Did the NFLPA collude with owners and discuss labor issues without the knowledge of union leadership? That’s the nut of Monday’s New York Times story:
Untitled Update
The National Football League Players Association is under federal investigation to determine whether some of its leaders tried to collude with league officials by holding secret meetings with them to discuss labor issues without the knowledge of top union leadership.
The investigation, being conducted by the Department of Labor, was revealed as part of a lawsuit filed against the union by a union employee, Mary Moran, and was first reported by Sports Business Journal. According to court documents filed in District of Columbia Superior Court on Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press, Moran provided investigators evidence that the former union president Troy Vincent and other union members met with N.F.L. commissioner Roger Goodell and the Houston Texans’ owner, Robert McNair, to provide the league access to confidential union information.
Moran also said in the documents that the union executive committee member Mark Bruener and the Texans player representative Kris Brown attended the meetings, which she claimed were not authorized by or reported to the union.
The NFLPA has long been accused of being the NFL’s lapdog; former leader Gene Upshaw was a noted target for such attacks. (Probably rightly so, in plenty of cases.) But this, obviously, is something wholly different. More as it develops.
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