Minor League Baseball players lose
Congress gave the boys of summer a pay cut
Baseball has long been identified as America’s national pastime — the quintessential American game. It has often reflected our culture and society, from Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier during the civil rights movement to rising immigrant participation in the game as our population becomes more diverse.
Sadly, as the new baseball season starts, the sport now reflects a very negative trend — the growing inequality and outsize influence of powerful, moneyed corporate interests in our political system. In a provision buried on page 1,967 of the new law to fund the government that passed last week with bipartisan support, Congress rolled back basic workplace protections for Minor League Baseball players.
The team owners who make up Major League Baseball had spent more than two years and more than $1 million lobbying Congress and the White House to exempt themselves from having to pay minor league players minimum wage and overtime. Just as it has so many times in the past 15 months, the Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump administration made sure billionaires got what they wanted.
Some may not feel their heartstrings tugged by a plea for fairness for professional athletes, whom they assume are overpaid and able to look out for themselves. But many of the minor league players affected by this shady deal have much more in common with other lowwage workers on the losing end of the Republican agenda than with their major league brethren. Among the more than 6,000 minor league players, some make as little as $1,100 a month.
This new provision would let major league team owners pay minor leaguers as little as $1,160 a month for a 40-hour week. But there’s no cap on how many hours they could be required to work, no overtime pay, and thus no bottom on their hourly wage. These minor league players share much with the 4.2 million people, many of them retail and fast food workers, who would have benefited from the Obama administration’s expansion of overtime. That change is currently on hold because of corporatebacked litigation and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s reservations.
To see the depth of the connection between these minor league players and the millions of other workers harmed by the pro-business bias of the Trump administration, you need only look to who benefits from this rollback of rights. Once again, the 1% come out ahead of the 99%. Major League Baseball brought in revenue of more than $10 billion last year. Paying minor league players a living wage would cost owners approximately $7.5 million a year, by one estimate. Yet Congress acceded to their complaint that they couldn’t find that small sum.
This is the same Republican Congress that gave billions of dollars of permanent tax cuts to corporate America and a small fraction of that in temporary cuts to workers; and the same Republican administration that reversed previous Justice Department positions in two major Supreme Court cases to undermine the power of workers in the workplace. Together, they have rolled back Obama-era regulations that protected the wages, retirement security and safety of middle class workers in accordance with a corporate wish list.
I am an avid Nationals fan and usually get very excited for Opening Day. This year, however, I’m a little less excited to see my favorite player, Anthony Rendon, and his teammates begin their chase for that elusive World Series title. I plan to spend less time watching the Nationals because I can’t shake the feeling that my support for the game I love undermines the well-being of the workers I care about and respect.
Just because the law now allows Major League owners to shortchange the players on their farm teams doesn’t mean they have to do so. I hope some of these wealthy owners will think about the real lives of players in their Minor League systems and do the right thing by paying them — at the very least — a wage they can live on.