NEW ORLEANS — The situation between the NFL and its players union has begun to resemble Minnesota Vikings defensive end Jim Marshall’s 1964 fumble return against the San Francisco 49ers. You’re going in the wrong direction, fellas.
Yesterday, the NFL brought out its legal All-Star team and by the time the five of them were done talking, replacement players were back on the table, sitting down at the table was off the table and the Norris-LaGuardia Act, passed in 1932 to prevent employers from crushing workers’ efforts to unionize, had been transformed into a defense for a management lockout.
Patriots owner Bob Kraft said several weeks ago for a labor deal to get done both sides needed to get the lawyers out of the room. The brief NFL attorneys filed with the 8th Federal District Court in St. Paul, Minn., yesterday forcefully argued his point.
Although league officials repeatedly indicated they have no intention of using scab players to replace the real ones this fall if the labor impasse continued, bombastic Bob Batterman, architect of the 2004-05 NHL lockout strategy, said there was no legal bar to preventing the use of replacement players, thus adding into the mix a new threat from management at a time when the league keeps insisting it just wants to negotiate a fair deal.
Joining Batterman at a press briefing at the annual NFL owners meetings were former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement; David Boies, who represented Al Gore in his failed bid to win the 2000 presidential election in a court challenge of Florida’s ballots; lead attorney Gregg Levy and in-house counsel Jeff Pash. Boies and Levy were the chief authors of a 49-page brief that argued the union’s decertification March 11 was a “sham’’ that carries no legal authority for the court to grant an injunction blocking a lockout now in its 10th day.
One of management’s ploys was to twist the Norris-LaGuardia Act into a defense of a lockout. That act was a depression-era federal law banning management from seeking injunctions to block nonviolent strikes and writing what were called “yellow-dog contracts’’ that required workers to agree not to join a union as a condition of employment. If John Grisham authored this, it would rightly be called fiction.
“We all know what’s really going on here,’’ one attorney said. “I don’t think any one believes them (the players). I don’t think any one of you believe (the NFLPA has permanently renounced itself as a union).”
Perhaps not, but if either the National Labor Relations Board or Judge Susan Nelson do, the lockout will end, and the league then will be exposed to a “Hobbesian choice,” its legal team argued.
If the lockout is lifted and the league is ordered to allow its players to go back to work, the NFL is expected to impose working conditions similar to the 2010 uncapped season until a new CBA is negotiated or a legal settlement is reached in the case of Brady v. NFL.
Such conditions would very likely include the college draft and franchise and transition tags that restrict player movement. The problem, as the league’s attorneys see it, is the minute the NFL does, it would be accused of violating antitrust law because most of those activities are illegal unless collectively bargained.
“They want an injunction that forces us to go out and violate the antitrust laws,” one league attorney said. “I would hope the court would craft a decision that whatever we do would not (automatically) be an antitrust violation.”
League officials also made clear the NFL would not follow the suggestion of NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, who sent a letter to Levy saying counsel for Brady and nine other players suing the league would be willing to discuss a settlement of that lawsuit.
That is the road that was taken nearly 25 years ago when the players won a similar antitrust suit after first decertifying their union, which led to nearly 20 years of labor peace.
But the league’s lawyers said adamantly they would “not go down that road again,” claiming the NFLPA’s decertification was a sham and that the league would only negotiate for a new CBA with the players union, even though the players now insist they have no union.
Pash repeatedly said the league is willing to follow the urging of ex-Patriots [team stats] linebacker Mike Vrabel for face-to-face negotiations but only if the players first admit the NFLPA is still a union not a trade association, thus effectively dismissing the Brady lawsuit and the players’ claims of rampant antitrust violations.
If this confuses you, you know how Jim Marshall felt 57 years ago when he thought he’d scored a touchdown for the Vikings only to learned he’d run 66 yards in the wrong direction and scored a safety for the not-hotly pursuing 49ers.
Post je objavljen 22.03.2011. u 07:26 sati.