IHL Labor dispute which threatened league games narrowly averted

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah -- The start of the International Hockey League's regular season was on thin ice for a time Friday as players refused to participate in morning practices because of a dispute over medical insurance.

But a last-minute compromise between the league and player representatives averted cancellation of Friday night's five openers.

Before the agreement, angry players refused to skate Friday in at least half of the 16 IHL cities. They were upset over a letter league owners sent to the Professional Hockey Players' Association on Thursday stating the owners intended to stop paying for players' off-ice insurance needs until a dispute over player benefits was resolved.

The players' director of legal and business affairs, Rich Evans, said a provision in the agreement prevented the union from calling a strike, and that "the players had acted of their own accord."

The agreement came about two hours before the start of the first of the openers in Cleveland.

"It's been a tough, tough 24 hours," PHPA executive director Larry Landon said. "It's unfortunate, because this was ill-timed ... but now the players will get to do what they want to do."

During the summer, the PHPA re-opened a portion of the league's collective bargaining agreement to request that owners consider enhancing players' family benefits to include vision coverage and other services.

The added coverage would cost teams about $160 per player, or $3,000 per team. When owners heard the players' request, Evans said they demanded players give up their pensions, a concession of more than $400,000.

"We go to talk about health and welfare, and they start talking about all these other reductions," Evans said.

IHL president Doug Moss said that wasn't the case, but that during the course of negotiations, the league asked the players to make certain concessions in their pension plans in order to help some of the league's struggling teams survive.

"We asked them to help us out," Moss said. "We lost two teams this year (in Quebec City and San Antonio), and we asked the players' association to work with us."

On Thursday morning, the players told the league they would play the season under the old collective bargaining agreement, but later Thursday the owners told the union they would not pay the insurance premiums.

Moss said the insurance had been paid by the PHPA and that the league had been billed for the premiums based on the expanded coverage that the league had not yet agreed to.

Moss said that since there hadn't been an agreement, he asked the teams to send their payments to the league office to be held in an escrow account.

But faced with the prospect of losing games for the first time in IHL history, representatives from both sides agreed to play the season based on the existing collective bargaining agreement, which runs through 2002.

Rene Chapdelaine, a PHPA executive board member and defenseman for the Utah Grizzlies, blamed the narrowly averted work stoppage on poor communication. He said four of the IHL teams that held practices Friday morning did so only because they had been misinformed about the nature of the dispute.

archive