National Football Lunacy
The lords of America’s $9 billion-a-year professional football extravaganza lost the battle then lost the war after losing their minds by locking out the NFL’s referees in a twobit labor dispute. Fools the team owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell were. For they have succeeded in proving how vital the officials are to the league — critical enough, perhaps, even to demand not just a raise but a cut of the revenue.
Why not? Without them the game has descended into slapstick. Point spreads are meaningless, and sooner or later, someone is going to get seriously injured — player or fill-in ref, you pick it.
The owners and Goodell fundamentally miscalculated when they stopped negotiating with the refs union, threw the officials out of work and hired replacement workers. Their tactics, about the most extreme that management can bring to bear, are best reserved for last-ditch struggles over profound matters.
Nothing remotely of that magnitude is at stake here. The issues are purely routine ones of salary and benefits: How much money will the league pay the refs? Will the refs keep their pensions rather than shift to 401(k) retirement plans?
Goodell & Co. would likely accuse us of oversimplifying in that they have concerns related to things like establishing unified personnel policies for everyone who works for the league central office, including the refs, who now stand apart.
But only bosses whose obsessions with management rights border on religious would go nuclear in hope of forcing perfect consistency onto a long-established organizational chart. Blind to pettiness, they’re burning their own house down.
Distill the issues to the basics, and you find a fight over wages and benefits that total $4 million a year, less than one-third of 1% of the league’s annual revenue.
The 121 locked-out referees make around $149,000 a year as part-time employees for a 16-game season. That’s very nice money, indeed, but it’s far less than paid to the other essential cast members who take the field for the show.
Then, too, the refs didn’t walk out. They asked for about $16 million additional over the life of a contract, which works out to something like $30,000 more a year, and not that much more than the $10 million raise Goodell just got.
As for pensions, the refs want to keep theirs and to have the league up its contributions. The union has, however, offered to shift newly hired refs to retirement savings plans, which has become pretty much standard practice in collective bargaining. It happened in the settlements of the Con Ed and Verizon battles.
Worse for Goodell, he went to war on national television after recruiting an army of stumble-bums. His replacements include refs who had previously been fired for incompetence by the Lingerie Football League. No joke.
They miss calls, and make calls when there are no calls to make. Where the locked-out refs had been entrusted with monitoring player safety, taking concussion awareness training, replacements get bollixed up spotting the ball.
Then came Monday night, when a fill-in ref gave a touchdown to the Seahawks’ Golden Tate, meaning a 14-12 victory for Seattle over the Packers — even though everybody and their mother said Green Bay had possession.
Every week that the madness continues, Goodell and the owners will go on running up the score against themselves. The sooner they recognize that they can’t win, the better.