Labor Archives - Page 23 of 36 - Marc Normandin is creating baseball coverage, featuring leftism

How are MiLB players going to live during the offseason, mid-pandemic?

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Minor League Baseball players have to work in the offseason. Maybe not every minor-league player — a few early draft picks might have received large enough signing bonuses to avoid that fate, and the players on 40-man rosters are making a living wage thanks to being part of the Players Association with the protections and benefits that entail. But the vast majority of the thousands upon thousands of minor leaguers are making sub-poverty level wages, and for just a few months per year. In order to pay rent, eat, and continue to be able to train for their career, these players need to find second jobs to sustain themselves.

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MLB wants to keep the expanded postseason, ruin regular season further

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Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to an expanded postseason for the shortened 2020 season, as a way to make up for the revenues lost by not airing any games for the first three months of what would have been the regular season. Now, though, MLB begins part two of their expanded postseason plan: convincing you it is not just a temporary, pandemic-related bug, but instead the kind of feature you should be hoping sticks. Here’s commissioner Rob Manfred, in the Washington Post:

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The History of Baseball Unionization: When vaudeville ended a baseball strike

Major League Baseball players had few rights before the signing of the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968. They didn’t get all of their current rights all at once, either: the battle was, and is, an ongoing one. Before the Players Association, before Marvin Miller, there were other attempts to organize baseball players against the bosses. In this series, we’ll investigate each of those attempts, and suss out what went wrong. Here’s part 1 and part 2.

The Players Protective Association had a promising start when the budding American League used its desires for better wages and protections to steal players from the reigning National League, but it didn’t end up working out in the long run. That’s because the AL, like the capitalists investing in the Players League before it, ended up partnering with the NL and eliminating themselves as competition in the process.

A little less than a decade later, in 1912, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America formed, with former player Dave Fultz at the head. Fultz, like John Ward of the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, had a background in law thanks to an education at Colombia, and was a practicing lawyer at the time of the formation of the Fraternity. He also kept in close contact with active players and their concerns, and those conversations — some about their continued gripes about the reserve clause, which no one had been able to permanently get rid of to that point — helped lead to the formation of the Fraternity.

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WWE policy change reopens question of independent contractor status

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The wrestlers of World Wrestling Entertainment perform exclusively for WWE. They travel across America, Canada, and overseas to perform live television shows multiple times per week, and have a touring brand for “house” shows, non-televised performances, as well. They do this 52 weeks per year, they do not get an offseason, and the physical toll on their bodies is obvious in a way it isn’t for most other non-football sports.

And yet, WWE’s wrestlers are not full-time employees. They’re independent contractors, without access to benefits or health insurance. They are responsible for arranging and paying for their own rental cars. They don’t, except in rare circumstances, receive a meaningful cut (or any cut) of merchandising revenue that their own performances drive the sales of. They are entirely at the whims of a 75-year-old egomaniac who equates WWE with wrestling itself and vice versa, and himself with both of those things as well. Saying no or making a fuss about anything could lead to being taken off of television, being let go, or having to spend months being publicly humiliated on camera.

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MLB plans to replace MiLB teams with clubs full of unpaid players

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Major League Baseball still hasn’t unveiled what their plan is for replacing one-quarter of Minor League Baseball’s teams, but there have been enough leaks and reporting on the subject at this point that we’re still pretty clear on what’s next. Minor League Baseball teams that are being pushed out of MLB affiliations will still get to have teams of a sort, but the 1,000 players whose jobs are now on the line? They are being replaced
with a workforce that is somehow paid even less: independent players and college baseball players.

Baseball America has reported for months about how college wood bat leagues were one of the potential replacements for the disaffiliated clubs, and now ESPN is reporting, with a week to go before MLB formally proposes a plan to Minor League Baseball, that this and “encouraging” disaffiliated clubs to go independent with MLB paying the franchise fees for entry is the direction that’ll be taken:

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MLB teams can now open instructional camps, but only if they pay players

The NBA’s players might not want NBA approval anymore

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Earlier this month, I published a piece in this space that discussed, in part, how NBA players had missed an opportunity to wield their collective power by giving in to the league and resuming the season amid a pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality. Nathaniel Friedman and Jesse Einhorn, at The New Republic, went much further and deeper on that particular angle in a feature titled, “The Dismal Politics of the Sports World’s “Wokest” League.”

Within that piece, Friedman and Einhorn explained how there were two opposing camps when it came to the return: the one led by Kyrie Irving and Avery Bradley wanted to tackle this moment in time by not playing, and instead do what they could to help and bring attention to the Black Lives Matter protests. The other camp, led by LeBron James, was more in concert with the NBA, with a different vision of activism. One more corporately approved, the thinking behind which led to this graph from the New Republic pair:

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Shrinking the minors will cost more than players their jobs

Culture of unionization in the NBA’s minors vs. MLB’s

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Some major news happened about a month ago, but it didn’t get very much play. That’s not because no one cares or that it’s not actually important, but has to do a lot with the state of things in the news right now. There are just a few things going on sucking up all of the oxygen in the room, between the literal pandemic, all of the election discourse, the return of live sports, the temporary postponement of live sports for MLB teams facing coronavirus outbreaks… it’s been a busy last few weeks, is all.

The news referred to in that first sentence, by the way, was the unionization of the NBA’s developmental league players. The G League’s players voted to unionize, with around 80 percent voting in favor of the move, and… that was that. Some of the silence around the story has to do with that, too. There is no protracted battle for recognition going on — the NBA itself recognized the organized union without a public fight or delay — so now there is just silence until the two sides meet at the bargaining table to discuss player salaries, health insurance, per diems, housing, and so on.

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MLB’s season has restarted, but not for struggling stadium workers

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Major League Baseball began its season last month, which meant television revenues could start rolling in once more. Owners and investors will be paid, players will be paid, coaches and trainers and clubhouse attendants and grounds crew will all be paid, too. Stadium workers, though, aren’t working these games: without fans, there was no need to bring them back into the fold just yet. Unlike with the minor-league players MLB teams are paying during the pandemic, though — at least during the timeframe their regular season would have happened — not all of these stadium workers are being helped out by their clubs.

And now that the $600 per week the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act has run out, that lack of assistance is even more apparent and harmful. Throw in that the Senate just left session without a sequel stimulus plan in place, and won’t be back to ignore or vote down the next plan until after Labor Day despite a literal pandemic impacting people who don’t make all the money they’ll ever need from corporate bribes and lobbyists, and times are even worse for folks like those who work at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

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