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smokin3000gt
03-13-2011, 06:04 PM
http://www.steelers.com/news/article-1/A-QA-with-Art-Rooney-II/ad9799d9-1b60-4c04-a31e-aeee5b6b6127


Steelers President Art Rooney II is a member of the 10-man management council executive committee and was in Washington, D.C., last week as part of the ownership group negotiating with the NFLPA. Those negotiations broke down on March 11.

Q. What were your feelings coming out of the mediation session on Friday, March 11, after talks broke down between the NFL and the NFLPA?

A. I was certainly disappointed that we didn’t get a deal done, and I was even more disappointed that we never got into any real bargaining. The players never really moved off their position, and looking back at the whole mediation, while there may have been a couple of points where there was progress, overall we really never made any progress. In my mind, they never really used the process to get a deal done.

Q. What was it like in the room where the mediation session was being conducted?

A. It was frustrating. There was a lot of down time, a lot of time in separate rooms. Last Friday – March 4 – when we did the extension for one week, I felt like we may have a chance to get something done. So when I went to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, March 9, I went down there with the idea that we were going to work hard and see if we could get something done. But we made very little progress, in fact there was very little bargaining that really even took place.

Q. What was the atmosphere in the room? You mentioned there was a lot of down time, but did it ever get heated, with finger-pointing, maybe even some raised voices?

A. It was emotional. There wasn’t a lot of yelling and finger-pointing, but there was some. More than anything, it was frustrating in that there just wasn’t a lot of movement. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of interest on their side in getting something done and we just came away from it with the impression that this was their plan all along – to decertify and take this thing into the courts.

Q. What is your reaction to the move to decertify?

A. They’ve been planning this for a long time apparently. At this point it certainly seems like that has been their Plan A, and we’ve filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board where we ask the Board to review the decertification because we think it’s a sham. We don’t think that’s the way collective bargaining should be done. They’ve done this – decertification – once before, and they came back and became a union again. We just don’t think it’s a legitimate bargaining tactic, and we think the NLRB will find in our favor.

Q. One of the key points the NFLPA kept bringing up throughout the process was transparency. What is your response to the union’s demand for the financial disclosure it said it was seeking?

A. That was one of the strange things in the negotiations, because the previous week when that subject came up, we said – after a long time of not being willing to provide anything and really feeling like it was one of those things that wasn’t going to lead to anything – then we felt like, OK, maybe if we agree to give them something and try to provide them some insight into what has happened to the teams, maybe that would lead to a breakthrough. So we offered to provide them some financial information through an auditor, we offered to go through a third party and have a third party look at the information. It was a very strange reaction. They didn’t take the information, after asking for it. They said it wasn’t good enough. I don’t even know how you can make that judgment without accepting what was offered. Certainly we would not have been surprised if they came back after they had seen it and had questions. But they never even looked at it. To me, that was a little bit of a tip-off as to where they were really headed with this thing.


Read more at..: http://www.steelers.com/news/article-1/A-QA-with-Art-Rooney-II/ad9799d9-1b60-4c04-a31e-aeee5b6b6127

zulater
03-13-2011, 07:33 PM
A.
It was emotional. There wasn’t a lot of yelling and finger-pointing, but there was some. More than anything, it was frustrating in that there just wasn’t a lot of movement. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of interest on their side in getting something done and we just came away from it with the impression that this was their plan all along – to decertify and take this thing into the courts.

Bingo! I agree Dan, that was the Union's plan all along.

Devilsdancefloor
03-13-2011, 07:54 PM
thing that bothers me the most is the players are a union when it benefits them, but then when it seems it is not then they decertify.

zulater
03-13-2011, 07:57 PM
thing that bothers me the most is the players are a union when it benefits them, but then when it seems it is not then they decertify.

Sham is the perfect word for it.

silver & black
03-13-2011, 08:54 PM
The owners don't, and shouldn't be made to open their books to the NFLPA. It's a business, and the players/union have no legal right to access to the financial records of the owners. If they are not happy with making money that 98% of us would kill to make... get another job!

I hate siding with the owners, but I feel the "emplyoyees" are over stepping their bounds.

steelreserve
03-14-2011, 02:44 PM
The owners don't, and shouldn't be made to open their books to the NFLPA. It's a business, and the players/union have no legal right to access to the financial records of the owners. If they are not happy with making money that 98% of us would kill to make... get another job!

I hate siding with the owners, but I feel the "emplyoyees" are over stepping their bounds.

With all due respect, the NFL is about as close to a "public" company as you can get without actually being one ... by which I mean their dealings are very visible, and SOME of this financial information is out there, to great public interest. The NFLPA or the public might not have detailed profit breakdowns by team, but chunks of knowledge are available, like a team spent $100M on player salaries, the league got $1.6B from a TV deal, such-and-such new stadium cost $500M, things like that.

Basically, plenty of information exists in public to paint the picture of what an insanely lucrative business the NFL is, and in the absence of anything to the contrary, that's what I'm going to believe. Since a pillar of the owners' argument is that they're facing difficult financial times, if evidence of that exists and they're refusing to show it, they're only hurting their own cause. Which leads me to believe they're not being entirely honest.

Again, I'm not really taking the position that the players deserve more and the owners are completely to blame -- but as I said in another thread, I just do not like these kinds of chickenshit tactics. If the league is really $5 billion more profitable than the owners let on, they're perfectly within their rights to tell the union, "Yes, this is how much money we make. We're allowed to keep it. You get high salaries already and nothing entitles you to a certain percentage of the gross, so you can keep playing or go suck a fat one." In fact, I wish they'd just have the balls to do that and get this over with.

Chidi29
03-14-2011, 03:04 PM
Sham is the perfect word for it.

Thank God Doty may not be residing over the hearing. It's clear that like you said, this decertification is a sham and nothing more than a tactic.