The last three years have been good to Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants, who won two World Series crowns and emerged as a contender to win another in 2013. But they haven’t been as good to the roughly 800 workers who staff AT&T Park, the ballpark on San Francisco Bay the Giants call home.

Those workers, who staff AT&T Park’s concession stands, restaurants, and kitchens, haven’t had a pay increase since their contract with Centerplate, the company that staffs and maintains concessions at the stadium, expired in 2009. The workers, affiliated with Unite HERE Local 2, say negotiations have stalled, leading them to authorize a strike in a vote held across the street from the stadium Saturday afternoon.

The vote won’t automatically result in a strike; rather, it gives the union the choice to begin one at a later date. Both sides are set to return to the bargaining table this week for their sixth round of negotiations — and workers will continue to fight for pay increases and against changes to their health care and pension plans, they told ThinkProgress.

“I started here in 2010, and I haven’t seen a raise since I got here,” Anthony Wendlberger, a kitchen worker at AT&T Park said. “We’re not asking for an extravagant lifestyle. Just the basics. And a little respect.”

Negotiations center on three major issues, according to workers and union officials. Workers want pay increases they haven’t received for more than three years, and they are fighting changes to their pensions and health care coverage. They also want increased job security from the Giants in case the franchise doesn’t renew its contract with Centerplate. That would come in the form of a “successorship clause.”

The average AT&T Park employee earns $11,000 a year, according to union officials. The jobs are seasonal, and many hold second jobs, but they receive their health care through Centerplate. Under the current plan, a worker who staffs 10 events in a month receives health care for the next month, but Centerplate wants to increase that to 12 events per month under a new contract, workers said (A Centerplate spokesperson would not confirm that detail). That would make it impossible to obtain health coverage in months like June, when the Giants have just nine home games, and making health care harder to obtain is a major sticking point for the workers.

Gina Antonini, a spokesperson for Centerplate, said the company viewed the strike vote as an “unfortunate step” in the process, adding that it remains “confident the situation can be resolved at the bargaining table.” While Antonini would not offer specific details of Centerplate’s offer, she said it would “provide a pay increase that would keep the workers among the highest paid in the industry.”

Giants’ workers start at $10.45 an hour for their first 50 games and make between $13.52 and $19.44 an hour after that, according to Unite HERE. But in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of living is among the most expensive in the nation, being among the highest paid in the industry doesn’t mean as much as it would in other cities. Wendlberger said he doesn’t make enough to live in San Francisco; instead, he lives near Sacramento, a two-hour drive without traffic. “A lot of times, I might not go home” after games, he said, even though he has a wife and two young children at home. “Gas is expensive, so I stay with my brother or my mom.”

“Some people are saying we’re being greedy,” Wendlberger said. “We’ve got members living in public housing, we’ve got people on public assistance. There’s nothing greedy about wanting a basic lifestyle.”

The ultimate fight may not be with Centerplate but with the Giants franchise, which takes 55 percent of all concession sales, according to Unite HERE. On a $10 concession sale, the Giants’ cut amounts to $5.50, while workers’ salaries and benefits and operational costs are covered by the remaining $4.50. That money “goes straight into their pockets,” Patricia Ramirez, a kitchen worker who has worked Giants games for 13 years, said.

A Unite HERE release said the Giants team value has risen by 40 percent in the last three years, and concession and ticket prices have risen during that time too. Even reducing their share of each sale by 50 cents “would be huge,” Wendlberger said.

“We feel a major part is how much the Giants are taking, and I feel like it would be different if they would just step up to the plate and do the right thing,” he said. “We work for the Giants and their fans.”

“The Giants are the ones with the deeper pockets, the ones who could help,” Ramirez said.

Ultimately, Wendlberger said, the workers are hoping to avoid a strike, a sentiment Centerplate echoed in a Friday release calling on the union to “come to the table to find a solution that is win-win for both sides.”

“None of us want to strike,” Wendlberger said. “We enjoy our jobs. We want our jobs. We just need the basics.”

The Detroit Tigers in March signed All-Star pitcher Justin Verlander to a contract that will pay him about $180 million over the next seven years, a record sum for a Major League pitcher and an amount that has Slate’s Edward McClelland rethinking his love of both his favorite team and the game itself. Verlander’s salary, and the rising salaries of other players, McClelland writes, “reveals everything that’s wrong with the American financial system.”

It doesn’t take long for McClelland to go off the rails, though, since his main thesis is quite misguided:

Over the past 40 years—the period of rising economic inequality that former Slate columnist Timothy Noah called “The Great Divergence”—Americans’ incomes have not grown at all, in real dollars. But baseball players’ incomes have increased twentyfold in real dollars: the average major-league salary in 2012 was $3,213,479. The income gap between ballplayers and their fans closely resembles the rising gap between CEOs and their employees, which grew during the same period from roughly 25-to-1 to 380-to-1.

Attempting to compare baseball players to CEOs gets wrong the dynamics of baseball’s labor market. Players aren’t CEOs — they don’t control the purse strings or the contracts or the benefits or the labor situation. They are the workers, the people on whose backs the company’s profits are built. There might be some argument in which comparing the growth in player salaries to the lack of growth in wages for the average worker is relevant, but it isn’t this one, because workers and players are ultimately on the same side of the equation.

Given that the most fundamental piece of McClelland’s argument is based on a fallacious comparison, it’s little surprise that he totally bungles the next point he tries to make:

I’m singling out professional athletes for my class envy because they’re the highest-profile beneficiaries of changes that have enriched those at the top of the economic order while impoverishing those at the bottom. The labor policies of the mid-20th century depressed the price of skilled labor while inflating the price of unskilled labor. Athletes’ bargaining power was constrained by the reserve clause, which tied a player’s rights to a single team for his entire career. At the other end of the labor market, unions represented 35 percent of private-sector workers and had their own political arm in the Democratic Party.

The deregulation of the American economy that began in the 1970s has increased the salaries of professional athletes enormously while reducing those of blue-collar workers. In 1975, pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos appealed to arbitrator Peter Seitz to strike down baseball’s reserve clause and allow them to sell their services to the highest bidder. The Seitz decision, which was upheld by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, began the era of free agency in professional sports. After increasing arithmetically for the first three-quarters of the century, salaries rose geometrically during the past 25 years of the 1900s and have continued to balloon in the 2000s.

Because the reserve clause was eliminated at the insistence of the Major League Baseball Players Association, the Seitz decision is considered a victory for organized labor. It wasn’t. It was a victory for the laissez-faire marketplace.

The Seitz decision is considered a victory for organized labor because it was a victory for organized labor. The reserve clause existed solely for the protection of ownership — baseball’s corporate class. It restricted player movement and suppressed salaries, since players couldn’t receive more than a set raise from their teams and couldn’t offer their services to other teams who might pay them more. It restricted worker rights and labor movement and kept the share of money players received artificially low, and the only reason it lasted as long as it did was because the federal government granted Major League Baseball an antitrust exemption that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1972.

The Seitz decision, though, gave baseball’s players — its working class — the right to negotiate fair salaries and the ability to gain a fairer share of the revenues and profits they helped create. Abolishing the clause gave the players a voice in the system and allowed them to share in the riches as baseball blossomed into a major business over the ensuing decades. It ushered in an era of unprecedented rights for ballplayers, something McClelland would seem to enjoy, given his concern for stagnant wages and declining unionzation rates for average workers even as the CEO class continues to prosper. Arguing that the reserve clause was a good thing that might need to make a comeback isn’t just the ultimate #slatepitch, it also undermines everything McClelland seems to be in favor of in the labor-business dynamic.

McClelland holds the belief, one with which I agree, that it is problematic that the wages of average workers have stagnated even as executive compensation has risen dramatically, and that the decline in unionization has played a major role in the struggles of the American worker over the last several decades. But baseball’s labor fights, and those in other sports, are similar in dynamic to labor fights at Caterpillar or ConEd or any other business, and rising baseball salaries (which, I might add, aren’t rising as a share of total revenues) are much closer to the ideal than the problem. A strong union has ensured that players are sharing in the prosperity they help create. The problem is that other workers haven’t been able to do the same.

On Friday 42, the big-screen treatment of Jackie Robinson starring Chadwick Boseman as the player who integrated Major League Baseball and Branch Rickey as the man who gave him the contract to do it, hits theaters. Unfortunately, what could have been a nuanced and complex exploration of racism and the role of sports in progressive movements and American life at large is a cliched, hackneyed mess that exists more to lionize Branch Rickey than to explore the real journey to desegregating America’s game. ThinkProgress sports columnist Travis Waldron and I saw 42 together, and discuss the problems with the movie’s treatment of history—as well as with its acting and writing—here:

Hi Travis,

On Wednesday, you and I headed out to see 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic that might be better titled The Oracular Pronouncements Of The Sainted Branch Rickey. I think we both walked out of the theater thinking that it was a terrible movie: there’s no human moment the script can’t resist immediately quashing with cliched oratory, and with a few exceptions, it seems to have some real anxieties about portraying the uglier side of racism.

I want to talk about all of those things, but I thought we should start with the one thing the movie got right: the economics of bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues. “New York is full of Negro baseball fans,” Rickey (Harrison Ford, overacting so dramatically I’m amazed he isn’t sponsored by the ham council) tells his assistant Harold at the beginning of the movie. “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.” When a gas station attendant refuses Robinson access to the toilet when his Negro League team is on the Deep South, Robinson blackmails him into desegregating it by suggesting the team can buy its gas elsewhere. “Jack, is this about politics?” a white reporter asks him at his first spring training. “It’s about getting paid,” Jackie (Chadwick Boseman, who might have had a star turn with a better script) tells him. “I’m in the baseball business,” Rickey tells Robinson at a later point. “With you and the other black players I hope to bring up next year, I can build a team that can win the World Series. And a World Series means money.” Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (a fantastic Christopher Meloni) lectures his players, some of whom oppose the idea of playing with Robinson, “I’ll play an elephant if it’ll help us win…We’re playing for money, here. Winning is the only thing that matters.” Durocher himself is suspended from baseball when the Catholic Youth Organization threatens to boycott the league over his affair with a married actress. Even the racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman (a very strong Alan Tudyk) recognizes the economic imperatives, taunting Robinson at the plate “You’re here to get the nigger dollars for Rickey at the gate.”

That economic imperative story is interesting, and it’s important—and it’s a critical reminder that the decision to desegregate baseball wasn’t simply done out of the goodness of Branch Rickey’s heart. I actually wonder if that’s one of the reasons we haven’t seen an out player in professional sports, yet. Unlike with black players and black fans, who were visibly excluded from the game, and who represented a clear pool of both ticket dollars and playing talent that were shut out of sports, it’s not as if there are alternate gay leagues and alternate gay fan bases that are visible to mainstream sports and mainstream executives.

But it’s a story that pretty much gets smothered in sentiment. What did you think? I’m particularly curious what your reaction was to the way 42 presents how Robinson’s teammates came around to his presence on the club.

Cheers,
Alyssa
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Now that Easter weekend is behind us, the first real sign of spring is here. America’s national pastime is back, as Major League Baseball’s 2013 season began today. Baseball, once a bastion of labor strife and work stoppages, is starting the season on-time for the 18th consecutive year, and the game itself is healthier than ever.

Still, there are interesting issues and storylines facing the game that don’t involve whether the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees will miss the playoffs or whether the Washington Nationals can win the World Series. Here are five issues I’ll be following throughout the season:

1. The Miami Marlins: You won’t actually want to watch the Miami Marlins play baseball, because chances are they won’t be very good. But the Marlins were one of the biggest stories for all the wrong reasons this offseason. In 2012, the Marlins opened a brand new taxpayer-funded stadium that Miamians didn’t want, loaded up their roster with expensive talent, and limped to a disappointing last place finish in the National League East. Then they shipped all of that high-priced talent to Toronto for virtually nothing in exchange, infuriating the fan base and becoming the epitome of cronyism in sports. If you choose not to pay attention to the Marlins, you won’t be alone: their season ticket sale was barely attended. Still, perhaps no franchise in sports serves as a better lesson for the pitfalls of public financing than owner Jeff Loria’s: the stadium he wrenched from the city will ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion to fund, and he doesn’t seem to be following up on his promise to put a winning product on the field in return. The Marlins are also under the watchful eye of the MLB Players Association, which is concerned that it may have violated baseball’s collective bargaining agreement by purging its payroll.

2. Kim Ng and gender diversity: Major League Baseball’s Senior Vice President for Operations, Kim Ng stands the best chance of cracking the game’s glass ceiling and becoming the first female general manager in American professional sports history. Ng (pronounced ANG) got her start in baseball in 1995 working for the Chicago White Sox. She’s since worked as an assistant general manager for the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers and has interviewed for GM positions with the Los Angeles Angels, the Seattle Mariners, and the San Diego Padres. Opening Day is a touch early to speculate about teams failing and firing their existing GMs, but Ng appears determined to one day lead a Major League front office, and she’ll likely be on the list for any club that has a vacancy later this year. Whether it’s Ng or not, baseball needs to get better about hiring women into positions of power. While it received an A grade for race hiring in 2012, its gender hiring grade fell to a C+ from a B- in 2011 and a B in 2010.

3. Performance enhancing drugs: The Miami New Times sent shockwaves through baseball early this year when it linked New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and dozens of other players to a peddler of performance enhancing drugs in Miami. Suspensions may be forthcoming, but the most interesting question is how baseball will address drug use going forward, not how it deals with what has already passed. The knee-jerk response to the New Times story was to call on baseball to institute tougher testing, but with so little evidence that drug testing acts as a deterrent to use at any level of sports, more testing might not be the solution people in baseball are looking for.

4. Revenue sharing: Baseball’s revenue sharing model came under scrutiny when the Marlins dumped payroll in the offseason; it has come under more since it was revealed that the Houston Astros will pay less for their entire roster than the Yankees do for a single player. Revenue sharing has helped improve parity, allowing smaller teams a better chance to compete with the big boys. But it has also allowed some smaller teams to pocket cash without attempting to compete. During 2011 collective bargaining negotiations, the union won tweaks to the model that force teams that benefit from revenue sharing to pour much of the money back into salaries. But whether they are is still in question, especially given the situations in both Houston and Miami. There are disputes over whether revenue sharing has been good or bad for players, and the union is monitoring the Marlins’ offseason payroll dump to see if it violated the league’s labor contract. Even if it didn’t, the ongoing debate about baseball’s revenue sharing model is sure to remain an issue as the new formula becomes clearer in the second season since it was changed.

5. Player safety: Football has taken the brunt of scrutiny over protecting players, but baseball has had its own debates too. Baseball has made huge strides in tackling safety issues regarding broken bats with new regulations that have made the game safer, but as mentioned above, it still faces questions about steroids and drug use. The debate also includes head injuries, which, while rare, still occur. Baseball now requires base coaches to wear helmets after a minor league coach was killed by a line drive in 2007, and after Oakland A’s pitcher Brandon McCarthy was severely injured by a line drive and Detroit Tigers pitcher Doug Fister took a liner to the head during the World Series, the league debated requiring pitchers to wear padded caps on the field this year. That proposal hasn’t been approved, but while head injuries from both batted balls and collisions remain rare, future incidents could revive questions about how to ensure players are as safe as possible on the field.

The Miami New Times published a bombshell investigative piece this morning that tied multiple Major League Baseball players, including New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, to a Miami drug company that was supplying them with anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and other performance enhancing drugs. The story of Biogenesis, the drug firm, and Rodriguez, who admitted to steroid use before, brought back an ugly issue baseball thought it had largely put behind it when it instituted strong drug testing and harsh penalties in 2004.

The response, of course, has been an immediate call for more testing and harsher penalties. But here’s a question few seem to be asking: do drug tests and harsh penalties deter drug use? And if they don’t, how will more drug tests and even harsher penalties do any better?

In baseball, that’s impossible to know definitively, since there are no before-and-after testing numbers. But academic research suggests that random drug testing probably doesn’t prevent drug use. Dr. Linn Goldberg testified during a House Oversight Committee last month that his two-year testing of high school athletes had no deterrent effect. Other academic research has found that “testing alone is not a sufficient deterrent to eliminate drug use among college athletes.” Research into random testing for drugs like marijuana, meanwhile, has found little proof that such testing prevents use.

If Rodriguez, who had already admitted to steroid use once, indeed used performance enhancing drugs again, drug testing and the threat of penalties and public shame obviously failed as a deterrent. Random tests and the threat of rescinded titles, a lifetime ban, and federal punishment didn’t stop Lance Armstrong, and harsh rules and penalties in professional cycling and the Olympics haven’t prevented numerous athletes from using performance enhancers.

It’s easy to suggest that drug testing acts as a deterrent and that more of it would prevent even more use, but it’s hard to find proof of how effective drug tests are at actually preventing use. I’m not sure what the solution to sports’ drug problem is. I’m not even sure there is one, especially if the technology and funding that goes into producing performance enhancing drugs continues to outpace the technology and funding that goes into testing for them. But before we rush to the intuitive “more testing, harsher penalties” solution, shouldn’t we first figure out if the testing that is being conducted now does any good?

Marvin Miller, the labor leader who built the Major League Baseball Players Association into sports’ most powerful union, died today. He was 95.

You won’t find Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t among the game’s most important figures. The Babe Ruth of labor negotiations, Miller took over a weak union in 1966 and immediately turned it into a force that would be modeled in other sports thereafter.

Miller led the union through a total of five work stoppages and, as adviser to the MLBPA, worked alongside it during three more. His victories were numerous. He led baseball players into the first collectively bargained contract in professional sports history in 1968; in 1972, he led the first major players’ strike in the history of American professional sports. Later that year, he led former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s unsuccessful challenge of the reserve clause, the rule that gave owners sole control over player contracts and movement. In 1975, baseball’s independent arbitrator — who existed because of a union victory — invalidated the reserve clause in response to another Miller-led challenge, paving the way for free agency that gave players labor rights they had never had before.

Free agency ensured that baseball’s players wouldn’t be excluded from the new-found prosperity that came from television contracts. When Miller took over the union in 1966, the average salary was just $14,000. By 1976, it had grown to $52,000 and the next year, star players like Reggie Jackson received multimillion-dollar contracts. The rise in salaries bolstered the players’ once-meager pension plan, making it the real retirement program they had long sought. By the time he retired in 1982, the average salary was up to $245,000; on the day of his death, it exceeded $2.3 million.

Critics of professional sports often point to the astronomical salaries players now receive. Those are, in part, Miller’s doing, but that is a point to praise, not to criticize. Miller recognized that the labor of the athletes he represented had substantial value, and a $6,000 minimum salary that hadn’t moved in nearly two decades wasn’t close to meeting it. It was Miller who convinced players to think like union workers (he came from the steelworkers union) who had extracted better salaries and benefits from corporate owners in other industries; it was Miller who got players to hold firm during fights for their rights. It was Miller who, when players were angry at Flood for disrupting the status quo, eventually coalesced them behind the idea that they weren’t just lucky to play a boy’s game for a living, but that they had worth and rights and that neither was being honored by baseball’s employment structure.

His victories resonated both inside and outside baseball, which today is home not just to the strongest union in sports but perhaps the strongest union in America. The 1981 strike he led and the 1994 World Series-cancelling strike that followed still stand as models of solidarity and determination; rather than break the union, the ’94 strike seemingly broke owners, who finally realized they would have to negotiate in good faith. After labor disputes ground baseball to a halt eight times between 1972 and 1995, the sport hasn’t had a work stoppage since. Miller is gone, but the union that has made baseball prosperous for both owners and players today is built on the foundations he put in place.

“All players – past, present and future – owe a debt of gratitude to Marvin, and his influence transcends baseball,” MLBPA director Michael Weiner said in a statement. “Marvin, without question, is largely responsible for ushering in the modern era of sports, which has resulted in tremendous benefits to players, owners and fans of all sports.”

Miller’s victories spurred labor movements in the other major American sports, leaving a legacy that today makes sports one of the labor movement’s strongest fronts. It isn’t implausible to think that without him, sports today would be union-free games where the labor didn’t share in the prosperity gained by the corporate class. Even if baseball owners never get over themselves and put Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, his legacy will stand among the giants of sports. Marvin Miller didn’t just change baseball. He made all of our sports better games.

On July 1, 2009, Major League Baseball’s Florida Marlins were cruising toward a second-place finish in the National League’s East division. The same day, county commissioners in Miami-Dade County finally approved a package that would give the team public funding for a new stadium — $409 million in public bonds, to be precise — ending a struggle that had lasted nearly five years.

On April 4, 2012, Marlins Park opened, and the franchise that had won two World Series titles but hadn’t fielded a playoff team since 2003 was starting over. They were now the Miami Marlins, replete with a new stadium, new uniforms, and a host of new faces. Owner Jeff Loria, banking on big revenues from his shiny new stadium digs, had spent big, bringing in All-Stars like Jose Reyes and Mark Buerhle to give his fans a contender.

Last night, after the once-promising Marlins failed to contend for the East Division title and finished in last place, the team traded its best players — Reyes, Buerhle, and star pitcher Josh Johnson — to the Toronto Blue Jays in a lopsided deal that, combined with earlier trades of star third baseman Hanley Ramirez and closer Heath Bell, will almost assuredly keep the Marlins in the National League basement next year.

It turns out the promises Loria made to fans — that he’d spend the money it took to turn the Marlins into a contender — in order to secure a stadium deal were emptier than Marlins Park was all season.

From the start, Marlins Park has been a disaster. Negotiations between the Marlins, Miami, and Florida’s state government repeatedly broke down between 2004, when a new stadium was first proposed, and 2009, when a project was finally approved. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that attempted to put the funding plan to a popular vote, and once a deal was approved, the initial bond sale fell far short of expectations on Wall Street.

In the end, the cost of the stadium rose to $634 million. All told, the cost of repaying the bonds will be an estimated $2.4 billion over the next 40 years. The stadium deal, and leaks of official documents detailing franchise profits that indicated a higher value than the team had let on during negotiations (and that owners had pocketed revenue-sharing money), led to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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