Sports

NFLPA Seeks To Dismiss Case Concerning Changes To Retiree Benefits

The union has no duty or responsibility to maintain any specific level of former player benefits and is prohibited from administering benefit plans.

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The National Football League Players Association has responded to a putative class action complaint filed by retired NFL players Aveion Cason and Donald Majkowski that attacks the union, the league, the retirement plan board, and the disability and neurocognitive benefit plan board based on the process of agreeing to a new 10-year collective bargaining agreement as well as the effects of the agreement on the benefits that former players will receive under its provisions. The 43-page memorandum of law in support of the filed motion to dismiss is based on lack of standing and failure to state a claim.

Initially, the union addresses the fact that the plaintiffs are retired NFL players and that, under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the union has no duty or responsibility to maintain any specific level of former player benefits and is prohibited from administering benefit plans. Furthermore, it has no duty to represent the interests of former NFL players in collective bargaining negotiations.

Setting that initial issue aside, the NFLPA argues that the plaintiffs failed to plead any facts to support a claim that a change to the Social Security disability offset would apply to them and that the second benefit change — the whole-person evaluation — will not take effect until 2024 and is thus speculative and not imminent. Additionally, the union says that changes to these benefits were necessary concessions.

“Although legally irrelevant, it bears mention that the NFLPA did not want the Social Security disability offset and whole-person evaluation process, but these were necessary concessions to obtain increases in other benefits as part of the give-and-take of collective bargaining,” states the memorandum in support of the NFLPA’s motion to dismiss. “This is precisely what the NLRA empowers a union to do, and pursuant to the LMRA, courts are prohibited from interfering in this bargaining process.”

The NFLPA also addresses the players’ claim that the union failed to disclose all material facts about the new collective bargaining agreement’s impact on retirement benefits and says the claim is far too speculative to proceed in litigation.

“Their theory — that if the NFLPA had disclosed all such pertinent information, then the retired players might have mobilized to lobby active players to vote against the CBA, and then the active players might have changed their votes in sufficient numbers to change the CBA outcome, and this might have led to the negotiation of a different CBA with the NFL that might have provided Plaintiffs greater benefit — is far too remote and speculative to confer standing,” the memorandum states.

The alleged failure to disclose pertinent information was a hot subject in March when former NFL defensive back Eric Reid tweeted about his lawyers sending a letter to the NFLPA demanding answers as to why language in the collective bargaining agreement was purportedly altered after a vote was submitted. He demanded a new vote and an investigation into the matter. Newly elected NFLPA president J.C. Tretter responded by indicating that the union would re-examine changes to the Total and Permanent Disability benefit, which could cause roughly 400 former players to see their Social Security disability benefits lowered as of January.

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The plaintiffs have also claimed that the union breached the collective bargaining agreement, but the union points out that the underlying claim is a complaint about the changes that the new agreement creates relative to the old agreement and that there has not and could not have been an actual breach of the new provisions at this time.

Ultimately, the former players suing the NFLPA are likely to have their case against the union dismissed based primarily on the union’s argument that former players have no cognizable legal interest in the collective bargaining ratification process of a union that only represents current NFL players. While Reid wants answers, it would likely need to be current players who push the union for information surrounding the ratification process, not those who are no longer part of the bargaining unit.

Darren Heitner is the founder of Heitner Legal. He is the author of How to Play the Game: What Every Sports Attorney Needs to Know, published by the American Bar Association, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. You can reach him by email at heitner@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter at @DarrenHeitner.

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