The Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints kicked off the NFL season in a show of solidarity Thursday night and the AFL-CIO has taken the field in the players’ behalf. In a letter released today, the AFL-CIO’s top leaders warned NFL team owners that locking-out players next season could create significant job losses off the field and cause a “spiraling impact on communities.”

In individual letters to each NFL team owner, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Schuler and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said football generates hundreds of thousands of jobs in stadiums and in the cities. They said a conservative estimate is that a lockout would cost thousands of jobs and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue in each NFL city.

We strongly urge you to think about the stadium workers, hotel and restaurant workers, and thousands of other working people who support [your team] as dedicated employees and fans.

The owners terminated the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) a year early, claiming they were losing money. But like other employers, they refused to let the players’ union see the books that showed their financial condition.

In negotiations that have lasted more than a year, the owners continue to threaten a lockout and make demands for more work for less pay. Besides that, there is no guaranteed health care for players who are injured and players must play for three seasons before they are eligible for only five years of post-career health care.

This is significant because an NFL player’s career lasts, on average, between three and four years because of the physical toll on their bodies. A study commissioned by the NFL found that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players far more often than in the national population—including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49. The researchers found that 6.1 percent of former NFL players age 50 and above reported that they had received a dementia-related diagnosis, five times higher than the national average.

In the letters, the AFL-CIO officers said they will work with the NFLPA to let local elected officials in team cities and members of Congress know just how much a lockout would cost their cities. And, the officers said, where appropriate, they would call for hearings on the monies that teams got from taxpayers and the effect of the team’s non-profit status on tax revenues.

This article was originally posted on AFL-CIO NOW Blog.

About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris