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Supreme Court Denies MLB Request To Dismiss Pay Increase Lawsuit With Minor Leagues

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On Monday the Supreme Court denied Major League Baseball’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of minor league players who are seeking compensation for past hours already worked. The case of Senne versus the Royals was originally filed back in 2014 on behalf of former minor league player Aaron Senne, who aimed to bring in thousands of past and present players to receive compensation for spring training that they were denied or paid salaries that were below the poverty line. 

Garrett Broshuis is the attorney and former minor league player who filed the initial lawsuit, and recently claimed that there’s “no reason for players to be making $7,500 or $8,000 for the year.” 

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“The ultimate goal is pretty simple: to get MLB to comply with the same laws that Walmart and McDonald’s comply with. Whenever they ask players to go to spring training, they should be paying their employees for it.”

This is a longstanding issue within minor league baseball. Players are often paid below minimum wage for their given numbers of hours worked. If the minor league season wasn’t cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, players who were considered to be Triple-A players were projected to be paid  $700 per week played, Double-A players $600, Class A players $500 and Rookie League and short-season players $400. Lower-level players in 2019 earned about $290 a week and even with some players receiving raises, some were paid less than $5,000 for a full season; a staggering amount when compared to their major league counterparts. 

In August 2019, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed the lawsuit to proceed as a class action suit which would allow former players to seek back pay that they are owed from previous seasons, and current players to receive compensation for the hours worked before the seasons cancellation. 

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The main issue lies in the minimum wage payments for these players. Back in 2018 lawmakers included the Save America’s Pastime Act in a $1.3 trillion spending bill. By including the Pastime Act in this bill, minor league players were directly stripped of their minimum wage protections, meaning their management could legally get away with paying them as little as they wanted. According to Broshuis, players typically are working 60 hours a week during an active season, and the law passing meant players could only be paid minimum wage for 40 hours a week.

“The law called for them to be paid minimum wage for 40 hours a week irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball-related activities. The Save America’s Pastime Act was a horrible act, it was a misnomer. There was never a need for it.”

The Ninth Circuit ruling allowed players located in California, Arizona, and Florida to join the class lawsuit. These states are the homes of dozens of minor league teams and spring training facilities. No players, including major league, are paid for their spring training, however, MLB players are able to negotiate a salary through the MLB Players Association, the minor league teams don’t have any sort of union in place to help them negotiate potential payments. 

The Professional Baseball Agreement between MLB and Minor League Baseball expired at the end of September this year, meaning the MLB will now likely take control over the minor leagues. This will potentially lead to a merger of unions as well and could give the minor league players the chance at renegotiating their working arrangements for future seasons.

Airplane Taking Off

With Airlines Expecting a Tenth Year of Profits, Employees Are Asking For Better Deals

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Thanks to the majority of United States airlines coming to the end of yet another profitable year – the tenth in a row – many of their employees are calling for bosses to provide improved remuneration packages.

Over 120,000 unionized employees will start negotiating their labor agreements that could potentially see major American carriers having higher expenses, including American Airlines who are starting to negotiate not only with pilots and flight attendants but maintenance workers too.

Currently airline companies spend the majority of their expenses on their labor costs with 28 percent of the overall $187 billion revenue being spent on labor costs, an increase of 21% in 2008 – mostly due to higher work forces and increased compensation payments.

Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants – who has around 50,000 cabin crew members from 20 different airlines, including United Airlines and is calling for flight attendants at Delta Airlines to also join the union – commented that “there are simply more funds to get and workers are cognizant they’re turning out more value.”

This is in stark contrast to ten years ago when many airlines were hit with bankruptcies alongside several megamergers leaving three quarters of the market in the control of four carriers.

However profits started to increase and experts have forecast a net income of under 1% for each of the four big airlines, which although does not sound much actually equates to $12.44 billion.

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Kit Darby tracks the pay rate of pilots and notes that “when the airlines are making money, it’s hard to deny the increase in compensation. Everybody tries to get a good contract when times are good. If it’s a short downturn, they hold on to what they got.”

With the news that profits are continuing to increase airports across the country have started to see protests as airline workers demand better schedules and working conditions as well as pay increases.

Executives at American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have attempted to have labor talks with their employees however they have laid the blame with the mechanics’ unions for delaying talks in an attempt to gain leverage, which in turn has caused operational issues that have led to thousands of flights being delayed or even canceled, although the unions have denied this.

In March of this year a resolution between Southwest and their mechanics ended six years of discussions with the new five-year contract including a 20 percent increase in wages as well as $160 million in back pay for employees.

However the airline’s discussions with their flight attendants is still continuing as well as their discussions with their customer service agents, dispatchers, and pilots. Most of the staff is concerned regarding the Boeing 737 Max still being grounded with the unions claiming the issue has caused employees to lose over $100 million in wages.

American Airlines are still in talks with their mechanics’ unions with the airline suing the unions in May due to the travel disruptions they were causing, winning an injunction that means they can no longer get involved in the airlines’ operations.

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Josh Freed, the spokesman for American Airlines, said “since August, teams for the company and the union have met for multiple days nearly every week” confirming that both groups have “made considerable progress” although further talks have already been scheduled for January.

Another issue is the fact that although unionized airline workers’ contracts are allowed to have the dates amended they do not expire, all contracts are valid beyond the finalized date and any negotiated raises will no longer be applied.

It is worth noting that employees are not only looking for extra wages with American airlines mechanics asking for the outsourcing of jobs to be limited, especially those to foreign companies. American Airlines pilots are also requesting improved scheduling to ensure a “better quality of life.”

Eric Ferguson, Allied Pilots Association President as well as an Airbus A320 captain agrees that “scheduling is our no. 1 issue.” The union has also requested that employees on the less-desirable flights receive higher wages as well as providing easier ways for the routes to be available to pilots. This should encourage the trips to be picked up by pilots, reducing the operational problems, which in turn would enable revenue and profits to increase and therefore be shared with the airline’s employees. However Ferguson wants to make it clear that the unions are not just saying “pay us more,” but that they want the airlines to “fix the problems” they already have.

The APA represents around 15,000 pilots and although talks started in the first half of 2019, the contract would not be amendable until the beginning of 2020. However the union are asking for 16% raises over a three-year deal. The airline has countered with the same increase but over five years.

Doug Parker, CEO of American Airlines, spoke at a meeting in June last year telling their pilots “shame on us if we can’t figure out over the course of a year how to get a contract done before the amendable date.”

Gender Inequality

Report Suggests Gender Equality Still a Century Away

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While the push for women’s equality has made substantial progress over the last several years, a new report released by the World Economic Forum suggests that civilization is still a long way away from ensuring equal treatment of the sexes. Entitled the “Global Gap Gender Report 2020,” the report analyzes 153 countries and ranks them according to how successfully they enable gender parity. While the report found many areas in which societies have made progress, such as ensuring that girls have access to educational resources in developing countries, it also remarks that the pace of progress has been slow, as only a handful of countries in the world were determined to even approach reaching full gender equality. The report predicts the milestone of achieving global gender parity to be 99 years in the future, with the areas of Economic Participation and Political Empowerment being where the gender gap will likely take the longest to close.

The countries ranked as the most gender-equal include Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, as the Nordic countries have some of the most progressive gender policies in the world. Finland, for instance, recently elected the world’s youngest female leader, Prime Minister Sanna Marin, and their Parliament contains an almost equal number of men and women. Finland and other Nordic countries also have policies like several months of paid parental leave, sophisticated sex education programs, and widespread access to abortion and birth control, which help to reduce the social gender gap in these countries. The World Economic Forum’s report focused on four main themes: economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment; and the Nordic countries were found to perform among the best in these areas.

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On the other end of the list, Middle-Eastern countries like Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen were ranked lowest. In these countries, according to the report, women’s rights are severely limited, particularly in the areas of “divorce, inheritance, asset ownership, access to justice and freedom of movement.” In some of these countries, women are almost entirely absent from political life, and the rates of literacy are much lower for women than for men as a result of unequal access to education. And when it comes to employment, women in these countries are routinely discriminated against, resulting in a low level of female involvement in the workforce.

Though different parts of the world are making progress in closing the gender gap at vastly different rates, the overall social gap between the genders is gradually narrowing, albeit very slowly. The report found that the world has almost achieved 100% gender parity in the categories of Health and Survival and Educational Attainment, but has only achieved 58% parity in Economic Participation and Opportunity and 25% parity in Political Empowerment, leaving the Global Gender Gap Index at a combined percentage of 69% of full parity between the sexes. The report stresses the urgency of increasing the pace of progress towards gender equality, saying, “without the equal inclusion of half the world’s talent, we will not be able to deliver on the promise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution of society [or] grow our economies for greater shared prosperity… at the present rate of change, it will take nearly a century to achieve parity, a timeline we simply cannot accept.”

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Even developed, industrialized countries like Japan display shocking deficiencies in the area of gender equality. Women in Japan, for instance, perform four times the amount of unpaid labor as men do, and despite government initiatives to expand female participation in the workplace, women often have difficulty advancing into senior work positions. There’s no question that the project of achieving gender equality is a difficult and complicated one, as gender issues stem from social, economic, and political factors, but countries like Finland show that with enough effort these barriers can in large part be overcome.

Labor Day

What Labor Day is Really About

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When most of us think of Labor Day, we think of back-to-school sales and having one last summer barbecue before the unofficial end of the season. But while many of us have a vague understanding that the federal holiday has to do with the labor rights movement in the United States, few of us fully appreciate the history behind the holiday, and how that history affects labor in this country today.

While the specific details about the origin of Labor Day have been disputed, the holiday traces its roots to the Industrial Revolution, a period of American history in which advances in technology had a substantial impact on society, as cities exploded in size and agricultural communities began to fade away. During the late 1800s, an increasing number of people worked in factories, mills, and mines. The working conditions for laborers in these fields was abysmal; the average American worker worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, just to make enough money to live. Additionally, these workers often lived in crowded, unsanitary, and unsafe tenement houses, which often lacked running water and other basic amenities. In the workplace, little concern was given to safety, as machinery had the potential to cause injuries, including dismemberment, and employees had little access to fresh air and breaks. Even worse, many of these employees were children, some as young as 5 years old.

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It was in the context of these living and working conditions that the labor movement began to emerge. Workers started to form unions, which would go on strike and rally in order to put pressure on employers to increase wages, reduce hours, and improve conditions. Employers were reluctant to take any actions that would cut into their profits, however, and resisted the demands of unions, oftentimes firing workers who organized and led unions or punishing them by other means. Occasionally, the tension between worker and employee would become so great that it would lead to violence, such as in the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which a number of Chicago workers and policemen were killed. The first Labor Day parade was held on September 5th, 1882, when 10,000 workers took time off from work to march from City Hall to Union Square in New York City.

The idea of a holiday to celebrate the working man, taking place on the first Monday in September, spread to industrial communities across the country, and several states passed laws recognizing the holiday. However, Congress did not recognize the holiday until 1894, after the American Railroad Union called for a boycott of all Pullman railway cars in order to protest wage cuts and the firing of representatives of the union. The federal government sent the military to Chicago in order to break the strike, which led to riots in which over a dozen workers died. In an attempt to reconcile with laborers in the aftermath of the violence, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill recognizing Labor Day as a federal holiday into law. The original founder of Labor Day remains unknown.

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Of course, the struggle to improve working conditions in America did not end there. Though Labor Day was recognized by the federal government by the end of the nineteenth century, that recognition was largely symbolic, as employers remained relatively free to treat their employees as poorly as they pleased without breaking the law. Workers continued to protest and lobby for legislation protecting their rights, and on September 3rd, 1916, the Adamson Act was passed, which established a standard eight-hour workday for railroad workers, with additional pay being required for overtime. After this law was passed, railway companies refused to follow it, claiming that it was unconstitutional, until the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law the following year. The success of this law led to similar efforts from other industries to pressure governments to pass legislation benefiting workers, and in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, which extended the eight-hour workday to other industries, created “time-and-a-half” pay for people who worked more than forty hours a week, established the right to a minimum wage, and placed restrictions on the type of work minors were allowed to do. 

Although a tremendous amount of progress has been made in securing workers’ rights, there are still areas that can be improved upon. Most notably, not every job pays time-and-a-half for overtime, as some industries and types of work are exempt from laws requiring employees to pay extra for hours beyond forty a week. Some jobs which have become popular in recent years, such as driving for Uber, lack the same protections of other jobs as workers are labelled as contractors rather than employees. And over the past several years, labor unions have been under an increasing amount of pressure, as only 10.5 percent of American workers belong to unions, whereas in the 1950s more than a third of American workers did. And, ironically, Labor Day is one of the busiest days for retail outlets, as many employees are expected to work overtime in order to meet demand created by sales. So this Labor Day, in between shopping, barbecuing, and picnicking, take some time to consider the history of the labor movement in this country.

Sources:

https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/labor-day-1

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/adamson-act

https://www.nelp.org/blog/this-week-in-labor-history-remembering-the-adamson-act/