Few things are an unalloyed good, other than dental anesthesia, and even then I’ve heard tell of people expiring in that big chair when they thought they were just going to have a cavity filled; you never think to say goodbye to your loved ones before having a cavity filled. For that matter, the “discovery” of ether as the means of painless extraction by William T. G. Morton brought him nothing but misery and litigation, and when the great director Preston Sturges made a film about Morton in 1944, it brought his incredible career to a slambang screeching halt. John Gray quotes the British 19th-century essayist Thomas De Quincy as saying that a quarter of all human misery is toothache, and that seems like a fair estimation, but then De Quincy also said that indigestion “is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else,” thereby contradicting himself. So we’ve got more problems than can be solved by painless dentistry and nothing is an unalloyed good, especially not labor unions, not even on Labor Day.
And yet, the Major League Baseball Players Association has been, if not perfect, a blessing to the game.
Saying something is imperfect isn’t the same as saying it’s not a good thing overall. For every story you might hear of someone not being able to change a light bulb because it goes against a collective bargaining agreement, there are another 12 guys not having their arms fed into industrial meat-grinders because of unsafe working conditions. That is perhaps an overly broad description of the labor-management relationship over time, but if you want to boil the essence of these kinds of regimes down to a very basic set of rules, it might go something like this:
1. When people exist in a state of nature, without any rules at all, Party A is free to bonk Party B over the head with a club. Laws and governments evolved so that Party B could get to the 7-11 and back without suffering cranial fractures or death. A state of nature is a bad thing insofar as human relationships go.
2. As humans made the transition from hunting/gathering and subsistence agriculture to capitalism, with bosses and employees, the state of nature was reborn, except that instead of being clubbed on the way to the 7-11, one was metaphorically clubbed by his employer, being required to work long hours in unsafe conditions for little pay. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln compared being a slaveholder to “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” The relationship of capital to labor early on wasn’t that different. If the foregoing seems like an exaggeration, let the sheer amount of anti-union violence in the 20th century stand for capital’s perception of unionization of a threat at exactly that level. Women and children were murdered, and the violence went on and on and on.
3. Unions and government regulation evolved to repair that imbalance, and there’s no reason to think that said imbalance would not revert without their existence. More than 15 years after the United States government’s first eight-hour workday law, reactionaries were still complaining that the country had gone Red. Unions were and are not immune to corruption, of course, but in a putative democracy any organ that gives a voice to the voiceless, that can counter the voice of wealth with a wealth of sound, is a good thing. What is hard is those with power accepting that those without may have some heretofore unsuspected leverage.
4. That said, as our economy has changed from being about the manufacture of things to the digital manipulation of wealth or the creation of virtual distractions, jobs not covered by or even conceived of by collective bargaining at the time of the unions’ greatest extent, the unions have lost power and become less relevant. That’s actually a net loss for everyone, because for those in low-income employment, the lack of a collective bargaining relationship with large companies such as Wal-Mart means that the cost of their healthcare and other basic needs gets off-shifted to everyone else, and even if you’re in a high-paying profession not normally associated with collective bargaining, it means you lack due-process rights that those in unions have: You can lose your job at any time, without appeal. Yes, those rights sometimes protect the incompetent, as with poor teachers, but it also means that once you have a job, you have the right to keep it so long as you perform and not lose it for some arbitrary reason that will send you crashing into bankruptcy.
Baseball players have those rights of job-related due process. Even Alex Rodriguez had them. You might not like Alex Rodriguez, but he has a contract and that contract couldn’t be voided, reduced, or otherwise altered without his getting a hearing. There is something wonderfully American about having the right to work, even if that’s not in our Constitution, even if such thoughts have often been labeled as Communist in the past. That’s something ballplayers have that the rest of us don’t.
Clayton Kershaw, baseball’s Tom Cruise equivalent — or one of several — catching some flies.(Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports )
Similarly, it may seem unfair that ballplayers are millionaires when teachers are often paupers, but Clayton Kershaw is no different from Tom Cruise — both are entertainers, both are indistinguishable from the product in the sense that you can’t have a Tom Cruise movie without Tom Cruise in it and you can’t get fans to come out to the ballpark to see Clayton Kershaw without Clayton Kershaw. Going further, you can’t have fans buy tickets to see Kershaw’s Dodgers play the Giants if both clubs don’t have a number of attractions with which to seduce the dollars out of millions of wallets. As such, baseball players get a more representative chunk of what they’re worth to their employers than do most other workers.
It wasn’t always like that. It wasn’t like that for most of baseball’s history. You often hear the term “gentlemen’s agreement” to refer to the unofficial official color line, but that wasn’t the only gentlemen’s agreement; it was also understood that a player could be punitively waived out of baseball. To continue with the Alex Rodriguez example, the general manager of the Yankees could have made it clear to his counterparts with other organizations that this A-Rod guy is bad news, needs to be taught a lesson, let him pass by you unclaimed. Players could see their salaries raised or cut at will, their contracts voided. The MLBPA helped put an end to all of that.
Yes, the rise of the MLBPA as a legitimate entity (its immediate predecessor was a paper tiger) gave the owners a conflict partner that they could not get to roll over and frequently could not comprehend. The intransigence of both sides, but in particular the owners, meant several stoppages, including the infamous 1994-1995 strike that led Bud Selig to cancel the World Series in the former year.
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That is the price we paid for the previous hundred years and a few truly reactionary individuals taking control of the game in a way that was no different than any other dispute about who gets the bigger slice of a pie. It in no way reflects negatively on the existence of the union, which has been a boon to the game. Here’s one way: In Killing the reserve clause, the union made free agency possible, and free agency in turn helped create parity. Now, for some parity is a dirty word, but before free agency and the amateur draft, teams were free to drift for decades at the back of the standings, claiming they didn’t have access to talent.
One of the many reasons that several of the game’s most revered records are such a joke is that Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and their successors played in an eight-team league, but in any given year at least a quarter of the teams just didn’t bother showing up. It was the Red Sox or the White Sox or the Browns at various times in the American League, the Phillies for about 30 years in the National League, plus transient others. Now we have the occasional planned implosion, such as the 2013 Astros, and whatever the daily whim of Jeff Loria seems to be, but for the most part the playing field is even, the excuses gone.
It’s difficult to say what the future of the American labor movement will be at a time when so much of what labor has traditionally represented has been taken over by machines. Even Google’s self-driving cars, now a novelty, will probably someday mean that when a taxi pulls over to pick you up you’ll say, “To the airport please” to a vacant space. For good or ill that’s another line of work gone extinct or at least vastly reduced. PitchF/X has amply demonstrated that the human eye cannot call the strike zone without the crutch of catcher framing. It’s fun to say “Robot umps now!”, but that too is another bit of labor replaced.
By the time the light of this column reaches your eyes, you will be through your barbeque and at least a few beers and I might have been replaced by a machine as well. Hell, the machine might be better — the old line about infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters eventually reproducing Shakespeare now seems entirely achievable. What they cannot do, however, at least not yet, is excite us like Yasiel Puig, Mike Trout, Bryce Harper. At a time in human history in which we have time to enjoy their work, that distraction is worth quite a bit, else we’d have a little less to look forward to. Every time the MLBPA kicks over something the owners do, remember that, and say a little prayer of thanks for Marvin Miller and the rest.
Marvin Miller (Getty)
And remember, even their achievements are transient. Even a Puig may now be replaced by a simulation. On Saturday, the New York Times published a story titled, “In E-Sports, Video Gamers Draw Real Crowds and Big Money.”
“This stuff is expanding out of control,” said James Lampkin, a product manager for ESL (for Electronic Sports League), one of the biggest e-sports leagues, which had 73,000 attendees at a four-day tournament in Katowice, Poland, in March. “We have no idea what the limits are.”
… More than 70 million people worldwide watch e-sports over the Internet or on TVs, according to estimates by SuperData Research. South Korea even has a TV channel devoted largely to e-sports. A championship tournament last October for League of Legends, an arena battle game, streamed around the world, attracting 8.5 million simultaneous online viewers at its peak – the same as the peak viewership for the deciding game of professional hockey’s Stanley Cup finals in June. This year, the League of Legends championship is expected to attract 40,000 to 50,000 attendees to a soccer stadium in Seoul.
So just as with Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays, Martin Luther King Day and the rest of the holidays that are really about something, think of Labor Day as something more than just an excuse to take a three-day weekend. Think about how baseball got ahead of integration with Jackie Robinson, and how although it trailed well behind the labor movement, it rapidly got ahead of it too. Then recall how, whereas the country followed baseball’s lead on integration, it just looked at the Players Association as rich guys vs. rich guys. It was never about that, and now it’s too late.
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