SAN FRANCISCO—Imagine you’re at a workplace where you make $3,000 over six months—and must work the other six for free. Where you work 50-70 hours over six days a week, and you don’t get overtime.
And a job where your boss can ship you to another employer at a moment’s notice, or ship you out. And where, to survive, you must room with five or six other guys—it’s an all-male worksite—in an apartment, and some of the guys bring wives and kids.
Welcome to the wonderful (?) world of minor league baseball. Those were the working conditions in baseball’s bush leagues that led ex-minor leaguer Dan Peltier to liken the minors to “indentured servitude of the 1700s.”
But all those conditions may be about to change. Definitely, money will.
Some 34 former minor leaguers, in a class action suit that took seven years to resolve, have reached a settlement with Major League Baseball, which effectively runs the minors, for what news services estimate is approximately $200 million restitution for years of unpaid overtime and minimum wage violations, all due to the bosses’ defiance of federal labor wage and hours law.
And in their case, which will be the subject of a July 11 settlement hearing at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the ex-players also may find out if they win not just on wages and working conditions of the past, but on their demand that the jurists ban MLB’s owners from imposing such exploitation on future generations of ballplayers.
Naturally, the...
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