## Facts

- A collective bargaining agreement between the National Football League (NFL) clubs and the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) expired, and the parties negotiated a successor agreement.
- During negotiations, the NFL proposed “developmental” (practice) squads with a uniform, fixed weekly salary for all developmental squad players.
- The NFLPA rejected a fixed, non-negotiable salary and maintained that individual players should be free to negotiate their pay.
- The NFL declared an impasse in bargaining and unilaterally implemented its last wage proposal for the 1989 season: a $1,000 weekly salary for developmental squad players.
- Nine developmental squad players filed a class action alleging the league-wide imposition of a uniform wage was a horizontal wage-fixing agreement violating Sherman Act § 1.

## Issues

1. Whether the nonstatutory labor exemption immunizes a multiemployer bargaining group from Sherman Act § 1 liability when, after bargaining to impasse, it unilaterally implements its last wage offer on a mandatory subject of bargaining.
2. Whether a post-impasse, union-opposed wage term arising from collective bargaining may be treated as exempt labor conduct rather than as per se unlawful price-fixing among competitors.

## Decision

- The court reversed the district court’s judgment for the players.
- The court held the nonstatutory labor exemption applied to the NFL clubs’ post-impasse implementation of a uniform developmental-squad wage.
- The court vacated the damages award and set aside the injunction that barred the NFL from setting uniform developmental-squad salaries.

## Legal Principles

- The nonstatutory labor exemption shields from antitrust scrutiny certain restraints on competition that arise out of the collective bargaining relationship and are necessary to allow the federal labor-law bargaining framework to function.
- Employer conduct tied to multiemployer collective bargaining over mandatory subjects (including wages) may remain within the exemption even when implemented unilaterally after a bargaining impasse.
- Antitrust liability is generally avoided where the restraint primarily affects the labor market within the bargaining relationship, rather than competition in the product market.
- Allowing treble-damages antitrust suits over post-impasse economic weapons authorized by labor law would distort the labor-law balance and interfere with collective bargaining regulation committed to labor-law institutions.

## Conclusion

The court held that the NFL clubs’ coordinated, post-impasse implementation of a fixed practice-squad wage was a labor-market restraint arising from multiemployer collective bargaining over wages and was therefore protected by the nonstatutory labor exemption from Sherman Act § 1 liability.


Brown v. Pro Football, Inc., 50 F.3d 1041 (D.C. Cir. 1995)