Don’t focus so much on what sides say they are going to do. Strike looming. Lockout possible.
Negotiating is all about posturing and leverage. That much was clear after my first week of negotiations class in law school. So the daily focus on what a player, player representative, or the league (or owners) says doesn’t really provide much information worthy of analysis. It does allow for endless unsubstantiated speculation about what might happen. It’s a perfect situation for a 24/7 news cycle, but we don’t learn much from the speculation.
In labor negotiations, other than revelations about what issues are holding up the process, there are only two real newsworthy moments if you are interested in signals, which everyone seems to be since there’s rarely ever any real information to digest. The first is when one of the sides starts to talk about a strike or lockout. That signifies that there are really issues that the two sides are butting heads over. One of the sides feels that it’s in their interest to raise the level of rhetoric.
The second, and last, newsworthy moment is when a strike actually happens. Everything else is posturing and leveraging, which is simply an attempt to sway public opinion. Posturing and leveraging is not news. If it was, each passing day would provide us with something newsworthy to mull over. Now Lindsay Lohan’s running soap opera with ex-girlfriend Samantha Ronson, that’s news.
