Pearl River      Even though much of our union work and labor organizing focuses on lower waged and marginalized workers, both formal and informal, the organizing and bargaining challenges and issues of higher waged workers are an endless fascination.  Often, we think of the unions of airline pilots or the almost closed-shop unions of the pilots that navigate giant ships on the Mississippi into New Orleans or other ports with their low-to-mid six-figure wages scales as the aristocracy of labor.  Not so, it’s professional athletes in baseball, football, and basketball that are the top dogs, when it comes to unionized workers with great pay packages.  Even more amazingly in the light of most standard-issue collective bargaining, most of the collective agreements in professional sports set the minimum standards, still allowing athletes and their agents to achieve huge top line levels, with in some cases, the only limits being a team’s salary caps or their billionaire owner’s willingness to pay the penalties to break through those ceilings.

This all came to mind when I was reading about the current handwringing in this area in the Wall Street Journal, as they speculated on the uncertainty facing the baseball and football unions during the current leadership turnover.  On the baseball side, the executive director left with the agreement with the owners due to expire at the end of the current season and a likely lockout by the billionaire owners.  Tony Clark, lately of the MLBPA, left under the cloud of both an inappropriate relationship and possibly his oversight of union finances.  On the NFL side, Lloyd Howell, their ED, also quit based on an unresolved governmental investigation over improper enrichment.  The football owners want yet another game, expanding their opportunities to cash in. The baseball owners want a salary cap, similar to what already exists in basketball and football.

The chief negotiator for the baseball guys makes the case that “We don’t believe in a system that’s basically a zero-sum game that says, ‘If we pay you, we’ve got to take that out of the pocket of another player.’”  With a fixed pot for salaries, after which the billionaires would have to go into their own pockets, they have a point, but it might be more of an ideological point that an economic one.  The Los Angeles Dodgers generational Japanese star, Shohei Ohtani, and his team handled this by signing a record-breaking long-term contract where he is paid about $2 million a year, and the rest is deferred.

Professional sports workers are in the entertainment industry, where they know the size of the pot because of lengthy multi-billion-dollar media deals, and at the very top level what they might bring in a higher gate at games by making a team a winner and to show off their own skills.  Football is still soaring in popularity and worldwide appeal.  Baseball has fallen below basketball in favor.  They both face the problem of almost all collective bargaining situations where, like it or not, it is often a zero-sum game based on guesses on both sides of the table about whether the pie is fixed or expanding.

In almost all our bargaining there is effectively a salary cap.  It’s not fixed transparently in a pot, but an increase in wages often might mean a reduction elsewhere.  Recently, trying to implement a wage adjustment for parttime workers under one of our contracts meant waiting for some months to track employer revenue collections to allow partial distribution to implement the increase.  For most unions, this is why bargaining wage bumps relative to cost-of-living increases are so common, because the employer can assume prices or income inputs on their ledger will reflect inflation, just as workers want to at the least be held whole against inflation.  It’s not exactly zero-sum, but it kind of is, because the real net increases for workers in wage gains are less than the figures reflected in the scales.  Furthermore, in three-year contracts, unions are always betting that the wage scales don’t fall under the increases in the inflation rates with their members losing ground.

Don’t misunderstand me.  The MLBPA was the first great sports union and its ability to fight off salary caps over the last 30 years has been epic.  I’ll root for them wholeheartedly once again.  I’m just saying theirs is not a holy war.  Every union negotiator would love to sit in their chair, win or lose, on the so-called “salary cap” issue, because all contracts fight this problem in all bargaining, it’s just a matter of degree for the rest of us based on our union’s level of strength and leverage.