From Daily Kos football referee strike is about: NFL wants to freeze referee pensions

The labor wars come into an area where Americans won't tolerate it, sports, where they insist on paying money they can hardly afford to watch millionaires bash each other's heads in as their roads remained unpatched, their bridges fall down, and their schools fall apart.

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell has made it explicit: The lockout of NFL officials is part of the race to the bottom. The referees' pensions are one of the key points of contention between the NFL Referees Association and the league's owners, and, talking to Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson, Goodelldidn't try to pretend that the NFL couldn't afford to continue pensions for its small pool of officials. He just said since most workers these days don't have pensions, why should NFL referees?

"From the owners' standpoint, right now they're funding a pension program that is a defined benefit program," said Goodell, who was in Washington on Wednesday attending a luncheon hosted by Politico's Playbook. "About ten percent of the country has that. Yours truly doesn't have that. It's something that doesn’t really exist anymore and that I think is going away steadily."

"What we agreed to do and offer as ownership," he added, "is that they would have a defined contribution plan, in the form of 401(k), so they'll still have a pension plan but the risk, like [for] most of us, would be on individuals."

Fuller story: http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/09/daily-kos-nfl-wants-to-freeze-referee.html


Originally published here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/13/1131437/-NFL-wants-to-freeze-referee-pensions-not-because-it-can-t-afford-them-but-because-it-thinks-it-can