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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

John Blanchette: Labor issue spills over into WHL

The 2015 hockey season opens Saturday for the Spokane Chiefs, and they may be skating on uphill ice during the franchise’s 30th year.

Long gone are the league scoring champion, their goaltender, and two veteran defensemen who lost their taste for junior hockey. On paper, their potential for both scoring goals and stopping them appear questionable, and the roster will have roughly 200 fewer games in the way of Western Hockey League experience than any other team in the U.S. Division.

And then there’s this: The state might decide that they’re running afoul of child labor guidelines and that their teenage players are professionals who need to be compensated as such.

This splash of Zamboni water comes courtesy of The Sports Network, which reported that Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries has begun an inquiry into whether the state’s four WHL teams are working the children – those under 18 – too hard, but will await an opinion from the attorney general’s office before plowing ahead.

“Employees,” spokesman Matthew Erlich told TSN, “should also be paid for the work they do.”

To which Chiefs general manager Tim Speltz offered, “We think our players are amateur athletes. We don’t think they’re paid employees at all.”

Sound familiar?

The spring and summer were filled fencing over the status of the college athlete. Lawsuits were argued and verdicts delivered. A labor arbitrator said the football team at Northwestern could unionize. Major schools shook free of the NCAA rabble, conscious-stricken after all these years and yearning to share a couple thousand dollars a year with the playforce above the scholarship ceiling.

It all had been building for some time, finally kicking into overdrive as TV networks threw stupid money at conferences, coaching salaries shot up from insane to obscene and the Final Four MVP complained of going to bed hungry.

So who rubbed two sticks together under the L&I folks?

Well, they’re not saying. But unionists in Canada are agitating for their provincial governments to look into the business practices of junior hockey, and it’s unlikely that a Chiefs player who didn’t think he got enough gas money is the instigator down here.

A quick primer: WHL players can be drafted and “listed” at 14, normally sign contracts that tie them to clubs from ages 16 to 20, are billeted with local families (who get a stipend from the team), are fed and equipped and reimbursed for their expenses. On top of which, they earn a modest wage – $250 a month up through age 19, $600 for 20-year-olds (“because there are different places they could play and financially do better,” Speltz explained). And there is a college scholarship package: a year’s tuition, books and fees for each year spent with the club, though it goes away if a player signs an NHL deal or plays in the minor pro leagues beyond an 18-month cutoff.

They’re also expected to go to high school and graduate.

Which is why the league characterizes its players as “student-athletes” – and why WHL commissioner Ron Robison has cautioned that calling them employees “could impact the status of other amateur athletes in the state as well.”

Or as Chiefs owner Bobby Brett put it, “What’s to say they won’t do the same to Ferris football, too?”

Well, perhaps that analogy is stretched, though yes, admission is charged to high school games, too. Ferris football’s season doesn’t stretch from August to April, however, and the Saxons aren’t obliged to haul themselves across the state in a bus twice a week.

It shouldn’t be a dirty-word distinction, but WHL teams are for-profit enterprises, and they get to be scrutinized as such – whatever the outcome of this tussle. Some clubs like the Chiefs do quite well; others, in smaller Canadian burgs, struggle. But that’s a marketing imbalance, and it doesn’t seem as if the 18-year-old winger’s employee/student status should be the solution.

On the other hand, Don Nachbaur isn’t pulling down $2 million-plus a year like the college coach down the road. The egregious fiscal sins of college athletics demand some attention, from the courts or otherwise.

This? Well, if you must.

But some of us would feel better served if L&I came down on the shame of companies exploiting unpaid “interns” first – and a few other things before a teen hockey league where a player can actually earn himself a college education.

Brett said he could see that if the WHL is classified as a pro league – with workman’s comp to pay, instead of insurance through the Canadian and American amateur associations – “that alone puts half the teams out of business, probably.”

But here in the Washington, the WHL may have trouble peddling that notion of being an educational enterprise. The league’s draft, the fact that teenagers can be traded from team to team without any say, that extra stipend for overage players – those things scream “business.”

And who mans his business with mere amateurs?