Collective Bargaining Agreement

Contract Negotiations Concerning the 1999 NBA Lockout

Contract Negotiations Concerning the 1999 NBA Lockout

Introduction

NBA lockout in 1998/1999's was the third strike in the history of the NBA. It lasted for almost 204 days from July 1, 1998 to January 20, 1999, it was one of the major reasons for the decline of the season to 50 games for each team. The greatest basketball league in the world was trapped in a tense hours during that time.

The lockout started three months later to the actual time which coasted the teams thousands of dollars and most importantly some of the main games were not played due to the lockout like for e.g. the all-start and Christmas Games. The main issue related to the lockout was the wages. The players were asking for 15 million per year but the owner wanted to limit the wages of the players to 12.5 million per year. Both the parties had arguments over the issue that led the players to go for lockout. It is one of the most popular lockouts of the history. The two sides were fighting over several issues but the dispute is primarily about how much money the owners will devote to player salaries.

The Origin

It all started with those team owners who had decided to revise the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in March 1998 to reform the system and determine the salary cap limiting the maximum salary of basketball itself. In turn, the players union (NBPA), was not endorsing the plans of owners which required increasing the minimum salary players. These differences led to the most prolonged lockout in the history of the overseas leagues. In the history of the NBA It was noted that to a large-scale lock-out there were only two people who knew the negotiation process, which lead to such critical events. In 1995, the parties took three months to find a compromising agreement. There were also many problems in 1996, but their differences were cured within a few hours (Wise, 1998). One of the major issues that the lockout stemmed from was how to distribute the millions of dollars of revenue earned by the league. NBA owners wanted to limit the amount players who were paid, in order to increase the value of their franchises. Furthermore, owners wanted to base the salary amount a player could receive on how many years he had played.

League players, however, wanted to base salary amounts on the health and ability of the individual athlete. With several NBA teams housed in medium-sized cities such as Vancouver, Sacramento, and Cleveland, the loss of NBA activity was detrimental to small business owners in those cities. According to the NBA 14 of 29 clubs recorded losses, but the NBPA had some information that indicates only four teams who could not make a profit. March 23 league owners voted for the revision of the collective agreement by a margin of 27:2. Negotiations with the Union players started in April and for three months by nine sat ...