When Dick ”American Bandstand” Clark checked into the elegant Four Seasons Hotel last week, an onlooker couldn`t help thinking that some people and things are ageless. But even Clark has a few wrinkles now.
Negotiations in the hotel between National Football League owners and striking players also had a timeless tinge. But, up close, this labor-management battle is not what it appears.
Workers are on picket lines as the owners and NFL Players Association are in a nasty entanglement aggravated by aspects unique to each and by the rather primitive relationship they have to one another.
If one views the fracas as a basic labor dispute between workers and employers, not an unfathomable act by famous and well-paid fellows with shoulder pads and brief careers, one might glean why it is a notable, if unfortunate, event.
The owners operate what amounts to a monopoly in a healthy industry. They are subsidized via huge TV revenues, share the money in a way that makes losing money a herculean task and tend to get preferential treatment from municipalities and sports authorities.
Further, their employees don`t have the right of nearly all Americans to switch companies and move elsewhere.
Over and over, the owners last week reiterated a refusal to markedly change their ”structure.” They declared their seminal belief in the impassioned manner that a devout Catholic might balk at the prospect of taking a wrecking ball to the Vatican.
It`s a system that restricts their workers from freely moving from team to team, testing the open market, deciding where they want to live and work. The owners` proposed liberalization of the system appears slight.
Free agency is cited by the owners as the only issue; the union says it`s merely one. In a sport in which the average career is 3 1/2 years, the union does not desire a Marxist-like demolition of the ”structure” but
unrestricted movement after four years.
This tempered notion, which would still inhibit the football players more than their counterparts in pro baseball and basketball, is too radical for the bosses.
The union, and its membership, is very young. Player turnover is high, institutional memory slim and its infrastructure of experts and bargaining experience not substantial. Public relations are poor, especially given the potential sympathy the union`s grievances could elicit if well-understood.
It confronts powerful employers, sports reporters who (to the union`s chagrin) may unwittingly lean toward management views and a football-loving public that cares less about bargaining rights and wrongs than about alteration of a Sunday ritual.
Consider what was surely the most significant act of the strike`s first week: the owners` decision to bring in free agents and prepare to resume the schedule on Oct. 4.
Even in an era of union weakness nationwide, the action was provocative and arguably brazen. The owners, in part seeking to divide players in a sport in which teamwork is paramount, didn`t even wait until a breakdown of bargaining, as have strong-willed companies in recent and raucous disputes in industries such as meatpacking.
Some normally tough-minded management attorneys were bemused by a move they consider precipitous and ultimately self-defeating. The replacement games may be woeful performances and simply stiffen the strikers` resolve, they suggest.
”It`s out-and-out union busting,” said Marvin Miller, the former assistant to the president of the Steelworkers Union who adeptly shepherded the baseball players` union as executive director between 1966 and 1983.
”Except for not having a private police force, controlling the National Guard and shooting strikers, they are just as bad as the steel companies of the 1920s.”
The NFL Players Association was formed in 1956 but did not gain a real semblance of self-respect and influence until the late 1970s. Though the average player salary has soared to $230,000 from $90,000 in 1982, a key reason for the surge was the fleeting existence of a rival league, the United States Football League, and the sort of competition the owners know might come with much freer player movement.
New-found riches aside, the union confronts difficult problems, not all of the owners` making.
Although many owners have plied their trade for decades, the union has only been a mature organization for about 10 years and is learning how to properly bargain for and service its members.
Lessons of solidarity must still be taught. Veterans of other unions shake their heads at the fact that this union can`t get key striking
”locals,” such as the Bears and the 49ers, to walk a picket line.
The union is also unsophisticated and surprisingly passive when it comes to public relations in an age in which getting out one`s message is critical. As the spokesman for a major union known for such savvy said, ”They hardly make the best case they might for themselves.”
The more institutionally mature and accomplished unions, such as the United Auto Workers, know the need to educate a community, or possibly the country, about its point of view before bargaining. Especially in an antiunion era, any and all friends are important.
The short history of football bargaining shows that the owners have been much superior in shaping the public view and framing the debate.
A small example: Last week, the owners` chief bargainer, Jack Donlan, made the arguably absurd claim that even after the ”key” issue of free agency was resolved, the parties would still need six or seven weeks of ”hard bargaining” to wrap up a deal.
Any labor relations expert knows that such a statement is folly, because one can cut a deal in days, even hours. But many reporters dutifully spread Donlan`s quote, the implication of which was sure to make some strikers nervous and fans angry, and the union did not rebut it.
”Take free agency,” said one major union`s spokesman. ”They have never effectively communicated to the public that it is something every other worker has.”
Yet one cannot have observed the failed bargaining here last week without glimpsing that the union`s ills are not all self-generated.
Mike Pyle, the former Bears` center who was the union president in the mid-1960s, recalls that back then union officials and management sat around a table in a boy-girl, boy-girl arrangement. The players were barred from having a lawyer in the room and Commissioner Pete Rozelle, paid by the owners, chaired the meetings.
The paternalism, Pyle recalls, was deep. It still is. The owners do not come close to seeing their unionized employees as partners in the enterprise in the way, say, that Ford Motor Co. does.
As Richard Trumka, president of the United Mine Workers said, ”These owners view themselves as the gentry, and are outraged that the people in their fiefdom ask for a little say in how their lives will be run.”
The state of the relationship was typified by Tex Schramm, president of the Dallas Cowboys. According to several sources, the 67-year-old Schramm, a former CBS public relations executive who is a prime architect of the Cowboys`s success, told union bargainers that the owners ”are the stewards of the game. Players are the transients. They come and go.”
It`s not the sort of attitude that breeds labor harmony, be it on an auto assembly line or a football field.
