CA board to decide on pay war's end

Cricket Australia’s board of independently-appointed directors, headed by David Peever, must approve the compromise deal in the works © CA

An end to Australian cricket’s pay war hinges on the same place it started – Cricket Australia’s board of independent directors.

It was the change of the CA board from 14 state-appointed delegates to nine independently-appointed directors in October 2012 that provided a major catalyst for the governing body’s attempt to break up the fixed revenue percentage models at the heart of all collective bargaining agreements between the board and the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) over the past 20 years.

Now, the compromise deal being thrashed out and drafted, in talks between the CA chief executive James Sutherland and his ACA counterpart Alistair Nicholson, must be approved by the same directors – chairman David Peever, Mark Taylor, Bob Every, Jacquie Hey, Earl Eddings, Tony Harrison, Michael Kasprowicz, Michelle Tredenick and John Harnden – who pushed for change in the first place.

The hand of Peever and his directors has been evident throughout the process, which began formally with a meeting between the CA chairman and the ACA president Greg Dyer last November. Directors have, in the words of Taylor, been updated via teleconferences “every three days, sometimes a bit more often if need be”.

Most recently, private talks between Sutherland and Nicholson were dramatically reset when, following a board phone hook-up on Wednesday, the CA chief executive went public with the governing body’s desire to get a deal done by early this week or to take “residual matters” to private arbitration before a retired judge. Talks between the parties are going on late into Monday night, but directors are said to be confident of CA’s ability to win the argument against revenue-sharing in that kind of forum.

They have been closely linked to Kevin Roberts, CA’s lead negotiator, until Sutherland entered the fray in the final days before the previous MoU expired on July 1. Roberts had joined the CA board as one of its first independent directors five years ago, a matter of months after the most recent revenue sharing agreement was finalised, before moving to the executive management team in late 2015.

At the time, Roberts was seen as a possible successor to Sutherland, due to his strong corporate background, and also because the move of a CA board director into management was virtually without precedent in the organisation’s history. Roberts’ role in leading negotiations for CA mirrored Sutherland’s own role as lieutenant to his predecessor Malcolm Speed before taking the top job in 2001.

Public pronouncements by board directors have been few and far between during the dispute, limited to television appearances by Taylor, who in May spoke stridently of the impasse. “Things haven’t been going anywhere for months now, and I know Cricket Australia feel the ACA aren’t negotiating at all,” Taylor said on Sports Sunday. “CA want to change the MoU, want to get away from the revenue sharing model, although the deal being offered to the players is still revenue sharing to a certain extent.

David Peever had defended CA’s proposal, calling their offer a generous one in a column in The Australian earlier this month © IDI/Getty Images

“No-one’s worse off. Women are going to be very well-paid in the new model. But, right from the word go, the ACA – I’m not so sure about the players – have not wanted to engage at all on this deal that’s been offered. It’s all about status quo or the highway, and I don’t think you can negotiate that way.”

A little less than two months later, Taylor offered a more conciliatory tone at Channel Nine’s Ashes launch on July 11, which followed the MoU expiry that left more than 230 players out of contract. “I think there’s got to be compromise on both sides, I really believe that,” he said. “I think at any negotiation, you give and you take. I think when you get to that situation, which I hope we are getting very close to now, then you get close to a resolution. I’m confident there will be a resolution soon. I don’t know when, but I just hope both sides keep working hard at it.”

Yet, the more hawkish views evident on the board were underlined just two days later, when Peever penned an indignant column in The Australian newspaper that was then posted on the board’s website. In it, he attacked the ACA and the media for peddling “myths” about his industrial relations history with the mining firm Rio Tinto, where he served as managing director in Australia until 2012. He also pitched for CA’s hardline position in very similar ways to Sutherland during his multiple public appearances over the same period.

“CA has put what in any normal circumstances would be regarded as a very generous offer on the table,” Peever wrote. “It includes healthy pay increases for all male players, a more than 150 per cent increase in pay for all female players and gender equity in both pay and conditions, a share of any surplus for all players and major increases in other support and benefits.

“The ACA has responded by not only rejecting that proposal (and recent concessions) out of hand, but by launching a campaign of such sustained ferocity that anyone could be forgiven for thinking CA was proposing the reintroduction of slavery rather than healthy pay rises.”

With days remaining before determinations must be made on issues like the looming Test tour of Bangladesh, and a raft of commercial agreements with broadcasters and sponsors around the home Ashes summer, the biggest question is whether the CA board will show a level of flexibility more in line with the words of the former captain Taylor than those of the current chairman Peever.

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

Source: ESPN Crickinfo