WASHINGTON -- Management's removal of the salary cap could hasten the end of the 5 1/2 -month baseball strike, but the premature intervention of the National Labor Relations Board didn't do anything to clarify a very complicated situation.
The players cast it as a one-sided victory. Incredibly, the owners tried to do the same. Which only proves that any attempt to predict the outcome of the dispute may be foolhardy.
The NLRB, undoubtedly at the behest of the White House,
moved quickly on the competing bad-faith bargaining charges that were brought by the players and owners after the salary cap was implemented in late December. If it looked like a clear rebuke of management's hard-line bargaining stance, it was, but an NLRB spokesman said Friday night that general counsel Fred Feinstein accelerated the complaint process because he and the administration felt that the prospect of NLRB action was becoming an obstacle to the collective bargaining process.
If that is true, then the action also could work in favor of the owners, because it left Major League Baseball Players Association director Donald Fehr without a clear fallback position as the negotiations headed into a pressure-packed weekend. This might be the best time to make a deal, especially if the Clinton administration is serious about attempting to impose a settlement if nothing is accomplished by tomorrow.
Of course, there are plenty of other possibilities. The White House may have pressured the NLRB to take action in an attempt to create a fallback position for the president, who has invested a lot of prestige in his attempt to push both sides into a quick settlement. The board succeeded in convincing the owners to lift the implementation, which could be construed as the kind of progress that would make Congressional intervention unnecessary.
There has been growing concern that Congress might not join the president in his attempt to force an end to the dispute, which would leave him with only the "bully pulpit" of the presidency to convince the players and owners to compromise in time to start the 1995 season. No one discounts the influence of the office, but without Congress, the pressure from the White House is largely a matter of public relations. So far, neither side has let negative public opinion alter the course of the negotiations.
The president still could win big, but only if both sides recognize that this may be the optimum time to compromise. The owners made some minor strides with the proposal they presented on Wednesday. The players submitted a counterproposal yesterday, but it was met with little enthusiasm by the owners.
The tenor of this latest set of negotiations has been decidedly more upbeat than any previous bargaining summit, but both sides continue to cling to their basic bargaining positions. Ownership negotiator Chuck O'Connor said Friday that management still would seek a new economic system that contains a strong cost control mechanism. The players immediately pushed the owners to negotiate new deadlines for salary arbitration and free agency, obviously hoping to codify the old system for at least the 1995 season.
If they succeed, there would be no reason to continue to strike. Fehr could send the players back to work and leave it up to the owners whether to maintain the status quo for one season or lock the players out of spring training. Ownership negotiating chief John Harrington, speculating on such a possibility in December, said that the players would have to sign a no-strike pledge before they would be allowed to return under the old system.
What's going to happen? That will depend on whether the union feels any real pressure to negotiate a settlement before Opening Day. The NLRB action puts them in a position to try and force the owners to play the '95 season under the old system, but they run the risk of setting themselves up for a new round of NLRB charges and perhaps a less favorable outcome.
The board acted in the union's favor and left no doubt that it would have ruled that ownership's impasse declaration was illegal, but that doesn't mean that it would necessarily rule against the owners if the owners declared impasse again at a later date. That might depend on the outcome of the current negotiations, which are being monitored with great interest by Labor Secretary Robert Reich. If the union stonewalls to gain a season under the old rules, it could waste the added leverage that it gained on Friday and lose the war.
Despite apparent optimism that the labor dispute has moved into the endgame stage, both the players and owners continue to prepare for the worst. The owners have not yet abandoned their replacement strategy, though they have been pressured by the White House to keep strikebreakers off the field.
Meanwhile, a couple of renegade owners had to be smiling on Friday. Orioles owner Peter Angelos had argued passionately against the implementation in December, and New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon brought an attorney to that same meeting to explain to the owners why the salary cap would not pass muster with the NLRB.