NFL falls foul of the "drunken Santa" problem Americans woke up on Tuesday to find their country consumed with its most momentous labour drama since Ronald Reagan broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers" Organization in 1981. People were paying more attention to it than to the presidential elections. Back in June, the National Football League locked out the 121 referees who work its weekly games. This, it was thought, would convince them to accept an inferior retirement plan and make other concessions that would save the NFL $3.2m. What a mistake. The lockout is now settled. The "real" refs returned to the field on Thursday night - but not before we learnt some lessons about what constitutes just compensation for low-prestige specialists in high-prestige industries. Substitute refs ruined three games over the weekend. Monday night's game between the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks, in which a wrongly called Seattle touchdown on the final play stole a win from the nationally beloved Pack, was only the coup de grâce. The Detroit Lions lost to the Tennessee Titans after referees mismarked the Titans" field position, wrongly awarding them 12 yards. The Baltimore Ravens" Sunday night victory over the New England Patriots, attained thanks to a dubious field goal and half a dozen phantom penalties late in the game, was more sloppily officiated still. In the interests of saving each team about $100,000 in costs, the owners wound up damaging their $60bn product. Teams that miss the play-offs because of the refereeing fiasco will have lost millions on the gambit. By the end of the weekend, there were boycotts and demonstrations planned, and calls for the firing of Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner. What went wrong? The league took a look at their employees" bargaining position and made the commonsense calculation that it was weak. The refs have a cushy deal. NFL refereeing is a part-time job but it pays a pension as if it were a full-time one. Refs can hold their other jobs and get flown to games on the weekend. They get proximity to celebrity, the ultimate perk in a television and celebrity-obsessed age. The 121 referees at the pro level had no obvious gifts that made them superior to the tens of thousands of college and high-school officials who would, presumably, do anything for their jobs. NFL owners soon discovered how little complex labour markets have to do with this kind of "common sense." NFL owners ignored the drunken Santa problem. Alcoholics acting as Santa Claus in department-store Christmas displays used to be a staple of US movies not because they're a clever narrative device but because they were an often remarked-on fact of US life. Why were so many of them alcoholics? Because no one gives up a good full-time job for a part-time job. In certain fields, when you hire temporary employees you hire from the ranks of the unemployed and the barely employed. Quality secretaries can be got for the right hourly wage, but not quality Santas and not quality referees. The 122nd-best referee in the country was not interested in losing his own enviable job (probably working college football) for a few weeks replacing the 121st in the NFL. When the league locked its employees out, it had to descend thousands of names down the list. A turning point in public sentiment came when it was discovered that some of the replacement referees had been hired from the Lingerie Football League, in which games are played by scantily-clad women. What the lockout did not provide was a strong new case for trade unions, even in an election season with pundits saying it did. Certainly, this was one of those moments when the efficiencies of a well-organised union workforce become obvious. September 11 2001 was another, when Americans came to wish they had the arrogant, entitled union cops they knew from the old days, rather than the lick-and-a-promise temp workers who had been hired en masse by subcontractors to man the most important security jobs in the country. But the NFL is a special case - it is designed as a monopoly. It enjoys certain exemptions from antitrust laws. The lockout did turn out to be a good illustration of a principle laid out by the Harvard economist Michael Kremer in the 1990s. Mr Kremer wrote a paper called "The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development" after a faulty O-ring - a very cheap part - caused the multibillion-dollar space shuttle to explode. He found that in high-value-added fields, where one malfunction in a complex chain can destroy all value, special rules apply. That is why you see a "positive correlation between the wages of workers in different occupations within enterprises." Skimping on referees turned out to be a false economy. Ultimately, the product a sports league sells is the integrity of its competitive season. This year's product has been damaged and it cannot now be wholly repaired.