Our Position - CBA

By Matt Finnis

As you may be aware the AFL has publicly flagged its decision to dictate salary cap and payment arrangements to AFL clubs by Monday, regardless of having an unresolved situation around the Players’ Collective Bargaining Agreement.

The players, through the AFLPA, have conducted promising negotiations in good faith to reach a fair outcome that recognises the huge contribution the players have made to the game and this latest move from the AFL is unnecessarily antagonistic and extremely disappointing.

We have offered up several concessions to achieve a fair deal, but we remain steadfast in our commitment to a deal which will preserve the interests and the rights of players in the long-term.

It appears the AFL has now decided to shift the goalposts.

To be clear, we are not negotiating over the size of the financial pie, but the terms and structure of the deal to best protect the players’ rights – and the proposal we have provided to the AFL fits within the financial parameters the AFL has provided to us.

The Players' demands have been there for 12 months yet this is the first time we've had the AFL making a song and dance about particular conditions such as travel and accommodation – these things haven't changed and they simply go to the standards of the professional working conditions of the players.

There's nothing new, we haven't increased our claims at all.

Our next steps are to contact our members, which we’ve begun doing, and to assess how they’d like to respond to this threat. We have several options open to us, but ultimately we would like to see a deal done.

We will of course continue to meet with the AFL this week to work through the issues.

Our negotiations have been focusing on the big ticket items and coming to an agreement on these which can provide certainty to the industry and its biggest stakeholders – the players. We will continue doing what we can to see that achieved.

Listen to Matt Finnis speaking with Tim Watson and Andy Maher on SEN this morning about the AFL Players' current position on this matter.