The lockout zone.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - National Hockey League and National Football League

It took a scandalous ending to the Packers-Seahawks game to get the National Football League to end its lockout against the unionized referees.

Scab refs, plucked from officiating lingerie football, proved the value of union labor.

By the time you read this, the lockout of players in the National Hockey League may be over as well. But for months, the NFL and NHL owners were doing their best impression of Mitt Romney at a closed fundraiser, thus damaging the integrity of their games.

But whether the NHL bosses do the right thing or replay 2004, when they chose to cancel their entire season, a question hangs over these debacles: Why is the sports world becoming the land of the lockout? Why, in the last year, has it become the arena for a nasty employers' offensive?

A lockout is considered the most extreme tactic in any labor/management confrontation. It's not a strike. It's the bosses aiming to drive their workforce into submission. According to U.S. labor law, it's not supposed to be a normal course of action. Yet we've now seen lockouts aimed at the players in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and the referees in the NFL.

The question remains: Why? DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association, explained it to me this way. "It's been a conscious strategy to arrive at a lockout," he said. "It's been the same law firms hired that have led negotiations [for the owners] and the same results."

If we accept that the lockouts result from a conscious strategy, then the question of why they are choosing this course of action still looms large. Pro sports in the United States isn't the auto or steel industry. It's not losing ground to cheap labor overseas or foreign imports. It's lucrative.

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No one in the NFL had the gall to say that their $9.3 billion-a-year business was actually imperiled by the $8,000-a-week wage paid to the referees, and only in season.

In the NHL, there are probably ten or fifteen terribly mismanaged teams that lose money but the rest are swimming in deep revenue streams that flow from luxury boxes, public...