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The United States women’s national soccer team is bound by the terms of its collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer, a federal judge ruled Friday. The decision means the players cannot strike before August’s Rio Olympics in their quest for better pay, but it has no effect on a separate federal wage-discrimination complaint filed by five players this year.
Friday’s decision, filed by Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in federal court in Chicago, was on a narrow matter: whether the team, represented by its players’ association, was bound by the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer that both sides acknowledged had expired in 2012. The ruling was a victory for U.S. Soccer, which had argued that the team’s C.B.A. was expired but contended that it lived on in a memorandum of understanding signed in early 2013. The union had argued that the memorandum did not specifically address the players’ rights, including the right…
