As if meddling in steroid use in pro sports weren't enough, Congress is now butting its collective nose into the business of NFL player benefits.
"The NFL is a billion-dollar industry and yet the players who built the league are too often left to fend for themselves," Rep. Linda T. Schwartz (D-Calif.), who chairs the committee told the Post.
First of all, the federal government has no business whatsoever even expressing an opinion on how private businesses negotiate with their employee unions. This is true whether we're talking about the United Auto Workers or the NFL Players Association. It's their club, their rules.
Second, union members voluntarily agreed to the terms of their benefits packages. It's not the responsibility of current NFL players to pay the pensions of others who "built the league" simply because the league can basically print its own money these days.
And third, if former NFLers believe the league isn't honoring agreed-upon commitments, they can take their case to the courts. That's what they're for. But this isn't the case. As far as I know, the old-timers want better pensions simply because players today make exponentially more money than they did back in the day.
Buffalo News reporter Bob DiCesare has a good column today on the tiff between the old players and current union boss Gene Upshaw. I have long suspected, and DiCesare appears to agree, that the NFLPA has been screwing a lot of retirees when it comes to medical benefits. But for all the sympathy DiCesare has for the former players on this point, he can't endorse their demands for a better retirement check.
By the way, I don't know why I even bothered to include a link to the online article because the News will yank the piece in 10 days, but there it is. I'll excerpt a good bit for posterity:
I feel for the National Football League’s long-ago retirees. I really do. They’ve been wronged in major ways, particularly when it comes to disability payments, which are grudgingly dispersed only to those who meet a stringent set of requirements that ignore the harsh reality of their plights.
An hour-long conversation I had with former Buffalo Bills guard Conrad Dobler in April drove home the point on the medical front. The retirees from less lucrative days have a major gripe that needs to be addressed on the issue of disability qualifications. There are, according to a new release on nflplayers.com, 284 NFL alums collecting some form of medical disability. The numbers, given the vicious nature of the sport, fail to add up. The alums have a strong case.
But the assertion that those same retirees warrant pension hikes because pro football now wallows in riches is an attempt to overwrite a lack of foresight with the benefit of hindsight. The NFL Players Association has been in operation since 1954. Players since then had every opportunity to negotiate contract terms that would protect them over time, perhaps correlate their pension payments to any subsequent growth in NFL revenues. That they failed to do so is not all the fault of Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFLPA since 1983, although he’s the man at which a group of vocal retirees, which includes former Buffalo Bills Hall of Famer Joe DeLamielleure, is pointing the finger.
For more on this story, check out BfloBlog. They covered it here and will undoubtedly hit it again as necessary.
And hey, Congress, go ban smoking or trans fats or babysitting or something, you worthless...
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