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Capitals/NHL

NHL lockout: Owners shouldn’t underestimate the Fehr factor

By Thomas Boswell,November 21, 2012

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That labor peace has lasted 17 years with no end in sight. The idea that Fehr, 64, was a radical or didn’t want owners to get filthy rich (unless players did, too) or wouldn’t take a fair deal if one were offered — that all died in the last century. Ironically, the stain on Fehr’s baseball reputation is that he was so focused on business prosperity, which would flow to players and agents, that the union was cynically resistant to a vast workplace health issue, opposing the testing of union members for performance enhancing drugs.

Financially, baseball has never been healthier. It’s gushing cash. The best thing that’s happened to baseball in modern times, aside from wangling free parks at mostly public expense, was MLB’s realization that a strong union, fair labor policy, fiercely negotiated, and booming business were compatible. The price baseball paid to learn that lesson was astronomical.

Now, it’s hockey’s turn. The most troubling development to me is that hockey’s leaders now sound like MLB owners a generation ago. It’s like a time warp. Two weeks ago, stories appeared intimating that players weren’t getting a straight story from Fehr, that he had his own agenda and owners’ concepts were not getting to the membership in a pure form. That is the one tactic that always backfired when baseball owners used it. It did again.

Fehr pointed out that “19 players” were at the negotiating table when the proposal, that he supposedly misrepresented, was discussed. Within days an NHL player had called Bettman a “cancer,” another called him “an idiot.”

Hiring Don Fehr, the Sun Tzu of jock labor, to face NHL owners in a lockout is like getting the Godfather to help you fix a parking ticket.

NHL leaders need to realize, in a fraction the time it took baseball, that if you go to the mat with a Fehr union, everybody suffers, but you might get it worse. If you work with them, then one day you wake up and Albert Pujols has a $275 million contract and the Dodgers sell for $2 billion.

Your choice.

For previous Thomas Boswell columns, visit washingtonpost.com/boswell.

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