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Washington law preserves WHL status quo, but teams could still face punishment

Washington governor Jay Inslee signed a bill earlier this week classifying Western Hockey League players as amateur athletes who are not required to be paid wages or adhere to child labor restrictions.

The bill, drafted in response to a child labor complaint filed to the state’s department of labour and industries, easily passed Washington’s house and senate, and allows the WHL to keep operating in the state with its current procedure of compensating players with scholarships, modest stipends, and free room and board.

The four teams in the state (the Everett Silvertips, Seattle Thunderbirds, Spokane Chiefs and Tri-City Americans) aren’t totally out of the woods, though, as the labour department is still investigating a child labour complaint it received last year. Department spokesman Matthew Erlich said vie email this week that “it would be premature to discuss how the signing would impact our decision” regarding the investigation, which has been ongoing since September 2014.

 

Erlich also stated that there’s “no time frame for completion of the investigation.” He clarified that the probe is focused solely on a child labour complaint and is not focused on other employment issues such as minimum wage or workplace safety regulations.

It’s unclear what kind of punishment the teams could face if they are found to have violated state law, but it would most likely be a fine. Fine amounts for labour violations vary widely, but in April a drywall contractor in the state was ordered to pay more than $1 million in a workers’ compensation case.

A spokesperson for Unifor, the union that has been advocating for CHL players rights in Canada, expressed disappointment with the developments in Washington, but admitted there’s not much Unifor can do about a law in the U.S.

For now, Unifor is focused on a class-action lawsuit in Canada that seeks to recover back wages it argues CHL players should have been receiving all along. Unifor president Jerry Dias claims, though, that the real purpose of the lawsuit is to get the league to sit down with labour organizers to create a system both sides can live with.

Some lawmakers in Washington expressed reservations about some aspects of the WHL model during public hearings for the law, and others were confused as to why the league’s supposedly amateur athletes are deemed ineligible by the NCAA (an organization much more familiar to Americans).

Ultimately, the legislators were moved by pleas from the teams that not passing the law could force them to abandon Washington due to child labour restrictions that would make it impossible to have 16- and 17-year-old players on their rosters.

If such a dire scenario was actually true and not just a threat by the WHL to get its way, four publicly owned arenas in Washington could potentially lose their primary tenants. The financial implications of that may have served as the primary motivation for pushing the law through. In fact, the law only offers the nonemployee designation to athletes whose teams play in a public facility.

At times during the public hearings, some lawmakers pushed the WHL representatives to better explain the concept of for-profit franchises utilizing amateur players, but most lacked enough familiarity with the league’s current operation to know what additional questions could have been asked. Opposing testimony from the American AFL/CIO labour organization and a letter from lawyer Ted Charney, whose firm filed the class action lawsuit against the CHL in Canada, led some senators and representative to become skeptical, but they essentially chose to take the WHL’s testimony at face value.

While the CHL will trumpet all of this as validation for the major junior hockey model, Washington’s law seems to be less of an endorsement for the league than it is a measure to prevent the financial devastation of four arenas losing their main revenue streams.

If that happened, a lot of people around the state could lose their jobs. Except the WHL players, of course, who apparently didn’t have a job to begin with.