Larry Foote isn’t the only person who finds the practice of reducing non-player salaries during the lockout to be unsavory. Plenty of folks have been scratching their heads when it comes to the decision by annually successful businesses to cower behind the lockout as the basis for cutting costs.
As pointed out in today’s one-liners, one economist thinks that the teams are doing it for show.
University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson tells ESPN.com’s Mike Sando that, apart from the short-term connection between monthly revenue and monthly payroll, the teams want us to think they’re hurting right now.
"[P]olitically, psychologically or from a public-relations basis, it shows some suffering on the part of one side,” Sanderson said.
If that’s the case, then the league thinks we’re all stupid. It’s one thing to use a recession as a pretext for trimming some fat and/or stuffing some pockets. It’s quite another to create a phony financial crisis via a quest for a larger piece of the labor pie and then to use that manufactured red ink as the trigger for taking money away from non-player employees.
At the risk of reprising our recent rant regarding the practice of allowing the lockout to impact the folks caught in the crossfire, this practice is shameful.
And while Packers CEO Mark Murphy has drawn praise for declaring that his publicly-owned -- and thus publicly-accountable -- franchise won’t reduce pay until revenues are reduced, some of the money potentially saved by teams in 2010 via the absence of a salary cap and salary floor easily could have been set aside for the self-induced hard times arising from the lockout.
Meticulous planning occurred in advance of the lockout. For plenty of teams, the staff apparently weren’t regarded as sufficiently important to be included in that meticulous planning.
