While the National Football League lockout of its referees is making headlines for
egregious, game-changing bad calls, the National Hockey League may be headed toward having no 2012-2013 season at all, thanks to its owners having locked out their players. That lockout is in day 10, and there's
no bargaining going on right now. Some players say they see it
going on for a year or even more.
Sarah Jaffe explains that the NHL as a whole is profitable, and owners who aren't making enough money have other owners to blame—they're just finding the players an easier target:
Mirtle notes that the bottom 10 teams in the league (in such notorious hockey cities as Phoenix) aren't making enough money to cover expenses, while the rich teams have little interest in sharing revenue the way, say, the NFL or Major League Baseball do.
“It’s an owner versus owner problem more than it is an owner versus player one,” Mirtle writes, but as a player agent tells him, “Owners would rather try to pound on players than pound on each other.”
For some owners greed is a simple answer, or an unwillingness to pick on people their own size leading them to go after their employees. But for some, the lockout fits in a hardline ideology:
Take Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider. He's the chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, which is partially owned by Comcast—yes, the media conglomerate that pays the NHL's TV contract. Snider was one of the founders of the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985; after a split within the “movement,” he became a supporter of the Atlas Society, the same place where Paul Ryan gave his speech calling for the end of Medicare. He was the executive producer of the Atlas Shrugged film and has publicly stated that “Capitalists build up business so that they can give weaker members of society jobs.”
Note that "weaker members of society" here means less-wealthy ones; I'm pretty sure professional hockey players are physically stronger than this guy.
A fair day's wage