What If Some NFL Players Strike?

There are two terms for this type of strike: wildcat (unauthorized by the union) and quickie (intentionally short duration, technically called a partial and intermittent strike). 

But here’s the bottom line: The National Labor Relations Act would not protect either type of strike.

That means striking players could be fired and not have a legal remedy.

But in the NFL, it’s not that simple. A team, not the league, employs a player. 

If a high-quality player is cut, the team often owes a guarantee. Striking for racial justice would not trigger a morals clause.

Apart from that, a cut player can be signed by other teams—and that includes the firing team’s main rivals. The player would be signed on the cheap, meaning the acquiring team would probably have space under the salary cap.

Okay, you say—teams would be really mad at players and boycott all the strikers. 

Team boycotts of players are subject to extremely strong limits under “anti-collusion” language in the collective bargaining agreement.

Twenty years ago, when free agent baseball players were boycotted by teams in reprisal for the 1994 strike, an arbitrator ordered $270 million in damages. The teams paid up and ended the boycott.

Where have we seen “quickie” strikes? The airline industry, for one. Flight attendants would spontaneously show up at a gate, start to picket, and flights would be canceled (called CHAOS strikes). The strikers were often women in their 50s who were fully vested and age-service credit qualified in pension plans. They knew they would be fired—and they knew their pensions would not be divested. To the surprise of some (including me), they won their case under the Railway Labor Act.

But the players work under a different labor law, the National Labor Relations Act. Quickie strikes are not protected under that law.

I wrote about this contradictory treatment in “Creating Order Out of CHAOS and Other Partial and Intermittent Strikes,” in Northwestern University Law Review. The research received very few citations. But maybe that article will be relevant now.