Don’t look now, but labor unrest is just beyond the horizon.
Well, okay, it’s actually about four years off, but tensions are beginning to heat up already, and it is a subject that I have already touched upon a few times already during this offseason. Yesterday, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith warned in an interview with Monday Morning Quarterback that “a strike or a lockout is almost a virtual certainty”.
That is not exactly what anybody is looking to hear. The NFL owners locked out the players during the 2011 season, the last time that the Collective Bargaining Agreement expired, and the next one is set to expire 10 years from that point, so it is not all that far down the road.
According to an ESPN article, that lockout lasted 132 days before the new Collective Bargaining Agreement was finally put in place. You might recall that the Pittsburgh Steelers were the only franchise that did not agree to and sign on to the new CBA, but of course they did not need unanimity to get it through.
While they did manage to work out a 10-year agreement the last time around, that does not mean that all has been well in the interim, as the NFL and NFLPA have traded heated barbs on a number of occasions, typically centering around the suspensions of players.
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http://www.steelersdepot.com/2017/08...ual-certainty/