though baseball retains its antitrust exemption in other respects. "But in the formational years of the MLBPA, they did not have that weapon, which brought players closer together," Feldman says.
Flood is the patron saint of free agency. He challenged baseball's reserve clause, which bound players to teams, when he was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969. Flood martyred his career by sitting out a year and carried his fight to the Supreme Court, where he lost.
Miller and the MLBPA filed a grievance in 1975 on behalf of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, pitchers who sought free agency. An independent arbitrator ruled in their favor two days before Christmas. Baseball would never be the same.
Its first free agents entered the market after the 1976 season, and the average salary rose from about $51,000 in 1976 to nearly $77,000 in 1977 to more than $241,000 by the time Miller retired in 1992. Today, the average salary is more than $3 million.
"Thank God for Curt Flood," says Grace, a color analyst for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Fox Sports. "But these young guys today, if you ask them who Marvin Miller is, they probably think he's a basketball player."
Baseball's strong structure
This season is baseball's last under its current collective bargaining agreement. And yet somehow, the storm clouds gathering over the other team sports do not seem a threat to baseball.
Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig says, "There's no question that nobody could've believed, starting with me, that we'd have 16 years of labor peace in a sport that had eight work stoppages."
Bruno, the Illinois professor, argues that peace is born of mutual respect built over decades of hard, often bitter negotiations.
"Major League Baseball has a mature, strong bargaining architecture," he says. "That doesn't exist in the other sports, at least to the degree that it exists in baseball. ? We'll see more prolonged bargaining (when baseball's CBA runs out), but there is no real at-war attitude. We have an at-war attitude in the NFL. We have an at-war attitude in the NBA. And we may very well be getting to that in the NHL."
NFL labor issues include a rookie salary cap and a lengthened regular season, but at their core these are simply more questions about how best to divvy up and grow that $9 billion pie.
"It's still hard for me to believe there would be a (work stoppage) in the NFL, especially with those revenues," Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Randy Wolf says. "It's the highest-grossing sport in America."
Even so, Wolf thinks NFL players have issues worth fighting for. "For those guys not to have their contracts guaranteed is unbelievable," he says. "Every sport is dangerous, but the NFL is Russian roulette."
At-war attitudes grow when one side senses weakness in the other, Bruno says.
"What two bargaining parties want desperately are two strong, competent and authoritative parties at the table," he says. "That's when you get a deal made. You might fight, you might scream, you might strike, you might lock out, but at the end of the day you get a deal made.
"It's not coincidental that baseball has peace. There will always be problems. But there have been enough problems that folks in that industry have understood where shared interest exists, how to find compromise, how to share wealth and how to act in the present with a mind for preserving the future."
Contributing: Kevin Allen, Jarrett Bell and Jeff Zillgitt
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