Don Fehr, who led the MLBPA as executive director from 1985 through 2009 before becoming NHLPA executive director in 2010, was the first recipient of the Michael Weiner Sports Lawyers Association Award of Excellence.
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Don Fehr, speaking earlier this year, hired Weiner while at the MLBPA.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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The SLA renamed the award last year in honor of Weiner, the former MLBPA executive director who died of brain cancer in 2013 at age 51. Fehr hired Weiner as a young lawyer, and the naming of the prestigious award in his honor “gives me an enormous amount of satisfaction,” Fehr said in his acceptance speech.
Unions almost never get into the news unless there is bad news, Fehr said. As for working as a union attorney, “There are a lot easier ways to make a lot more money,” he said.
Fehr has long been regarded as one of the most powerful union leaders in North America, and the MLBPA was regarded as the most powerful sports union under his leadership, but he often has been disliked for his willingness to fight owners in ways that have shut down the sport. Fehr used his speech to offer a tutorial on labor law and sports unions.
“We have an adversarial system by law,” he said. “If you don’t reach a deal … then the law says resort to economic coercion.”
In agreeing to a deal, the question is not whether the deal is a good deal or a fair deal, Fehr said. “The question is: Is the deal on the table sufficiently good enough so that a strike is not a better alternative? That’s it. That’s the question.”
Sports unions have two distinct disadvantages over other unions representing workers, Fehr said.
“The first one is that the four sports leagues are cartels,” he said. That means the league’s consumers can’t really find an alternative that puts economic pressure on the league.
Secondly, the turnover of the workforce in sports leagues is so rapid that a union leader cannot make a mistake, Fehr said. As an example, he noted that if he were the executive director of a teachers union and was negotiating a four-year collective-bargaining agreement that caused problems for the teachers, he could fix the problems for those same people in the next deal.
“You can’t do that in sports,” he said. “Half of them are gone. Most players have one opportunity for a contract.”
Fehr ended his speech by thanking all the MLB players who employed him from 1977 to 2009 and all the NHL players who have employed him since 2010.
“Working for these athletes, through their unions, is a high honor and a privilege,” he said, “and anyone who has ever had the opportunity to do that, I think, believes that to his core.”
