In recent months, most of the public attention on the union question has been devoted to the status of collective bargaining rights for public unions in such bellwether states as Wisconsin and Ohio. In those cases, the key issue is whether the outsized structure of pension and benefit programs can be pared back without a fundamental restructuring of the negotiating system that generated them in the first place.

At the same time, and at the opposite end of the financial spectrum, a second labor dispute is now in motion that could result in the cancellation of the National Football League’s 2011-2012 season because of a breakdown in the renegotiation of the players’ labor contracts. The looming disintegration of collective bargaining with public unions is not relevant to this particular debate, for there is surely enough to go around in one of the world’s most lucrative sports. The question here, rather, has to do with the division of the spoils between management and players in a sport that has proved spectacularly popular in recent years. That issue in turn arises because of the peculiar structure of these negotiations, which pits management en masse against the labor unions in what appears to be yet another illustration of the fragility of collective bargaining arrangements in which each side has no option but to deal with its opponents.

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