Difficult Labor Talks Continue

By Casey Reese

            Almost four days have passed since the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) was set to expire in the National Football League. Yet, the players and employees of the league have not been locked out. How is this so?

            Well, for starters, the league voted to extend the duration of the CBA one additional day on Thursday, March 3, 2011. After no resolution was made following this brief extension, an additional five days were granted in order to hammer out additional details of the upcoming CBA. Federal mediator George Cohen has been said to be the driving force behind this extension, and is credited for extending talks to avoid a lockout. Cohen, who has previous mediation expertise as recently as preventing a similar situation from emerging with Major League Soccer last year, stated, "I am here, my colleague and I are here, to facilitate, to assist and help people reach agreement whereby they will control their own destiny.”

            The additional time has been welcomed, as the two sides are said to be inching ever closer to the middle as the details are hammered out. The main conflict between the two parties is in regards to a $1 billion redistribution of returns, from players to the teams, that the teams claim is necessary to close off debt and losses collected from simply existing. Additionally, the proposed rookie wage scale has been under scrutiny. With this system in place, each slot in the draft would have a set value, as opposed to each team offering a contract in which they are free to offer as much as they want. This idea is in response to the ballooning value of the number overall pick, who now receives contracts of upwards of $60 million, with a heavy amount of this salary in guaranteed money that the player will receive even if he is cut. The last conflict is in regards to the proposed eighteen game regular season, which, as Commissioner Roger Goodell says, is to provide football at a higher quality than the preseason. The NFLPA (National Football League Player’s Association) has demanded lighter off season workout regimens, mini camps, and training camps in order to preserve the human capital by preventing injuries potentially occurring in the longer season, demands unlikely to be ignored if a lockout is genuinely wished to be avoided.

            Will the conflict finally be resolved, and a new CBA agreed upon? Only time will tell, but the fact that a lockout has been prevented continuously for the past week bodes well for fans of the National Football League. With an additional five days to discuss the conflicts of the new CBA, one could only assume that greater ground will be bridged, and if a resolution is not reached, major leeway will lead the talks to continue even after this Friday. Stay tuned, however, for this situation will be in the news even more than it has in the past couple weeks as the two involved parties inch ever closer to an agreement, and the event comes to a close. 

Sources:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nfllabor

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/2011-03-06-labor-preview_N.htm