NFL STRIKE : Sean Jones Expresses Concern Over Anti-Labor Climate in U.S.

The Raiders’ player representative, Sean Jones, indicated Wednesday that there are some ominous similarities between the present football players’ strike and the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike.

And at a press conference at AFL-CIO headquarters here he said: “If they break us the way they broke the traffic controllers, they’ll go after the others--the culinary workers, the auto workers and the rest.”

Jones, a Jamaica-born, fourth-year defensive lineman with a marketing degree from Boston’s Northeastern University, sounded a note of concern about what he considers the anti-labor climate of the day.

“They have instituted economic conditions that can break the union,” he said.

He didn’t identify the “they” of his worries, so AFL-CIO executive Bill Robertson helped him out.

“This strike is no different from the others of the last seven years of the Reagan administration,” Robertson said. “They destroyed the controllers first.”

It was a day of management-bashing after Robertson had called the press conference to symbolize labor’s support for National Football League strikers.

“We intend to demonstrate (at the Raider game) Oct. 4 if this isn’t resolved by then,” he said. “We’ll have a massive turnout of union people.”

There are 700,000 union members in the Los Angeles area, but the NFL doesn’t expect to see that many around the Coliseum.

“We’ll have respectable representation,” Robertson said.

Most Coliseum workers are in unions--they are represented by four or five different ones--and Robertson was asked if AFL-CIO pickets will try to shut down the game.

“We haven’t yet heard from the international presidents,” he said. “It’s up to them.”

Can a 1987 football game be successfully struck?

“If all the ticket takers, the ushers, the culinary workers and all the others support the strike, it will be chaos out there,” Robertson said.

Jones, 24, who has succeeded Mike Davis as the Raiders’ player representative, thinks the strangest aspect of the NFL’s newest labor dispute is that the antagonists are, on both sides, a bunch of rich people.

Blaming the owners the most, he said: “In most cases, strikes (are called at) struggling industries. This (pro football) industry is booming. It’s still on the upswing.”

The club owners are multimillionaires, and the players earn an average $230,000 a year--up from $90,000 since the rise and fall of the United States Football League three years ago.

Jones, agreeing that players’ salaries are now large, said they still have small pensions, inadequate severance-pay agreements and no job security. Only six NFL players have contracts that guarantee them employment beyond the next game, he said.

“You hear about the big salaries, but if you’re cut after any game, any year, you don’t get that salary the rest of the year,” Jones said.

Continuing with a reference to Seattle linebacker Brian Bosworth, he said:

“That $11 million in 10 years, or whatever it was they announced, Boz will have to play all 11 years to get it. They can cut him any time. There aren’t any 32-year-old linebackers making that kind of money.”

Jones, on Mark Gastineau, the linebacker who is working out with the New York Jets’ non-union team: “He won’t get many Pro Bowl votes this year.”