Baseball players in minors to lose minimum wage protection

Minor league baseball players who make as little as $5,500 a season would be stripped of the protection of federal minimum wage laws under a provision in government spending legislation expected to be approved by Congress this week.

The "Save America's Pastime Act" is included on page 1,967 of the $1.3 trillion spending bill and appears to pre-empt a lawsuit filed four years ago in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by three players alleging Major League Baseball and its teams violate the Fair Labor Standards Act and state minimum wage and overtime requirements for a work week they estimated at 50-to-60 hours.

The provision in the legislation would exempt "any employee employed to play baseball who is compensated pursuant to a contract that provides for a weekly salary for services performed during the league's championship season (but not spring training or the offseason) at a rate that is not less than a weekly salary equal to the minimum wage ... for a workweek of 40 hours, irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball related activities."

The House approved the spending bill Thursday and the legislation appears likely to be approved by the Senate and signed by President Donald Trump.

"Instead of going through the regular committee process where it has a hearing, all of this was done in secret and a in a very rushed manner," Garrett Broshuis, the lawyer for the players, said Thursday. "It's emblematic of how things are getting done in Washington these days, where the people with a lot of money are able to flex their political muscle and make a lot of contributions and get things done in secret that benefit only them."

Major League Baseball spent $1.32 million on lobbying expenses in both 2016 and 2017, up from $330,000 in 2015, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. MLB paid $400,000 each of those years to an outside firm, the Duberstein Group, which reported lobbying the House and Senate on the issue, as did MLB's in-house lobbyist.

"We aren't billionaire business owners and billionaire team owners," said Broshius, a minor league pitcher from 2004-09 who later became a lawyer.

The language in the spending bill is nearly identical to a standalone bill introduced in 2016 by Republican Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky and Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois. At the time, the pair said the exemption from minimum wage laws was necessary because without it, minor leagues would have to make cuts that could imperil teams and hurt the economy in cities where they play.