This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $15. Leaving aside that the bill in question wouldn’t actually raise the minimum to $15 until 2025, or that this won’t pass the Senate and become the law of the land, it’s worth exploring how this kind of change would impact baseball in the United States.
While a higher minimum wage wouldn’t impact MLB players, given the league minimum is $550,000 right now, it would change the salaries of minor-league players as well as those in independent ball. It might even succeed in killing indie baseball, but as I’ve written about before, that’s not the worst outcome, at least when we’re talking about the current format of independent ball. Give me municipal baseball teams and give them to me now, thanks.
A jump to a $15 minimum wage would be massive for MLB’s minor-league players, who currently, at the lowest levels, pull in $1,160 per month, and only for the months of the regular season. Despite working about 70 hours per week, none of them are receiving overtime, and won’t, either, thanks to MLB’s years of lobbying Congress to make sure that didn’t happen, which resulted in minor-league players being singled out in last spring’s $1.3 trillion spending bill. They have to get offseason jobs, split roach-infested, filthy, broken apartments with five other teammates, eat mac and cheese and ramen and Dollar Menu meals all the time because of the low pay and road-only $25 per diem, purchase their own equipment… you see what I’m saying. More than doubling the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 would be huge for these sub-poverty-level workers.
Continue reading “Here’s how a $15 minimum wage would impact minor-league pay”