NFL PLAYERS STRIKE: DAY 18 : 6-Year Contract, Pension Proposal Snag Talks

The National Football League negotiations hit new snags Friday over the owners’ demand for a six-year contract and a pension proposal that the union finds as unsatisfactory as the owners do free agency.

Nonetheless, bargaining aimed at ending the 18-day strike continued through the day and into the night with time out for meals.

The charge that management was stalling was made by Doug Allen, the union’s assistant executive director. It came immediately after NFL Council spokesman John Jones had confirmed that the games would be played for the second weekend with non-union players and regulars who had crossed the picket line.

Jones said, nonetheless, that negotiations would continue and that Jack Donlan, management’s chief negotiator “feels it’s proceeding just about as he had expected.”

But he added: “I have no indication of any time frame on how long this process will take.”

Allen said he thought the two sides had narrowed the gap on several important issues, including guaranteed contracts, severance pay and protection for player representatives, but he called a complicated impasse over pensions one of the major problems.

“We believe their position is a factor designed to derail the process,” he said. “No deal is going to be held up by our position on free agency. But nothing is falling into place on pensions.”

Allen also accused management of introducing a negative element by insisting on a six-year contract in place of the three-year contract that had already been agreed upon in principle. Normally, the labor agreement parallels the league’s television contract, which this time is for three years.

“We’re a little concerned about a pattern that seems to be developing, a pace slowed down so that some time tomorrow management will consider walking away from the table,” Allen said.

“We hope that’s not the case. An indication of that is the insistence on which they have pushed this idea of this six-year agreement. That is a ludicrous suggestion at this point in the negotiations, given the progress that has been made in many, many other areas.”

Jones said, however, that the three-year agreement was contingent on no strike. Once the strike started, he said, many owners demanded that the Management Council negotiate a longer contract in “an attempt to get labor peace for a longer period than 2 1/2 years.”

Jones also said the management proposal contains a clause to reopen economic items at the end of three years, to coincide with the television contract. Under that proposal, Jones said, differences would be submitted to arbitration with the contract to remain in effect.

Allen, in fact, seemed to back away a bit from the six-year contract in a second briefing in which he singled out pensions as one of the major impediments to an agreement.

The owners contribute $12.5 million a year to the player pension fund, and the union is asking $25 million. Management says it is willing to improve the benefits from $150 a month for each year played to $200 a month.

However, the main disagreement is over a management proposal that the owners keep excess interest earned on pension fund investments, which Allen claimed could cut the contributions of the owners to nothing.