Possible Labor Breakthrough

Indicating a possible breakthrough in their long labor talks, negotiators for baseball’s owners and players met four times Friday.

The fourth meeting ended after midnight in New York, but neither side was heading to bed.

They expected to reconvene, continuing to work through the night.

“There has been movement on both sides,” a management negotiator said during a late evening break, refusing to speculate on a possible settlement.

Said acting Commissioner Bud Selig: “I’m hopeful it’s going in the right direction.”

The sides have been narrowing differences during irregular meetings over the last six months, but on Tuesday, management’s ruling executive council gave lead negotiator Randy Levine permission to make a “last and final” offer when he was ready to do so and to return to federal district court to seek lifting of the injunction that ended the 232-day players strike on March 31, 1995, by reinstating the expired work rules.

Sources have said that Levine planned to make that final offer next week. If no progress ensued and owners successfully got the injunction lifted, they could then declare an impasse and unilaterally implement new work rules.

Whether that spurred the players union to take new positions on the pivotal issues Friday wasn’t clear, but an agent familiar with the talks said union head Don Fehr, knowing, perhaps, that it’s unlikely he could get player support for another stoppage as response to implementation by the owners, was prepared to make further concessions in an attempt to resolve the four-year struggle.

In a memo to players that was obtained by The Times Friday, Fehr said negotiations were entering a critical period and that the union staff planned to tour the clubs beginning next week to update players.

“In the last several weeks the clubs have begun to threaten to go to court to lift the injunction that ended the strike,” Fehr said in the memo.

“We have cautioned them that doing so would be viewed as the first step in renewing the public and often ugly confrontation that we have worked so hard to avoid. . . .

“There’s a regular bargaining session scheduled [referring to Friday’s sessions]. . . . After this meeting we will have a better sense of what the owners intend.

“Whatever is said or done [in that meeting], do not doubt we are entering a critical period.”

The week’s stepped-up rhetoric camouflaged the progress that has been made in civil talks devoid of the media spotlight accompanying negotiations during the strike.

Any agreement is likely to span five years. The sides have basically agreed that 1997, ’98 and ’99 would include a payroll tax of about 35%.

The tax would affect five or six clubs a year, with the threshold at which the tax would kick in starting at a payroll level of about $51 million and increasing 7% per year. The year 2000 would be free of a tax, but the players and owners have been in dispute over 2001. The union wants it tax free, but the owners oppose a second tax-free year unless there are major concessions by the union in other areas.

A potential agreement is also likely to include restoration of the service time that the players lost in the strike; a phased-in revenue-sharing plan that the owners adopted to assist low-revenue clubs; significant increases in minimum salary, and changes in the arbitration system, possibly eliminating the 20% lid on how much a player can be cut and the adoption of a three-member panel to decide arbitration cases rather than a single arbitrator.