Less three months after announcing its arrival, the Professional Fighters Association (PFA) is nearing the next step of its ongoing efforts to unionize UFC fighters.

The organization, led by longtime baseball agent Jeff Borris and attorney Lucas Middlebrook, expects to announce an interim executive board comprised of nine current UFC fighters or veterans to lead the PFA "within the month," with the goal being to introduce the executive board during UFC 205 fight week in New York City.

"Those nine individuals are going to be responsible for making policy decisions," Middlebrook, known in MMA circles as the attorney of Nick Diaz, told MMA Fighting on Tuesday. "As the union starts to collect more authorization cards and gets closer to potentially filing with the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), or asking for voluntary recognition, there's certain things that you have to do both from an administrative end and from a legal standpoint.

"You have to have a constitution and bylaws that end up getting filed with the Department of Labor, and there's things in those constitutions and bylaws that you're really going to want fighters to start making the decisions on. You can amend those at a later date, but you don't want just a lawyer and an agent drafting that for the fighters. This is something they should have input on. It's going to be their union. So ultimately the executive board is going to be empowered with making policy decisions for the union going forward and administrative decisions on when we're ready to file with the NLRB.

"Obviously I'll be there to counsel them on any legal points and answer any questions they have," Middlebrook continued. "But it's going to be a union of the fighters and run by the fighters, so the sooner we can get some sort of executive board in place, really, I think the more genuine and the more realistic that the union is, because you have fighters already making decisions for the profession and their career."

The PFA first announced its presence back in August, with the PFA staging a press conference during UFC 202 fight week that outlined the group's goals of bringing together UFC fighters under one common cause of unionizing. Borris estimated at the time that UFC fighters earn only 15-percent of the UFC's revenue -- a far cry from the 50-percent earned by athletes in many other major sports -- and said that it was "almost embarrassing" how much the UFC "bullied" its fighters.

The process since then has taken place mostly behind the scenes, as both Borris and Middlebrook have set out to secure authorization cards signed by at least 30 percent of the UFC roster, which would allow their unionization efforts to be submitted to the NLRB.

Those efforts have taken the PFA to numerous gyms across the country, and Middlebrook noted that despite the apprehension that exists among fighters in speaking out against the UFC, several active members of the roster have "taken it upon themselves" to serve as advocates for the PFA and help convince their fellow athletes to sign the authorization cards.

"There definitely is that fear out there," Middlebrook acknowledged.

"And really, what I'm finding is that it's more -- and this is typical with any union organizing drive -- that they don't understand the process, they don't understand the protections that are in the law, what it means to sign an authorization card, what happens after that. So I'm really finding that once you are able to talk one-on-one or in small groups, that once they have a better understanding, a lot of that fear starts dwindling away.

"And actually, some (fighters) are really looking forward to actually coming out and being publicly known for their role on the board."

Dissension among the ranks in the UFC has been an ongoing narrative for many years in mixed martial arts, but seemingly never has the issue been more on the forefront of conversation than in 2016. The latest example of that arrived in October, when UFC legend Georges St-Pierre announced that he had terminated his UFC deal after contract talks for his return at UFC 206 stalled out.

The dispute between St-Pierre and the UFC remains ongoing, with both sides appearing to indicate a public willingness to hunker down for the long haul. On Tuesday, Middlebrook explained how the PFA's efforts could help cases like St-Pierre's in the future.

"The way I think it would help him is, typical amongst collective bargaining agreements is you have a grievance and arbitration process," Middlebrook said. "So if you have contractual disputes, and this could even relate to individual fighter agreements because that would be something that would be negotiated -- you would have a standard fight agreement and then obviously fighters could negotiate for different things upward, but you couldn't go below that -- so if you had a situation like this where the parties weren't seeing eye-to-eye, then GSP could file a grievance through the union process. And the union, if they wanted to, could what's called ‘fund that grievance.‘

"The union would then be essentially paying for it to be processed through the grievance and arbitration procedure, which is a much faster and cost-effective way to resolve these disputes than going to court and litigating for a year or two and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees. And if the parties can't resolve it, you go in front of an independent arbitrator or a panel of arbitrators, and you lay out your case. And typically you're looking at a solution on those things in anywhere from three-to-six months, as opposed to years in litigation.

"So I think that's one big area where it would've helped him and he would've been able to have the backing of the union behind him, which is obviously going to provide more leverage than just a single person trying to take on the UFC."

According to Middlebrook, after the upcoming announcement of the PFA's interim executive board, the group will continue to seek out the threshold of signed authorization cards needed to begin the process of unionization.

That process will likely stretch into the new year, allowing the PFA's new nine-fighter executive board plenty of time to continue its course of education and outreach among the rest of the roster. Then, once that stage is done, the real work will begin in earnest.

"I think we're still talking maybe into the early spring of 2017," Middlebrook said. "But what I will tell you, I do feel that once the executive board is announced and fighters see that there are other fighters who are now willing to serve in a position on the union, and these other fighters are then out there with the authorization cards, I think it's going to just lend more credibility to the organization and the drive, the organizing drive that's going on.

"I expect the card collection to actually pick up once the board is out there, so I could see an influx of cards coming in shortly thereafter. But I would still think that we're probably looking at the early spring of 2017 before we have a sufficient number of cards to where we need to make a decision on where we're going then."