NHL’s Greed Launches Another Lockout

September 15th, 2012 by Greg Eno Leave a reply »
It has been the nature of labor relations in professional sports that the team owners are basically filthy rich fans with the emotional stability of Sybil and the fiscal restraint of a teenager.

The cycle runs something like this, from the owners’ perspective: 1) buy team; 2) spend like mad; 3) help get the league into a financial mess; 4) ask the players to bail us out.

The above corollary applies to any team sport. In baseball, from the days of handlebar mustaches in the late 19th century to the mid-1970s, owners held servitude over the players via the Reserve Clause. The ballparks may as well have been plantations.

The tyrannical rule baseball owners had over the hired help ended in 1974, when an arbiter’s ruling ushered in free agency. That’s when the owners turned from autocrats to unruly kids in a candy store, grabbing players off the shelves and gleefully spending.

Pretty much every labor dispute in pro sports can be traced to the owners’ inability to control themselves.

Yet it’s a hard sell to portray the players as sympathetic figures whenever words like “strike” and &ldqu ...

Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NHL
Article written by

Posted in NHL

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Advertisement

Comments are closed.