NFL PLAYERS STRIKE: DAY 22 : Is It an Impasse or Impossible? : Union Proposal for Arbitration Is Rejected as Players Stay Out

The National Football League strike continued to drag on Tuesday when the owners rejected the players’ demand for binding arbitration and the players’ union declined to send the players back to work.

“It’s in his court again,” union leader Gene Upshaw said at a Washington news conference, about three hours after Jack Donlan, the owner’s chief negotiator, had told him that he would accept mediation but not arbitration to settle the dispute.

Upshaw said the players would be willing to exempt free agency from arbitration but remained firm that “all other unresolved issues” such as pension, severance pay, guaranteed contracts and drug testing be put in the hands of an arbitrator.

The NFL owners also rejected that proposal.

Upshaw said he would be back in touch with Donlan in hopes of finding another way to get the players back in the absence of a contract.

No date was set for another bargaining session and Donlan said he saw no reason to resume the talks, which broke off Sunday, unless the union changes its position on key issues.

The league said the strike-replacement games would go on for the third weekend.

“They’re intent on busting the union,” Upshaw said. “It just shows the people that are in control don’t want to reach an agreement.”

The union’s new proposal came after a six-hour meeting Monday in which the players voted to go back to work if management would accept a series of conditions.

The crucial condition was the mediation-arbitration clause. The union said it would accept the mediator it had previously rejected if the owners would agree that if there was no settlement after six weeks, the entire dispute would be submitted to binding arbitration.

But the Management Council’s executive committee, which had previously rejected arbitration, quickly did so again. The owners claim that to allow an arbitrator to make decisions on issues is to give up control of the game.

“It’s very simple,” Donlan said. “They want binding arbitration and we don’t want any part of it. We’ve told them that many times when they’ve proposed it. The only surprise is that they’d come back to it now.”

Upshaw said that without arbitration, the players would not return to work, even though management had accepted its proposal to keep the 1982 agreement in effect and not engage in reprisals against strikers or player representatives.

“We cannot agree on returning to work with the 1982 agreement in effect forever, and that’s what he (Donlan) has proposed,” Upshaw said.

Among the other items included in the union proposal was a demand that the jobs of the 45 players on a team’s roster at the beginning of the season be protected. The union was concerned that some strikers would lose their jobs to replacement players who have played since the strike began.

But management offered to guarantee the salaries of striking players only for two games.

The owners also acceded to a union request to protect player representatives and union officials, saying they would guarantee their salaries for the rest of the season even if they are cut. They also said players would not be disciplined for strike activities if the union doesn’t discipline its members who crossed the picket lines.

And management agreed to extend the 1982 contract until a new agreement is reached, as the union had asked.

“I’ve told Gene many times that we won’t go to arbitration and I don’t think we’ll do it this time,” Donlan said early Tuesday.

Joe Robbie, owner of the Miami Dolphins, said as he arrived for the meeting: “I do not want compulsory binding arbitration. I think that’s putting business out of your own hands.”

But at least one committee member, Dan Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers, was cautiously optimistic before the meeting.

“I think it’s something we should look at very seriously,” said Rooney, who was instrumental in ending a 57-day walkout in 1982. “I’m encouraged because they have tried to do something to take a step toward us.”

Tex Schramm, president of the Dallas Cowboys and one of the executive committee’s hard-liners, seemed to soften his position. After first rejecting it outright, he later said that the owners would have to study it more closely.

“I think it would be presumptuous to feel that a decision could be made that would affect this Sunday’s games,” Schramm said. “But we have to study all the ramifications of the proposal and then we’ll give the union an answer.”