On April 3, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association agreed to the first-ever collective bargaining agreement covering minor league baseball players. As I previously discussed, this was only about seven months after the minor league players joined the union and MLB agreed to voluntarily recognize the Players Association as their bargaining representative.
The unionization effort and resultant contract followed years of acrimony between minor league players and MLB concerning what the players regarded as inadequate wages and living conditions. In 2015, minor league players, led by Aaron Senne, filed a class/collective action against MLB and its clubs, alleging they had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and various state wage-hour laws by failing to pay the players the minimum wage and overtime. In March 2023, a judge approved a $185 million settlement in that case.
In the midst of that litigation, MLB successfully lobbied Congress for a partial exemption from the FLSA. In March 2018, as part of an omnibus spending bill, Congress amended the FLSA to exempt the following class of employees from its protections:
any employee employed to play baseball who is compensated pursuant to a contract that provides for a weekly salary for services performed during the league's championship season (but not spring training or the off season) at a rate that is not less than a weekly salary equal to the minimum wage under section 206(a) of this title for a workweek of 40...
This story is the second in an ongoing series on the Cost of Fraud, as Open the Books tallies the hidden fees on American tax returns. Click here to read the first story on fraudulent autism billi...