Southpaw #8: Minor League Baseball's Lochner Era
Could a lawsuit be the first step toward ending Minor League Baseball’s exploitative labor practices?
Dear Readers,
Last week, we wrote about the perils of electing college football coaches to our nation’s most esteemed deliberative bodies, and this week, we got a glimpse of what Jock Rule might look like. Spoiler: it ain’t pretty.
In the same interview, Tuberville, who suggested that the United States fought World War II to free Europe from “socialism,” said that building a Senate staff was “no different” than building a football coaching staff, and mistakenly implied that Al Gore had been president for 30 days in 2000. To use a metaphor Tuberville might understand: he fumbled before the opening snap.
This week wasn’t all bad news, though. On Friday, Kim Ng became the first female general manager in any of the major North American men's sports leagues when the Miami Marlins named her as the team’s new GM. The move is long overdue, but it was refreshing nevertheless. As the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins put it, “While it might be nice to think that ‘firsts’ don’t matter as much as they used to for women, they still do. The simple reason is that when a woman enters a new executive-level, command-decision office, she has not so much shattered a ceiling as picked a lock. When the once-locked door is open, she holds the key, allowing others to follow through.”
Congratulations, Kim Ng. If, by 2030, 50 percent of GM positions aren’t occupied by women, we’ve failed to learn our lesson.
The Minor Leagues are stuck in the Lochner Era. A lawsuit is trying to break them out.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court waged war on American workers. Using a broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause, the Court struck down a series of laws and regulations intended to curb the influence of big business and protect workers from exploitative labor practices and unfair treatment. The court’s 30-year period of unapologetically pro-business jurisprudence was dubbed the “Lochner Era,” named for the 1905 case Lochner v. New York, in which the court ruled that New York’s 60-hour cap on the number of hours that bakery workers could log in a given week was unconstitutional. In the ensuing decades, Lochner came to symbolize everything that was dirty and dangerous about America’s love affair with unchecked, laissez-faire capitalism.
Organized labor has come a long way since the Lochner era, and while there’s still a ways to go to ensure fair treatment for workers (and by all indications we are moving backwards on that front), a significant number of American workers do benefit from the very protections that the Lochner Era court tried to eliminate.
Unless, that is, you happen to be a minor league baseball player.
In 2020, the minor leagues are still stuck in their own Lochner Era. The people who run Major League Baseball have for decades taken advantage of the sport’s idiosyncratic minor league system to extract cheap labor from young players chasing their Big League dreams. (The minor leagues have few real equivalents in other professional sports leagues, where teams routinely draft top-tier talent directly into the top leagues and reward them with sizable contracts.) Before 2018, the league skirted employment law by classifying its 7,500 players as “seasonal part-time apprenticeships” rather than as official “employees.” This deceptive classification allowed the league to circumvent the legal obligations that employers typically incur toward their employees, including paying them minimum wage and granting them basic labor protections.
Meanwhile, the federal government has been more than willing to lend MLB’s exploitative labor practices a patina of legal legitimacy. In 2018, Congress effectively codified MLB’s regime of wage suppression when it passed the “Save America’s Pastime Act,” a cynically-misnamed law which exempted minor leaguers from the labor protections guaranteed by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The new law, which was backed by thousands of dollars of MLB lobbying cash, stripped minor leaguers of federal minimum wage protections by compelling the league to only pay players minimum wage for 40 hours of labor a week, despite the fact that players routinely work over 60 hours a week during the season. It also stripped players of their right to overtime pay, allowing the league not to pay players for “instructional hours,” including the hundreds of hours of labor that players log at Spring Training. In typical fashion, Republicans buried the law on page 1,967 of a $1.3 billion spending bill, ensuring that the act would receive minimum public scrutiny.
Since then, the situation has only gotten worse for minor leaguers. After granting players modest pay increases in February of this year, MLB announced in September that it would be cutting 25% of its affiliated minor league teams when the Provision Baseball Agreement between the major and minor leagues expired on September 30. (Never mind that the need to avoid such a contraction was one of the league’s major arguments in favor of the 2018 law.) The chaotic contraction is set to wrap up by the end of this month, leaving hundreds of players and staff unemployed in the middle of a global health crisis. One small bright spot: thanks to a new law passed by Congress in March, players who get cut by their teams may file for unemployment benefits, a basic entitlement that minor leaguers had been denied access to for decades.
Even the players who survive both the contraction and the extended pandemic offseason will not receive fair treatment when minor league baseball eventually returns. After this year’s pay increases, the minimum weekly salary will stand at $500 for players in Single-A, $600 in Double-A, and $700 in Triple-A. After taxes, fees, and clubhouse dues, most players will still earn less than $10,000 over the course of the five-month season—well below the federal poverty level. Don’t expect the stories of talented players moonlighting as janitors while their families live on the edge of financial ruin to disappear any time soon.
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. The case was originally filed in 2014 on behalf of Aaron Senne, a former player in the Royals minor league system, who claimed that the team’s refusal to pay him more than $7,500 per season violated state labor laws and the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In October, the plaintiffs won a major victory when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear MLB’s appeal to reverse a class certification that had been granted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The certification allows any past or present minor leaguer who played in California, Arizona, or Florida to join the class action suit.
This case is, to put it mildly, a big deal. If the trial courts decide the case in the players’ favor, Senne could signal the beginning of the end of the minor leagues’ Lochner Era. Most immediately, a ruling against the league would force the MLB to pay past and present minor leaguers millions of dollars of back-pay to make up for the wages they were wrongly denied while playing in the league. In the longer term, Senne could provide a road map for players across the league seeking to challenge the minor leagues’ compensation structure in court. Although the Save America’s Pastime Act made it significantly more difficult for players to seek recourse under the FLSA, Senne has raised the possibility that courts could compel MLB to comply with state minimum wage laws. Until players choose to unionize—a course of action they have declined to take in the past—court action will remain their most expedient path toward fair treatment.
MLB has said that a ruling against the league in Senne could force even more drastic cuts to the minor leagues, but as we learned during the current contraction, the league, which turned a $10.7 billion profit in 2019, doesn’t always stick to its word.
Beyond these material impacts, a victory in Senne would be a major symbolic victory for the thousands of athletes who toil in amateur and semi-pro sports leagues across the country. With multi-million dollar contracts for America’s star athletes dominating headlines, it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of the country’s athletes are members of the working class and endure the same economic exploitation and political marginalization as the rest of America’s workers. As Senne’s attorney Garrett Broshuis said, “The ultimate goal is pretty simple: to get MLB to comply with the same laws that Walmart and McDonald's comply with.” That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
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. . . why sports are losing the fight with the pandemic’s winter wave? “Sports were a distraction from the pandemic. Now they’re being battered by it.” By Jerry Brewer in The Washington Post (November 12, 2020).