Management Cracks
As MLB's All-Star Week approaches, baseball's workers notch two major victories
Dear readers,
Happy Sunday. We hope you’re all staying cool as the dog days of summer descend in earnest on the East Coast.
One quick bit of news before we get to our main item: This week, Calder started an exciting new job at POLITICO, helping to edit their nightly newsletter and doing some periodic editing/writing for POLITICO Magazine. This feels very full circle for us, since we first met while working together at our rinky-dink college newspaper, and now, a few years later, we’re once again working under the same (metaphorical) roof. Shucks.
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And now, in a rare twist of fate, more good news!
-Ian & Calder
Ahead of All-Star Week, baseball’s workers go 2-0
It’s All-Star Week for Major League Baseball, giving fans like us a chance to step back from the day-to-day grind of the baseball calendar, celebrate (or, in Ian’s case, mourn) the first half of the season, and watch some of our favorite players mash home runs with reckless abandon.
This year, though, fans have even more reason to celebrate after concession workers at Dodger Stadium, where this year’s game is being held, successfully leveraged the upcoming All-Star game into a major labor victory.
Last Sunday, just days before the All-Star festivities were scheduled to start, 99 percent of the stadium’s unionized concession workers voted through their union to authorize a strike. For the past several months, the union that represents the stadium’s 1,500 concession workers, Unite Here Local 11, has been trying to negotiate a new contract with the company that operates the stadium’s concession, asking for higher wages, better benefits, and improved workplace conditions. Talks between the union and management had stalled, but on Wednesday, with the possibility of a strike threatening to disrupt All-Star weekend, the union announced that negotiations had resumed, temporarily averting a work stoppage and giving the workers another chance to have their demands met.
As regular readers may recall, this also isn’t the first time in recent memory that baseball’s workforce has seized on a headline-grabbing event to advance its demands. Just last year, workers at Oracle Park in San Francisco, home to the San Francisco Giants, deployed a similar set of tactics when they voted to authorize a strike in the weeks before the Giants were set to embark on a much-anticipated playoff run. Less than a month later, the union won a new contract that guaranteed significant wage increases, more generous hazard pay, and increased pension benefits for both full- and part-time workers.
The concession workers weren’t the only workers to notch a major victory this week, either. On Friday, Major League Baseball agreed to pay $185 million to former minor leaguers to settle the class-action lawsuit Senne v. MLB, which hinged on the players’ claims that minor league teams had violated state and federal labor law by paying their players a pittance.
The money is nice, though for MLB it’s basically a drop in the bucket. The more significant outcome of the settlement is that teams will likely begin to pay their players for off-season and spring training activities. In one of our first Southpaws, we wrote, “Minor leaguers’ hope for fair economic treatment currently hinges on a single lawsuit, Senne v. Kansas City Royals Baseball, which has been winding its way through the federal courts for six years . . . Senne could provide a road map for players across the league seeking to challenge the minor leagues’ compensation structure in court.”
The situation for minor leaguers has dramatically improved since November of 2020, when we published that piece. But this progress has not been inevitable. Minor leaguers have won major new rights and labor protections because they’ve continued to put pressure on Major League Baseball, sticking with a lawsuit that took eight years to resolve and which the league fought at every turn.
The lesson here is pretty straightforward: to win labor victories, keep the pressure on management. The threat of a strike remains one of organized labor’s most powerful weapons, and in the sporting world, it’s even more powerful when unions deploy it before a major event like an all-star game or a high-profile postseason matchup. And while we love to see organized labor flexing its muscle regardless of the venue, there’s something particularly sweet about watching a majority-minority union score a victory at Dodger Stadium, which was literally built by a bunch of red-baiting businessmen on top of the leveled homes of immigrant laborers.
Of course, the fight at Dodger Stadium isn’t over yet, and it won’t be until the concession workers’ union has a new contract safely in hand. Ditto for the fight for fair pay for minor leaguers. But in the spirit of All-Star Weekend, we’re celebrating the fact that Dodger Stadium’s workers are one step closer to winning a fair workplace and that minor leaguers are one step closer to winning fair wages.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about …
. . . the NFL’s toothless domestic violence policy? “N.F.L. Players Pay a Small Price When Accused of Violence Against Women,” by Jenny Vrentas in The New York Times (July 13, 2022).
. . . the missing voice within the MLB players’ union? “In M.L.B.’s Labor Talks, Latino Voices Are Few and Far Between,” by James Wagner in The New York Times (July 14, 2022).
. . . the nerdy-but-important details of a proposed international baseball draft? “What you need to know about the international draft proposals from MLB and MLBPA,” by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich in The Athletic (July 15, 2022).