NFL PLAYERS STRIKE: DAY 9 : Arbitrator Thinks Back to a Strike by Air Controllers

With every union player who crosses the National Football League Players Assn. picket line, the union’s position deteriorates and the owners’ position strengthens, according to Ken Moffett, who arbitrated the last baseball strike in 1981.

Moffett, as befits an arbitrator, has been a disinterested observer in this strike, taking a professional interest but taking no sides. He has been following the strike in the same way most of America has--by reading his local newspaper.

Thus, when Moffett reads that union players are threading through picket lines and reporting to work, he thinks back to the air controllers’ strike he arbitrated.

“The owners could do to the union players exactly what happened to the air controllers--they could fire them all,” Moffett said Wednesday from his Washington office.

“When you have people crossing the line, it’s bound to give fuel to the owners. I’m sure the owners are watching that. I’m sure the owners are going to assess what happens this weekend, and that will help them decide the direction they will go.”

Moffett pointed to the player defections as a possible sign of weakening. He also wonders about the impact of a seeming split in the union--with NFLPA President Gene Upshaw saying the main issue is free agency, and some players saying money is the issue.

“It can’t help that there is this division,” he said. “I think, as far as free agency goes, just look at what’s going on in baseball. There is no question that football went to school on what baseball was able to get in free agency.

“It’s perfectly legal (free agency), it’s just a matter of bargaining. The baseball players were able to get their free agency from arbitration--courts. Later they added to it with collective bargaining. They haven’t been tested like football has.”

With both sides apparently not willing to move yet, Moffett said that the only thing to do to resolve the strike is to get the principals talking.

“As we say, ‘When all else fails, form a committee or call a meeting.’ ”

Of all the factors weighed in negotiations, fan sentiment is the least considered, according to Moffett. He said that during the baseball strike, fans were picketing outside the meeting rooms and hotels of both the players and the owners.

“The fans are too fickle to rely on,” Moffett said. “They talk about loyalty, but that’s something that baseball has proven about free agency. A guy is a hero in Chicago, fans love him. He’s traded to Montreal and all of a sudden he’s a hero in Montreal.

“The fact that these athletes make so much money makes them unsympathetic to the fans. I’ve never been able to understand this thinking: A blue-collar worker who resents an athlete making $300,000 a year but not feeling that way about a Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand, who make that much in one night.

“The things that impact the bargaining the most are the bread-and-butter issues--are the unions standing together and for how long?”

Moffett said that if the NFLPA wants to establish free agency, it will likely be a long struggle. Legally, however, he can’t understand why it’s not already in place. “Sport is the one area in our entire economy where that is the situation. Everywhere else, you can go where you want to go. Clearly, the players want this.”

Football’s union is not as strong or as unified as baseball’s, he said, adding that to survive a long strike, the NFLPA will have to plug the leaks in its picket lines.

“Baseball, from the outset, has been more unified,” he said. “You can go back and look at who the union leaders in baseball were, and they were the leaders in the game. That impresses the owners, it makes the union appear as if it has more say. In football, when you hear who the player reps are, you don’t know their names.”

Names wouldn’t matter to an arbitrator, he said, if the football strike ever gets to that point. If Moffett were arbitrating between the players and the owners in this case what would he do?

“I’d sit them down at a table and get them talking,” Moffett said, laughing at the improbability of it.