Baseball Negotiations Have Nowhere to Go : Labor: Animosity between owners and union officials keeps situation dismal. Usery doesn’t want to quit.

They can talk about each other, but not to each other, and when they will make the attempt again isn’t certain.

As Congress began to consider President Clinton’s request for legislation giving the administration authority to order baseball’s labor dispute resolved by binding arbitration, owners and union officials went their separate ways Wednesday. No further negotiations are scheduled. Spring training begins next week.

“I was not advised this round was over until I found out the owners had left town,” union leader Donald Fehr said before leaving town himself.

The six-month bargaining battle, the most costly work stoppage in sports history, is back where it began--nothing resolved and nothing to show for it except more rhetoric and rancor.

If Clinton, unable to produce a voluntary settlement during unprecedented talks at the White House on Tuesday, is also unable to bring the sides together under the mandate of binding arbitration, who knows when they will meet again or what they will talk about.

This much is clear: Special mediator William J. Usery intends to remain a part of it, associate Dick Conn said Wednesday. The veteran mediator, concerned about the extent of the bitterness and mistrust between the sides and worried that his position had been compromised by the union’s verbal attack on him Tuesday night, had considered withdrawing, Conn said, but was persuaded to stay on the basis of his tenacity and the urging of administration and Congressional leaders.

Usery met with Senate majority leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich Wednesday afternoon and was asked to keep at it.

After returning from the White House meeting, Fehr and other union officials called Usery’s settlement recommendations the most one-sided they had ever seen and said they felt betrayed by the 50% payroll tax. They said Usery had been unable to explain or justify the economic impact or other aspects of the recommendations.

Union lawyer Eugene Orza admitted that at one point during Usery’s presentation he called the 71-year-old mediator “senile.”

“I was there with him and it was a very unprofessional and unpleasant scene,” Conn said of the Orza attack. “Obviously, nobody wants to be subjected to the treatment he got from one or two of the union officials.

“He certainly does not engage in personalities, and this was a little beyond that pale, but I don’t think it will have an important impact. He’s been called everything in the book and has a fairly hard shell. He’d have to after all these years in the business.”

Fehr talked to Usery by phone Wednesday but would not comment on their conversation. Union sources said he did not seek Usery’s withdrawal.

The nation’s most successful mediator and a former labor secretary, Usery also was “not at all happy” with management for distributing his settlement suggestions to the media, Conn said, because the suggestions didn’t represent a formal proposal but a way to spark negotiations.

Whether it was a proposal or series of suggestions, management accepted the plan and the union rejected it, comparing the tax to a salary cap and complaining that two- and three-year players would lose their right to arbitration without receiving anything in return.

The owners, however, rejected Clinton’s appeal that the sides voluntarily accept binding arbitration and a union proposal that players return to work under the old economic system while the President appoints a fact-finding committee to facilitate renewed bargaining after the season.

“It’s regrettable that the two opportunities we had to call a truce did not prove productive,” Fehr said. “One doesn’t run away from arbitration unless one isn’t persuaded by the force of one’s own argument, and one doesn’t run away from the kind of fact-finding being discussed unless one is not very happy about the kind of facts that are most likely to be found.”

What’s next in this mess?

--No matter what Congress decides about the Clinton request, the union will continue its lobbying to get the antitrust exemption removed. Fehr and acting Commissioner Bud Selig will appear next Wednesday at a Senate hearing.

--The National Labor Relations Board is expected to come down on the owners again next week, issuing a complaint relating to management’s signing freeze and, possibly, seeking an injunction to have it lifted. If the freeze comes off, the union might decide to have striking players return to work, leaving the owners to weigh the legal and Congressional consequences of a lockout.

In the meantime, spring camps are certain to open with replacement players dotting the rosters, an unhappy prospect, Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Wednesday.

“The administration is opposed to permanent replacement of striking workers,” Reich said. “This is a management policy that has had very negative results wherever it’s been tried. It undermines worker-management relations. It undermines trust with a lot of negative connotations for the industry itself. So I would very much stand by the public interest and public policy and urge that the owners do not pick permanent replacements.”