Labour Union wants League to Honour Contracts -NHL Lockout Update
While talks over a new collective bargaining agreement continue between the Players’ Association and National Hockey League (NHL), the labour union is beginning to focus on another aspect and that is team owners honour their contracts.
The first and foremost thing that comes to the mind of the players is that team owners and management did not have a problem signing them on to long-term or short-term deals prior to knowing that the lockout would come into effect on September 15, 2012,
but now have an issue in honouring them.
Both stakeholders met for the second time this week on Thursday and after putting three offers on the table, which they termed to be ‘great’, players are now looking towards having their contracts honoured despite their being a lockout or not.
All three offers were rejected in the meeting, which lasted a little over an hour, certainly surprising the players as they had prepared for it for days in advance. The league came out with their 50-50 offer on Tuesday and did not consider any one of the
labour union’s offers to be even close to it.
“As players we know we tabled a great deal today,” Toews said. “Our biggest concern is obviously that our contracts continue to be honoured as we progressively make our way to a 50-50 split between the league and the players.”
It sound pretty logical that the players are only demanding what they agreed to prior the lockout coming into effect, but experts term it to be not as easy as it sounds. There are many complications involved in player compensation during a lockout persisting
in the NHL, as clauses clearly term no pay or use of team facilities whenever a deadlock is in play.
The league, according to their own way of thinking, is regarding the dishonouring of contracts as part of the process to get a new labour deal into play and will start compensating as soon as a collective bargaining agreement is announced. There is hesitation
from both sides to sit and discuss these terms face-to-face but seeing how the lockout continues to get longer and longer, there is no telling what the future holds.
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