Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Why cannot we sit down together with a board of arbitration, honestly state our difficulties and try to work out a sane method of procedure?” Mrs. Roosevelt is saying that they should have a third party to help work out the disputes in a professional manner. The relation from this quote to major league sports labor disputes is the league and players tend to go to court to try to settle their disputes. However, the leagues have gotten very use to going to court to settle their disputes that they do not try to settle the little disputes personally. Hence, the government intervention should be limited in the major league sports labor disputes.
First, the government’s intervention into major league sports causes problems because the judges do not always label the disputes correctly. Some of the federal laws, that determine what the labor disputes are labeled, are the National Labor Relations Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Act, and the Norris LaGuardia Act. However within the article “Federal Jurisdiction in Sports Labor Disputes” by Michael LeRoy a professor in labor and employment relations, the sports labor disputes are often set under the antitrust act instead of the labor law. Therefore, the judges do not always read the cases right, and in return the judges mislabel the cases under the antitrust. When the court systems label the disputes under the antitrust act, the judges normally dismiss the cases. However, the Clayton Act organizes labor under antitrust laws in a bad manner, which causes more problems than it solves from LeRoy’s article “Federal Jurisdiction in Sports Labor Disputes". Therefore, the Clayton act was not well written because the act caused more problems than it solve...
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Needs Labor Unions to Counteract Power of Big Business,” in Labor Unions, edited by Noel Merino, 99-104. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Greenhaven Press, 2012.
For this assignment, we learned that Maurice Clarett filed a case against the NFL where he argued that the NFL’s three-year rule acted as an unreasonable restraint in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Act. On the other hand, the NFL argued that its three-year rule was covered from the antitrust laws by the nonstatutory labor exemption. First, the case was reviewed by the district court which concluded that the NFL's eligibility rules violated antitrust laws by requiring the player to wait at least three years before entering the NFL draft and that the eligibility criteria was not immune from those antitrust laws. The court favored Clarett making him eligible for the 2004 NFL Draft.
The paper will discuss minicases on ‘The White-Collar Union Organizer’ and ‘The Frustrated Labor Historians’ by Arthur A. Sloane and Fred Witney (2010), to understand the issues unions undergo in the marketplace. There is no predetermined statistical number reported of union memberships in this country. However, “the United Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) excludes almost 2 million U.S wages and salary employees, over half of whom are employed in the public sector, who are represented at their workplaces by a union but are not union members. Not being required to join a union as a condition of continued employment, these employees have for a variety of reasons chosen not to do so. Nor do the BLS estimates include union members who are currently unemployed” (Sloane & Witney, 2010, p.5). Given this important information, the examination of these minicases will provide answers to the problems unions face in organizational settings.
Professional sports, like most of our popular culture, can be understood only partly by through its exiting plays and tremendous athletes. Baseball and football most of all are not only games anymore but also hardcore businesses. As businesses, sports leagues can be as conniving, deceitful, and manipulative as any other businesses in the world. No matter what the circumstances are, it seems that Politicians are always some how right around the corner from the world of sports. These Politicians look to exploit both the cultural and the economic dimensions of the sports for their own purposes. This is what is known in the sports industry as “playing the field”.
Any real baseball fan needs to read a copy of Bob Costas' "Fair Ball." Costas addresses the issues pressing Major League Baseball, its owners, its players, and its fans. Everything that caused the 1994 work stoppage could happen again after next season. However, Costas very thoughtfully lays out a plan primarily for the owners, since they should be able to master what they own.
Davis, T. & Hairston, C. T. (2013). NCAA Deregulation and Reform: A Radical Shift of Governance Philosophy? Oregon Law Review, 92(77), pp. 77-128.
Wallerstein, M. & Western, B. 2000. Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why? Annual Review of Political Science. 3: 355-377.
Dispute resolution follows career and post career planning on the list of functions. Dispute resolution is somewhat self-explanatory. It includes the agent resolving disputes with the league, team, teammates, fans, referees or umpires, the media, and endorsement companies. “Renowned baseball agent Dennis Gilbert likens the role of the agent to a shield, stating that it is the agent’s task to shield the athlete from the headaches that go along with resolving disputes” (Schwarz, 1996). This so called “shield” allows players to concentrate completely on their sport, without outside distractions.
The NCAA prides itself as an organization dedicated to safeguarding the well-being of student-athletes and equipping them with the skills to succeed on the playing field, in the classroom and throughout life. In order to ensure that participants are students first and athletes second the NCAA has specific rules pertaining to athlete amateurism. The requirements prohibit contracts and tryouts with professional teams, salary for participating in athletics, prize money, and representation by an agent. (Amateurism) These rules not only limit the freedom of the player but also put the player at risk of being taken advantage of due to the lack of a players union and illegality of employing an agent. Other aspects of the NCAA’s rule book have been under scrutiny as well. Marc Edelman, Professor of Law at Baruch College, wrote in his treatise: Why the NCAA’s No-Pay Rules Violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act that courts are now beginning to overturn certain rules that are deemed anticompetitive. This development is important because according to the Sherman Act “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherw...
Abstract: Collegiate athletes participating in the two revenue sports (football, men's basketball) sacrifice their time, education, and risk physical harm for their respected programs. The players are controlled by a governing body (NCAA) that dictates when they can show up to work, and when they cannot show up for work. They are restricted from making any substantial financial gains outside of their sports arena. These athletes receive no compensation for their efforts, while others prosper from their abilities. The athletes participating in the two revenue sports of college athletics, football and men's basketball should be compensated for their time, dedication, and work put forth in their respected sports.
These professors argue that student athletes, under common law and NLRB’s (National Labor Relations Board) employee criterion, do in fact fall under the classification of an employee (Cooper). Under common law, four tests determine if someone is an employee or not. Three of these rules are as follows: “(1) the right of others to control a person's activities; (2) whether that person is compensated; and (3) if that person is economically dependent on that compensation.” According to these guidelines the employer-employee relationship is plainly synonymous to that of coaches and student-athletes. For one, coaches have a significant amount of control over their student-athletes’ activities, two, athletic scholarship money is considered compensation, and third, student-athletes are highly dependent on these scholarships for their food, living, and education. Even after realizing that a student-athlete falls under what the law defines as an employee, we can agree that any D1 student-athlete who works upwards of 40 hours a week to perform at a high level of competition for the universities benefit is essentially working a full time job on top of school work
An argument can be based on whether or not the NFL should be held liable when players know what a violent sport they participate in. The NFL is 10 Billion dollar a year business and the majority of their income are made through the exploitation of their players (Grove, J 760). The argument can be made that players should seek compensation for injuries because salaries for injured players are not guaranteed beyond the season in which the injury is sustained (Grove, J 760). It has been posed as whether or not the government should step in to help regulate owed compensation. One way the state or federal government can intervene and impose legislative act...
Sports transformed into a business where profit was the main concern. “As the pecuniary returns of the game increased, the value of the individual player was enhanced: the strength or weakness of one position made a difference in thousands in receipts, and this set the astute managerial mind at work” (Ward 315). This pertains to baseball, football, basketball and any other sport today. The more money a person could make off the game, the more significant the players became. The players were the ones making the money for the owners or the gamblers, and so many of these people no longer saw the person in the player, only the prowess in the player. The players soon began to be thought of as property and were often coerced into giving their permission to be traded to another club. “[T]he buying club bought not only the player’s services for the unexpired term of the contract, but the right to reserve or sell him again” ( Ward 315). Clubs claimed that this right to the player’s prowess was necessary to conserve the game and so many clubs abused this idea and ignored getting the player’s
Flanagan, R. J. (2005). Has Management Strangled U.S. Unions? Journal of Labor Research, 26(1), 33-63.
Sport is never far from controversy. Whether it be alcohol-fuelled misbehaviour, allegations of drug abuse or inappropriate public musings on a thorny political issue, the national press is filled to the brim with sports stars dragging the image of their employers — and the sports they represent — through the proverbial mud.
The laws and regulations surrounding Industrial Relations since the 1900’s have, at each reform, placed tighter constraints on the amount of power unions are able to exert. The reforms have also radically increased managerial prerogative, through an increased use of individual bargaining, contracts and restrictions imposed on unions (Bray and Waring, 2006). Bray and W...