The Man in the Middle:
Ken Moffett and the Art of Labor Peace
Kenneth Elwood Moffett spent his career walking into rooms where people hated each other and finding a way to make them talk. He was not a flashy figure. He did not make headlines for the way he made headlines. He made them for what happened when he left the room — a signed agreement, a season saved, 700-something canceled games that didn’t get canceled after all. For three decades, from the halls of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to the executive suite of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Moffett was one of the most consequential behind-the-scenes figures in American labor relations. He was also, in one of the more peculiar episodes in the history of baseball, fired from the most prominent job of his career after less than a year on the clock.
He died on November 19, 2021, at 90, at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. The Washington Post and The New York Times both noted his passing. Joseph A. McCartin of Georgetown University called him “one of the most skilled and dedicated mediators to have emerged in U.S. labor relations in the postwar era.” He deserved the tribute — and also, perhaps, a fuller accounting of a career that intersected with some of the most turbulent moments in the history of American labor.
Early Life and the Architecture of a Career
Kenneth Elwood Moffett was born on September 11, 1931. He came of professional age in a United States where labor relations were anything but settled — the postwar decades were a period of extraordinary union growth, recurring strikes, and an ongoing national argument about the proper balance of power between workers and employers. The federal government had positioned itself as a structural referee in this argument through the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, created by the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947 as an independent agency whose explicit mission was to preserve and promote labor-management peace.
Moffett would eventually rise to deputy director of the FMCS — a position that placed him at the center of the largest and most complex labor disputes in the country. His method, by all accounts, was to be calm, persistent, and low-key in environments that were rarely any of those things. He did not grandstand. He shuttled between parties, set up frameworks, and suggested compromises that each side could walk away from without losing face.
It was, as he would later observe, a different kind of work than most people imagined. “It is done in a fishbowl,” he told The Associated Press in 1994. “Every statement, every press release — anything — is for public consumption. In most negotiations, you don’t hear a peep until there’s a settlement.” Baseball, more than any other industry he worked in, made the fishbowl literal. Every development in a baseball labor dispute was analyzed, debated, and reported to millions of fans with an immediate financial and emotional stake in the outcome.
The 1981 Baseball Strike: Fifty Days on the Brink
The summer of 1981 was one of the most contentious in the history of American labor relations, and not only in baseball. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike against the Federal Aviation Administration in August of that year — and President Ronald Reagan responded by ordering the firing of every controller who did not return to work within 48 hours. It was a defining moment in postwar labor history, a signal to American employers everywhere that the political winds had shifted decisively.
Baseball had its own crisis running in parallel. The dispute between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the team owners had been building for years, centered on the question of free-agent compensation: specifically, whether a team that lost a premium free agent should be entitled to receive a player from the signing team as compensation. The players saw this as a back-door mechanism to suppress player mobility and, by extension, player salaries. The owners saw it as a reasonable check on an open market that was driving up costs. Neither side was wrong about what was at stake.
Moffett had been involved in FMCS efforts around baseball as early as 1980, when the agency helped players and owners reach an agreement that deferred a potential work stoppage by a year. When the 1981 strike actually began — with players walking out on June 12 — he was deployed as deputy director of the FMCS to manage one of the most high-profile labor crises in sports history.
What followed was 50 days of a season simply not being played. Seven hundred and thirteen games were canceled. The players had solidarity and a union built by Marvin Miller into one of the toughest labor organizations in America. The owners had a $44 million Lloyd’s of London strike insurance policy, which let them wait. Bargaining sessions between the sides grew so contentious that at one point, Moffett reportedly told both parties to go home, cool off, and come back in a week. The two lead negotiators — Miller for the players, Ray Grebey for the owners — developed what observers described as a “vicious hatred” for each other. When the settlement was finally reached at 6 a.m. on July 31, 1981, at a New York hotel, Miller and Grebey refused to pose together for the traditional photograph.
The settlement gave the owners a limited victory on the compensation issue: teams that lost a premium free agent could draw compensation from a pool of players left unprotected across all clubs, rather than exclusively from the signing team. It was a compromise, imperfect for both sides — which is usually the sign of a successful mediation.
Moffett had used what observers described as “shuttle diplomacy” throughout, moving between parties who refused to be in the same room, proposing frameworks, absorbing the frustration of both sides. The players noticed. They were, by multiple accounts, genuinely grateful for his work.
The PATCO Strike: A Different Kind of Outcome
Almost simultaneously with the baseball resolution, Moffett was also working at the FMCS during the PATCO strike — the air traffic controllers’ walkout that Reagan crushed so definitively. The two labor disputes that defined the summer of 1981 had opposite endings. Baseball survived; PATCO did not. The contrast was instructive.
Baseball had a union with decades of institutional history behind it, a membership that was both highly paid and deeply organized, and a management structure that ultimately needed the players more than it could afford to pretend otherwise. The air traffic controllers had public sentiment against them and a president who had decided to make the strike a symbol. Moffett worked both rooms. The outcomes were out of his hands. What a mediator can do is create the conditions for agreement; he cannot create the will to agree.
The Executive Director Gamble: Becoming the Union Man
Here is where Moffett’s story takes its strangest and most revealing turn.
In December 1982, the Major League Baseball Players Association hired him as the second executive director in its history, succeeding the legendary Marvin Miller, who was retiring after building the MLBPA from an organizational afterthought into the most powerful union in professional sports. Moffett took over officially on January 1, 1983. He was given a three-year contract.
He lasted ten and a half months.
The MLBPA’s executive board fired him on November 22, 1983. Marvin Miller was immediately named interim director. Donald Fehr, then the union’s general counsel, took over as acting executive director on December 8 and would go on to lead the union until his own retirement in December 2009.
What happened in those ten months is a case study in the difference between mediation and advocacy — two roles that are sometimes confused from the outside but are, in practice, nearly opposite.
Moffett was a mediator by formation, temperament, and professional identity. His entire career had been built around finding the space between opposing positions and expanding it. That is an enormously valuable skill. It is not, however, the skill set that the MLBPA needed from its executive director in 1983.
Miller had been a quintessential hard-liner. Baseball management had been anything but compassionate toward the players during his tenure, and negotiations had been pitched battles. The union’s strength was precisely that management knew it would go to the mat on every significant issue.
Moffett, by contrast, came in with a cooperative philosophy. He believed — not unreasonably, given the environment — that confrontation for its own sake was counterproductive, especially on an issue like the growing cocaine crisis in baseball. Players on several teams were visibly struggling with drug use, and Moffett believed that a joint program with management, rather than a confrontational posture, was the appropriate response. He told a conference in early 1984 that he had been near agreement with management on “a tough, impartial drug policy” when he was fired.
Sports Illustrated reported at the time that “no single event triggered the dismissal, but players cited an erosion of confidence in Moffett’s toughness, persistence and leadership.” Montreal pitcher Steve Rogers, the National League pension representative, was quoted saying: “The process of educating the members hadn’t been followed as diligently as it should have been. There was a lack of direction.”
Moffett himself placed the blame squarely on Miller’s continued presence and influence. Miller, though technically retired, was in the office almost daily, still deeply embedded in the culture and direction of the union he had built. The clash, as Sports Illustrated framed it, was one of “styles and philosophies.” It was also, perhaps, a structural mismatch: a man trained to see both sides of a table being asked to sit firmly on one side of it.
“You can’t go to the mat on every issue,” Moffett said after his firing. “My sense was that management was making an effort to be conciliatory. I felt this was the way to go, instead of to the brink. I think things will now go back to being confrontational. That’s wrong, especially in this day and age.”
He was not entirely wrong in his critique. But he had misread the institution he was now supposed to lead. The MLBPA’s power rested on the credibility of its willingness to fight, and its members — the players themselves — were not ready to replace that credibility with goodwill.
After Baseball: A Return to Labor
Moffett did not disappear from labor relations after his firing. In 1985, he became assistant to the president of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, a union that merged with the Communications Workers of America in 1994. He retired in 2003 as the CWA’s human resources director — a quiet, steady conclusion to a career that had included some of the most public labor moments of the late twentieth century.
He watched from the outside as baseball went through its 1994-95 strike, the one that wiped out the World Series — the dispute he had warned, in his way, was coming when he talked about things going “back to being confrontational.” He gave the occasional interview, reflecting on what made baseball negotiations different from everything else he had done. His line about the fishbowl remained as accurate in 1994 as it had been in 1981.
When the 2022 MLB lockout produced calls for federal mediation, Moffett’s name came up again, as a historical reference point. The MLBPA declined mediation that year — but the invocation of his role in 1981 was a reminder of how long his shadow stretched across the history of the sport’s labor relations.
The Question of Legacy
Ken Moffett’s career presents a coherent arc with an interesting rupture in the middle. As a federal mediator, he was, by every available account, genuinely exceptional — patient, creative, and effective in situations that routinely defeated less skilled practitioners. The 1981 baseball settlement was a real achievement in a genuinely difficult environment, reached at a moment when the broader political climate was turning sharply against organized labor.
His time as MLBPA executive director, brief and turbulent as it was, offers a different kind of lesson. The skills that make a great mediator — the capacity to see validity on both sides, the instinct to search for common ground, the aversion to escalation — are not the same skills that make a great union leader in an adversarial environment. The MLBPA in 1983 was not looking for someone who could understand management’s position. It was looking for someone who would fight.
Moffett understood this, eventually. “I think things will now go back to being confrontational,” he said after his firing. It was a prediction, a lament, and a diagnosis all at once.
He survived in labor relations for another twenty years after leaving baseball, working in a quieter key, within the union movement rather than above it. He died at 90, in the home he shared with his fourth wife, Mary Taddeo, with three children surviving him. His son Kenneth Jr. went into negotiations himself, working for the National Treasury Employees Union — a detail that suggests the work got into the family DNA.
McCartin’s assessment — “one of the most skilled and dedicated mediators to have emerged in U.S. labor relations in the postwar era” — stands up. So does the messier, more human story underneath it: a man who was extraordinarily good at one thing, tried to do another, and found out that mastery in one domain doesn’t transfer automatically to the next.
The 1981 baseball season, fractured and reassembled in the middle, was saved in large part by his work. That is not nothing. In the summer when Reagan was firing the air traffic controllers and the old postwar labor compact was coming apart, Moffett went into that fishbowl and got a deal done. The players remember it. Baseball remembers it. He should be remembered for it.
References
Associated Press. (2021, December 6). Moffett, mediator, briefly baseball union head, dead at 90. AP News.
ESPN. (2021, December 6). Kenneth Moffett, federal mediator of 1981 baseball strike and former MLBPA executive, dies at 90. ESPN.com. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32805938
Friends of FMCS History Foundation. (2022). FMCS and baseball. https://www.mediationhistory.org/fmcs-and-baseball/
Kaplan, J. (1983, December 5). Scorecard: Palace coup in the baseball union. Sports Illustrated.
Major League Baseball Players Association. (n.d.). Chronological history of the Major League Baseball Players Association: The 1980s. MLBPlayers.com. http://www.mlbplayers.com
Sandomir, R. (2021, December 5). Ken Moffett, top federal mediator and union official, dies at 90. The New York Times.
Smith, H. (2021, December 4). Ken Moffett, low-key mediator in high-profile labor disputes, dies at 90. The Washington Post.