When it comes to the potential for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the NFL Players Association has considerable leverage. It comes in the form of time.
The current CBA covers the next five seasons. The NFLPA can’t be forced to do anything until the existing agreement expires.
Coupled with the fact that the NFL would like to get a new deal in place sooner rather than later, the message is clear: If you want to do something now, you have to make it worth our while.
Appearing on Thursday’s edition of The Rich Eisen Show, NFLPA executive director JC Tretter addressed the question of whether a new CBA could be negotiated within the next year.
“I would say extremely unlikely,” Tretter said. “I became president during COVID, which I think taught me to really view things in foreseeable chunks of time. As you move too far forward, there’s too many variables to deal with. I was elected in March, started April 1st. The first part of my job is making sure I understand what our members want, because this is a membership-ran institution.
“I will not be able to do that until throughout this season as I go and visit each of these 32 teams. So there is nothing that could be done until I talk to my guys and make sure I understand what they want and what they’re looking for. And then that’s also understanding, can I get everybody on the same page in that amount of time? Which is probably a difficult ask as well.
“So I think my first step is getting out and talking to all 2,500 members and making sure I understand what they care about, and then getting our guys to understand what we should be fighting for. And that’s gonna come from their feedback. There’s gonna be a lot of work that goes on by me and the staff and then bringing that to the executive committee and bringing that to the board [of player representatives] and making sure they have a say, making sure they understand the trade-offs and what the discussions would be.
“So there’s a ton of work to be done before a conversation could even start happening, let alone going through an entire collective bargaining process. Those aren’t one-month discussions. This is a 500-plus-page document of clause after clause after clause that would need to be negotiated. That is a very heavy lift on that timeline to get anything done.”
He’s right about all of that. Even if the league would make the union a great offer right now, it becomes very difficult (if not impossible) to properly build the consensus needed with the executive committee, the board of player representatives, and ultimately the rank and file.
“We have an agreement for the next five years, so I don’t even think we’re thinking of, ‘Well, how fast could we get this done?’ It’s, ‘Do we want to even have a conversation if that’s what’s going to be slid across the table to us?’ And right now we have a deal, I think we’re happy with and we’re OK with and things are operating well under and what’s the motivation to speed up a process? And I don’t think we’re looking to do that.”
The overriding question of whether a work stoppage may happen is premature, to say the least.
“I think we’re still so far away from that,” Tretter said. “And it’s weird how quickly these conversations have started, and it’s because the league is interested in doing something. They’ve been clear about that. But we are still five years away from this time. That is so much time. That is over a life cycle of a player, on average. It’s longer than the average career length. So we’re still so far away from a work stoppage, a strike, a lockout that, though you’re always planning for those scenarios, that’s not just something that we’re really like diving into right now, just because we are so far into a deal with so much more runway to go before that would ever happen that I don’t think anybody should be concerned, because we have five more years of football guaranteed. There is a very long time before something would happen.”
And so the union will continue to wait. At some point, however, an opportunity to get an even better deal could be lost. The challenge becomes picking the right time to accept the terms the NFL would impose a lockout to get, and to secure extra benefits by agreeing to do it early.
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