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March 31, 2011 at 11:22 AM
A more-than-thirty-year-long dispute between football players and the National Football League has finally been settled with a permanent injunction that restricts the right of the League to collect a reimbursement of workers’ compensation benefits paid to players.
As reported by NU Online News Service, Judge Paul A. Crotty ruled that teams could only collect an offset, or reimbursement, based on a formula that calculated the time period during which players received salary and workers’ compensation benefits concurrently. Teams had been pushing to collect dollar-for-dollar reimbursements—the entire sum of comp benefits provided to a player, but the judge wasn’t having any of it.
Despite having won the case on every level of litigation, attorney Adam J. Kaiser, who represents the players, said that he’d been battling the teams for 7 years. This latest ruling, he said, was "incredibly important," since players could be dropped regardless of contracts if they were hurt and couldn’t play. In addition, former players don’t get post-employment health insurance.
