Seven Oaks Magazine.

Saturday marked the first important day of a new National Hockey League (NHL) season. With the NHL entry draft, which took place this year in Raleigh, North Carolina, professional hockey marks the beginning of the team building process, in which staff spend a summer considering various combinations of players to include on the team in the fall. This year, however, as any Canadian news-watcher knows, may be a year without an NHL season. The NHL, the owners of its member organizations and the players they employ are approaching an industrial action, either a lockout or a strike, after a spring and summer of what many believe will be fruitless negotiations. The NHL and the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) are engaged in the most public round of industrial negotiations in the country right now, perhaps the most public round in Canada’s history. Knowledge of the struggle has reached every nook and cranny of the Canadian popular consciousness, thereby shading public opinion of future bargaining processes with the bizarre details of this one.

The primary reason for the high profile of this collective bargaining event is the work of the NHL and NHLPA. They have carried out the first stage of their battle on the front page of newspapers, or in conversations with Canada’s hockey don Ron MacLean during the All-star game and the playoffs. More recently, the NHL has moved the pseudo-negotiations to the web, with the launch near the end of the season of www.nhlcbanews.com, a website dedicated to informing fans of every aspect of the negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement for the NHL.

The website, and the media coverage regarding the entire process, focuses on the perceived threat of the upcoming lockout to North America’s hockey addiction (okay, Canada’s hockey addiction). But there is a very real threat to Canada’s perception of union-company negotiations contained within this much publicized boondoggle as well. The profile of a bargaining event like this is unprecedented, and it is one of the few places that the primary function of a union – to negotiate a better contract for its members – is being discussed in a legible way. While generally popular media reduces unions to strike machines with a political agenda comparable to a lobby group, the CBA process involving the NHL offers a depiction of a union performing its most common, and maybe most important function – negotiating a collective agreement.

The danger of this public round of negotiating, however, is what is appears to say about union negotiations in general. For the majority of Canada’s workers, the negotiation process is unfamiliar. And this particular example is likely to set back popular understandings of negotiation considerably.

For example, the NHLPA hardly qualifies as a union. As its name suggests, it is more like a professional association, comparable to doctors or lawyers. This may seem like a small difference, but it’s huge. Hockey players are skilled professionals, the best of whom can move from employer to employer negotiating a better contract. For the average worker, this sort of versatility is not possible, and it means that they have little personal power in relation to their employers. For hockey players, they can negotiate from a position of some power – their skills are in demand. It’s only through collectivity that the average worker can assume a similar position of power.

Usually, unions are the representatives of this collectivity. The NHLPA, however, represents individuals prepared to negotiate their own pay contracts, benefits and working conditions. This means that what the NHLPA is actually negotiating is the conditions of a market, and they want to make it as free as possible. This makes the NHLPA virtually the opposite of a traditional union, which works to protect their members from the vagaries of a free market.

Thus, those who are watching the negotiations are witnessing the spectacle of the NHLPA denying its responsibility for the wages in the NHL. While most unions dedicate considerable energy to raising the wages of their members, the NHLPA insists that it is the owners’ fault that wages are so high (they could choose not to pay so much) and argue against a system that would ensure more equality in the league’s wage scale. Meanwhile, the NHL, a business run by a group of people who have made their billions by taking advantage of a so-called free market, are hastily demanding closing the market. They want to put restrictions on the freedom of players to choose their employer (through restricting free agency) and also want to cap the wage levels in the league. This means that it is the employers who want to structure wages, and set a proscribed range, while it is the union that wants to free wages of any constraints and allow the market to dictate. This sort of topsy-turvy negotiation does the public appearance of unions no good.

Besides the union’s unusual membership, and therefore its conservative negotiating agenda, it has also totally failed to account for the importance of collectivity in their membership. While most unions function to protect the rights of the workers as a collective, in opposition to the individual employers, in this case the employers are a collective, identified publicly by their overarching association. The union is a collection of stars, who individually weigh in on a day-to-day basis regarding negotiation issues and their future as professional athletes. Several stars have spoken about playing in other leagues, or speculated on leaving the continent. The result is that the union disappears into a small collection of individuals, whose issues it is hard for working people to identify with.

Meanwhile, the NHL becomes a faceless provider of entertainment. The owners who appear in this scenario to be aggrieved parties are actually among the wealthiest people in the world, with fortunes that far outstrip even the enormous wages the athletes are making. The NHL owners hide behind the league, and have done a very effective job of displaying themselves as victims. Tools like the “Levitt Report,” a fiscal accounting of the NHL’s fortunes available on the web at the CBA site, have assured owners public support. The report asserts that the league lost $273 million last year, a number that the NHLPA hotly denies. The union insists that the NHL’s definition of income is too narrow, it shows no consideration of the fortunes the owners of teams are making on associated, but not directly linked, products. One example is the sale of athletic equipment, which no hockey teams necessarily receive any money for. However, the athletes and their endorsements clearly create value, and the owners themselves are smart enough to be involved with the companies that cash in on this value. The NHLPA counts this as revenue generated by players – the NHL does not. Because the owners have been so successful in hiding themselves as a collective, the media has largely covered the Levitt report as accurate as well. There is no attention to their individual income as created by the NHL. Therefore, the negotiations appear to be going on between overpaid stars and their underfunded league, with which the majority of media outlets, and likely fans, identify.

Ultimately this is the most unfortunate aspect of the publicity surrounding the approaching lockout. Fans of hockey are left with little to cheer for, or idenitfy with. As Jerry Seinfeld noted, identifying with teams in modern sports is largely cheering for a jersey, but cheer we nonetheless do. In these negotiations, it is largely the owners that most people are identifying with, something that can only hurt popular support of unions in general. That is, until the NHLPA releases its line of vintage jerseys.