Hoornstra: Minor league players’ unionization effort is done; now their fight begins

A year ago, Harry Marino was the executive director of Advocates For Minor Leaguers, a nonprofit organization just 15 months into its mission to improve working conditions for minor league baseball players everywhere. Our conversation was brief, but Marino was explicit about the goals of his group. Forming a union didn’t top the list.

Flash forward to December. Kieran Lovegrove ― a recently retired minor leaguer, like Marino ― was energized. Speaking on behalf of Advocates For Minor Leaguers, days before they hosted a players-only meeting, Lovegrove declared on social media. “I am here to tell you guys that the exploitation of minor leaguers is done. We are coming together, and we are going to make sure that you guys are treated as the elite athletes that you are.”

Flash forward to last week. Each member of the Advocates for Minor Leaguers staff resigned to take on a new role working for the MLB Players’ Association, which had been selected to represent minor leaguers in collective bargaining with their MLB corporate overlords.

Flash forward to Tuesday. The MLBPA requested formal recognition from MLB with “a significant majority” of minor leaguers authorizing the union to become their collective bargaining representative and to create their own minor league bargaining unit.

The most remarkable element of the race to unionize minor league baseball is how quickly it was run.

In a matter of years, the less savory elements of minor league working conditions have become well-known outside the industry. Most minor league players work second jobs because their in-season pay isn’t enough to make ends meet. Until last year, players were required to pay all or part of their rent, and in many cases secure their own living arrangements for the season.

While providing nutritious meals at the ballpark improved in recent years, that wasn’t true across the board. One team, the Angels, fed players 800-1,200 calories of food a day at their California League affiliate but expected players to consume more than three times that amount.

To understand how those conditions catalyzed the formation of a union, it helps to go beyond baseball. Begin with the state of the world at large in March 2020, when Advocates For Minor Leaguers was formed.

“With the pandemic, we saw a rise in the cost of commodities,” said Jake Wilson, a professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach who studies organized labor. “Food costs came up. A lot of people lost their jobs. A shock to the economic systems. Travel, the delivery of goods, supply chains ― all of these began to impact other parts of the economy. Fuel, rent, food costs went up.

“All these things are happening at the same time. Globally you have a massive economic crisis. Everyday workers who are trying to survive, feed their families, have had enough.”

Unionizing might be the players’ ultimate power move, but it is far from their only prong of attack.

In March, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced plans to legislate MLB’s antitrust exemption out of existence. In June, the Justice Department asked a federal court to limit the scope of MLB’s antitrust exemption. This motion was reportedly sparked by a lawsuit brought by three minor league teams among more than 40 phased out of affiliated baseball by MLB in Dec. 2020.

A federal class-action lawsuit filed in Feb. 2014 finally settled in July, when MLB established a non-reversionary fund worth $185 million for minor leaguers seeking wage restitution.

Now, with 5,400 active minor league players joining the counterattack, it’s been speculated that MLB might once again threaten to eliminate teams ― and, by extension, player jobs ― from affiliated baseball.

Wilson thinks this threat could fall apart quickly.

“It’s an anti-labor threat straight out of the anti-union handbook that it will mean loss of jobs,” he said. “There’s so much money being taken straight out the top of this, it’s disingenuous that owners will not make a profit if there are more wages at the bottom.

“It’s about educating workers: Major League Baseball has already upended the minor league system more than once by eliminating small market teams, and other things they’ve done. If workers are united in this ― and this includes the big leaguers stepping up ― Major League Baseball could have a big problem on its hands.”

Wilson believes the idea of major leaguers publicly advocating for minor leaguers is essential, not tangential, to a successful outcome. Minor league players could have chosen any union to represent them in collective bargaining, and the MLBPA has not always made minor leaguers’ financial interests a priority.

For example, while the union has ensured its members fair compensation in exchange for “MLB The Show” representing their names, images and likenesses, it did not secure royalties for minor leaguers when their personae populated the 2020 version of the video game.

More broadly, MLB negotiators might pit major leaguers against minor leaguers by claiming both parties can only be compensated out of the same pie: For every slice that goes to minor leaguers, another must be taken from the major leaguers.

But this ignores the many revenue streams available to the league, and the complex ways in which those revenues are distributed to players. The simple counterargument for minor leaguers: why not expand the pie?

The new players’ union, Wilson said, will feature “separate contracts with separate bargaining teams.” The separate contracts aren’t inherently in conflict with each other.