Friday, August 16, 2002
Union has taken advantage of owners' missteps
By John Byczkowski, jbyczkowski@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
If professional baseball players flex their muscles by striking against Major League Baseball, they'll shut down an industry with $3.5 billion in revenues, with more than 76 million paying customers across 28 cities in two countries.
To some, that makes the Major League Baseball Players Association very powerful. “They are certainly the strongest of the unions in professional sports, and maybe the strongest union anywhere in the United States,” said Robert Manfred, Major League Baseball's chief labor negotiator.
His boss, Commissioner Bud Selig, won't argue: “Many say that. It's not an unfounded observation, let's put it that way.”
Former commissioner Fay Vincent asks, if not them, then who? “Which union is more powerful?” he said. “There's no union in my judgment that's got the kind of financial power these guys do.”
This portrayal just amuses Donald Fehr, the union's current leader, and Marvin Miller, Mr. Fehr's mentor and the man who negotiated the union's first collective bargaining agreement in 1968. Both laughed at the suggestion.
It's no wonder Mr. Selig and Mr. Vincent feel this way. Both have tire tracks on their backsides from having been run over by the MLBPA. Since 1968 the players have gained free agency, salary arbitration and the right to file grievances before an impartial arbitrator. Since 1972 there have been eight work stoppages in baseball — five strikes and three lockouts — and each time it's the players who have emerged victorious.
But other unions have the power to bring the economy to its knees, not just a single company or industry. Take the case of the Teamsters and United Parcel Service, the nation's largest package-delivery company with $30 billion in annual revenue. The Teamsters represent 230,000 UPS employees.
A strike in 1997 shut down package delivery for 15 days, cost UPS $750 million in lost sales, and slowed commerce nationwide. Heading for a July 31 strike date this year, the number of UPS packages shipped in June and July fell by more than 4 percent, as customers bolted for Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service. An agreement was reached July 15, averting a strike and winning increases in wages and benefits for employees.
For labor leaders like Dan Radford, executive secretary-treasurer of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council, the Teamsters' new contract dwarfs the impact of baseball. Mr. Radford says that as unions, the Teamsters and United Auto Workers are more powerful and influential.
The players simply don't have much in common with the rest of organized labor, says James Dworkin, chancellor at Purdue University North Central in Westville, Ind., and a professor of industrial relations. “I don't think that there's all that much solidarity between the coal miners in West Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky that aren't making $2.3 million a year” and the players, he says.
“I think if you were a strategist for organized labor, what just happened between the Teamsters and UPS would mean a lot more to you than what's happening in professional baseball. That could set a tone for other contractual negotiations. What happens in baseball could have an impact in football and hockey, but it's not going to set much of a precedence for postal workers or miners.”
Still, there's little question the Major League Baseball Players Association is one of the most successful unions in America.
In 1970, the average annual player's salary was $29,303. This season, the average is $2.3 million, and 413 players are paid $1 million or more.
“The main reason that people join unions in the United States is to improve their economic status,” says Paul Staudohar, an expert in labor negotiations at California State University, Hayward. “By that standard, there's no one even close to the baseball players' union in terms of achieving economic success. It's almost unheard of almost in the history of trade unionism in this country or in the world to have that kind of rapid increase.”
Chuck Korr, a professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and author of The End of Baseball As We Knew It, a history of the players' union, agrees: “The players union, in terms of what they've gotten for their members and in terms of the impact that they've had on their particular industry, they've certainly been the most effective and the most successful (union). I don't think there's any question that in the postwar period, they're the most successful labor union in America.”
Sen. Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher who helped create the modern players' union, says without boasting, “I think they have been the most successful negotiating group that ever, ever, ever represented any union.”
How the union became so successful and powerful has its roots in decades of poor treatment of the players by the owners. In the mid-1960s, the players' minimum salary was $6,000, a figure that had changed little in 20 years. Players received no salary during spring training, just $25 a week for expenses. And players had little control over their careers, as the “reserve clause” in their contracts bound players to one team for their working lives.
That began to change in 1966, when the union hired as its executive director Marvin Miller, a labor economist who had worked for the United Steel Workers union. Mr. Miller, who retired in 1983, said the union's small size, then about 500 players, allowed him to get to know the players, and at every opportunity he held meetings to educate the players about the union and their economic situation.
“I knew that the conditions of major-league players were miserable. I knew that they had so little in the way of employment rights that you almost could not fail, because anything you did would be a vast improvement,” Mr. Miller says. “It would be easy for players to see the difference between non-union and union.”
Mr. Miller says he focused on educating players about how the business of baseball worked. “Generations of players had been told this was a sport that didn't make money, that the owners were all sportsmen, that players were lucky to be there, and if they rocked the boat the owners would pick up their bats and balls and go home and that would be the end of baseball,” he says. “That kind of foolish propaganda was really easy to penetrate.”
Mr. Miller set out in 1966 to negotiate the union's first collective bargaining agreement. Because the union was certified as the players' bargaining representative, the owners were required by law to negotiate. The owners had never given the players much of anything and weren't prepared for what they faced in negotiations.
“I don't want to paint the owners as stupid, (but) they did do a lot of stupid things,” says Mr. Korr, the historian. “These guys suffered from the arrogance of unlimited power. They always had things their way. They had no reason to ever deal with the players. They had no reason to make concessions. They were incapable of making compromises.”
The players' goal in their first negotiation was “to be as organized as management,” Sen. Bunning says.
And then he laughed. “We didn't realize at the time that we were more organized than management. As time went on and Marvin worked his magic, we realized the owners were completely — completely — overmatched ... in knowledge of the labor law, in the ability to sit down and negotiate. They weren't even in the same league as Marvin.”
The first collective bargaining agreement in 1968 doubled the players' pension benefits, nearly doubled the minimum salary to $10,000, set up a grievance procedure and incorporated everything in the standard player's contract.
“The biggest victory that we ever had,” Mr. Bunning says, “was when Marvin was able to get the uniform players contract included in the basic agreement, thereafter allowing arbitration of all the rules and clauses in the uniform contract.” That, coupled with a new grievance procedure allowing players to challenge their contracts, set the stage for a cataclysm that would turn baseball on its head.
An arbitrator in 1975 sided with two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, who had challenged the reserve clause. His decision opened a truck-sized loophole in the reserve clause, allowing any player who worked one year without a signed contract to become a free agent — free to negotiate a contract with any team he wished.
The impact was immediate. From 1950-75, average player salaries grew at less than 2 percent per year, according to economist Andrew Zimbalist. From 1976 to 1991, average salaries grew almost 14 percent a year. Pitcher Nolan Ryan became the first $1 million player in 1979. Today, shortstop Alex Rodriguez earns $25 million a year.
But the owners get the credit — or the blame — for the players' solidarity. “The owners have mistreated the players,” Mr. Vincent says, citing the owners' collusion to hold down salaries 1986-88 as an example. That collusion was ruled a violation of the collective bargaining agreement, and the owners paid a $280 million settlement.
“I think that (Marvin) Miller originally portrayed the owners as bad people — these rich, bad, lying millionaires,” Mr. Vincent says. “That made the economic fight into a moral fight. Anytime you can bring an economic issue to a moral level, you make it very difficult to deal with it.
“The owners have cooperated in that. They've made the union very successful by cheating. So the union's always able to say to the players, "Look, these guys steal from you; they can't be trusted.' That keeps the players very well unified.”
“Solidarity gets built with two things: crisis and success,” Mr. Miller says. “There's been enough of both those things all along the way. The crises were not of our making. Success, I think, we have to take credit for.”
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Union has taken advantage of owners' missteps
