The Referees Are Fighting for All of Us

September 26, 2012

This column by AFSCME President Lee Saunders is cross-posted from Firedoglake.

Mike Pereira knows how to make a call. He’s the former head of officiating at the National Football League, who now provides analysis for Fox TV. Here’s what he told the New York Times about the on-going lockout of experienced unionized referees by the National Football League: “Week one went smooth. Week two was a disaster. Week three is the Titanic.”

And that was before Monday night, when millions of football fans saw the Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers, solely because of poor officiating by the temporary referees put on the playing field by the NFL. By Tuesday morning, even Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, no friends of unions, echoed his call. They want the professionals back.

Who is to blame for this mess? Why are amateur referees officiating at games?

The owners of the NFL are responsible. Their trained professional referees are not on strike. They are ready to do their jobs. But they’ve been “locked out” by the owners, told that they are not needed for games to be judged fairly.

And why are the owners locking out the professional referees?

That’s simple too. The referees want what they bargained for in contract negotiations going back to the 1970s, primarily the right to a pension when they retire. Now, the billionaires who own the football teams want to take those pensions away. It is that simple.

Every American should be interested in this battle, whether they care about football or care about unions, because what is happening on the football field has been occurring to workers all across the country for years. Now, however, we’re seeing it played out on television.

The NFL’s referees are the lowest paid officials in all of professional sports, and as we’ve seen, they are important to the game. The NFL is not poor. The teams bring in more than $9 billion a year. But the 18 billionaires and 12 millionaires who own the NFL teams don’t want to provide pensions and benefits that would cost them less than $3.3 million a year.

This greed of the NFL owners is more important to them than the reputation of the game or the safety of the players. That was made clear in a letter sent earlier this week to the owners by the players union. “Your decision to lock out officials with more than 1,500 years of collective NFL experience has led to a deterioration of order, safety and integrity,” the letter said.

But the owners really don’t care about the integrity of the game. They only care about money. It’s as simple as that. And if it means destroying the retirement security of 120 officials, they could care less. Workers across the country know what that is like.

For a generation now, Wall Street and corporate CEOs have engaged in a wholesale theft of the pensions of working Americans. In her remarkable book “Retirement Heist,” Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen E. Schultz outlined how the elimination of pensions as a part of retirement security wasn’t an economic necessity – it was a choice made by CEOs to line their pockets at the expense of their middle-class employees. Companies large and small abandoned their responsibility for pensions and forced workers into risky 401 (k) accounts that place their retirement savings into Wall Street’s pocket.

As more workers lost their pensions, the wealthy targeted those who still possessed them. “Look at that guy with a pension,” they’d say. “You don’t have one, why should he have one?” That divide and conquer mentality was on display this week when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell noted that he doesn’t have a pension. Well, he makes $10 million a year. That’s more than triple the cost of the pensions the referees are fighting to keep.

What the referees are fighting for is a benefit that has been stolen from millions of American workers. Let’s hope the referees keep their pensions. And let’s get to work creating real security for the many millions of American workers who had their retirement destroyed by the greed of Wall Street and this nation’s corrupt CEOs.