The management of baseball, especially in the minor leagues, is symptomatic of the way workers are treated across the country.
On June 15, player advocacy group Advocates for Small Leaguers called on the Baltimore Orioles for their treatment of Double-A affiliate the Bowie Baysox.
Baysox players, Advocates for Minor Leaguers tweeted, “were considering sleeping in their car” because or truck the team would not pay for accommodation and the cost of a hotel would be 80% of their salary. weeks after taxes.
A few hours later, players were informed that the price was now half of what they were originally told to expect. Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias has denied to press that the players have ever been threatened with sleeping in their cars.
However, it is difficult to take this denial seriously. Minor League players have been subjected to mistreatment and bad wages for decades. Congress codified this abuse in 2018, including a provision in the £ 1.3 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act that exempts teams from paying minor leaguers or spring training overtime. The game is stacked against minor league players, who are vying for an elusive chance to reach the majors and a real salary.
It’s the American way. Workers across the country face bad circumstances, low moreover wages and unrealistic promises of a better future. Wealthy baseball team owners deny their underage workers adequate wages and housing despite the relatively low cost of doing so – just as billionaires like Jeff Bezos overwork and underpay their employees in other industries.
Food and shelter
Minor league players face difficult work disorders, Advocates for Minor Leaguers executive director Harrison Marino told me. Most players earn around $ 15,000 per year – a seasonal salary that comes with a contractual obligation to provide providers year round. Many, if not most, minor leaguers have to find other jobs during the offseason just to make ends meet while continuing to train.
Housing is extremely difficult given the step-by-step movement of most minor leaguers to majors and for the paltry sum they are paid. While teams pay for player accommodation on the road, players must support themselves and find accommodation as needed when playing at home. This presents a myriad of issues, including the fact that a player can bounce from city to city as they advance in their career, as or truck not all affiliates on a team will be in the same region.
For example, a player in the San Francisco Giants organization should in theory travel from his Small-A affiliate team – the top rung of the minor league ladder – in San Jose to his Superior-A team in Eugene, Oregon. (562 miles away) to his Double-A team in Richmond, Va. (A 2,873 mile trip), and finally to the Triple-A team in Sacramento (a 2,783 mile trip). While finding new accommodation each time they move up (or down) levels.
Food circumstances are often not much better. On June 1, Advocates for Minor Leaguers released shots of the Oakland Athletics Minor Leaguers showing their post-game meals: a May cheese sandwich worthy of the infamous Fyre Pageant and, more recently, what appeared to be a taco attempt. The As claimed that they ended the relationship with the seller “several weeks ago”.
There isn’t much that the players can do.
“Because the players have been tied to their MLB club for seven seasons, they can’t look for a better deal with another club,” Marino told me. “As far as the treatment by MLB teams of Minor League players, it’s really a study race to the bottom. “
America’s game
Because of its monopolistic place in the business of baseball, Significant League Baseball is the only possible buyer for the major workforce of baseball players. This gives the league inordinate power and control over its core workforce to an extent that most other companies can only dream of. In practice, this means a relationship between the worker and the boss that leans overwhelmingly towards the powerful.
Minor Leaguers have faced an extreme variation in this relationship for decades. Steve Hamilton, a major leaguer, told Studs Terkel in 1974’s “Operating” that the unbalanced relationship between players and owners was even more difficult for underage players – who did not and do not have a union. , unlike the major league. players.
“They insist on knowing you like a thing,” Hamilton said. “It’s easy for them to handle. “
Water mirror
Abuse and low wages are rampant in nearly every industry in America, and the stress between how workers are treated and business owners are compensated has become more apparent in recent years. The conversations about income inequality that exploded into the mainstream more than a decade ago have matured and started to target the systemic foundations of the U.S. economic system.
Baseball is not even the worst offender. The economics of concert events, especially driver solutions like Uber and Lyft, has led to a less stabilized and less secure principal workforce, even though the people at the top of those companies are making a profit. An hourly wages for a driver at Uber – as Minnesota Twins pitcher Randy Dobnakout did before signing – is just under $ 10 an hour after tax, EPI study finds the company further lowers wages by refusing, unless forced to do so, to provide benefits to workers.
Across the country, companies are offering promotion and empowerment opportunities to workers in order to lure them into dead end auto jobs, technically it is possible that they can advance – although only approximately 10% will. But for the majority of working people in the United States, the American dream hardly seems worth imagining.
No wonder, then, that there is a labor shortage. The products and services industry faces serious challenges getting people back to work, and the response from many restaurateurs and caterers is to call for an end to COVID-related unemployment benefits. The song remains the same: For bosses and bosses, workers are disposable, whether they are short-term cooks, drivers for Uber, or minor-league baseball players,
“Baseball occupies a one of a kind situation in our cultural landscape,” said Marino. “Over the past 150 years, labor relations in baseball have both reflected and shaped labor relations in the United States more generally. “
Today, the ailments are better than they were in the past – despite the kind of Minor League players. But the game is still against the workers, as it is in almost every industry in America.
