Cite as: 518 U. S. 231 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
IV
Congress is free to act to exempt the anticompetitive employer conduct that we review today. In the absence of such action, I do not believe it is for us to stretch the limited exemption that we have fashioned to facilitate the express statutory exemption created for labor's benefit so that unions must strike in order to restore a prior practice of individually negotiating salaries. I therefore agree with the position that the District Court adopted below.
"Because the developmental squad salary provisions were a new concept and not a change in terms of the expired collective bargaining agreement, the policy behind continuing the nonstatutory labor exemption for the terms of a collective bargaining agreement after expiration (to foster an atmosphere conducive to the negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement) does not apply. To hold that the nonstatutory labor exemption extends to shield the NFL from antitrust liability for imposing restraints never before agreed to by the union would not only infringe on the union's freedom to contract, H. K. Porter Co. v. NLRB, 397 U. S. at 108 . . . (one of fundamental policies of NLRA is freedom of contract), but would also contradict the very purpose of the antitrust exemption by not promoting execution of a collective bargaining agreement with terms mutu-proposition that hard core 'anticompetitive commercial restraint[s]' like 'price-fixing and market allocation'—and petitioner would add group boycotts—were subject to antitrust regulation even where bargained about. 381 U. S. 732-33 (concurring opinion). As this Court unanimously warned in 1949, 'Benefits to organized labor cannot be utilized as a cat's paw to pull employer's chestnuts out of antitrust fires.' United States v. Women's Sportswear Mfr's Ass'n, 336 U. S. 460, 464 (1949). See also Allen Bradley Co. v. Local No. 3, 325 U. S. [797] (1945). Similar arguments by football were rejected by this Court in Radovich [v. National Football League, 352 U. S. 445 (1957),] as 'without merit,' and the reserve systems of other sports are now regulated by state and federal antitrust laws." Pet. for Cert. in Flood v. Kuhn, O. T. 1971, No. 71-32, p. 21, n. 9.
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