So if Rob Manfred doesn’t trust my advice, I don’t necessarily blame him. I’ll preface this by acknowledging that my outlook on labor issues - both within baseball and more broadly - is generally pro-worker.

Would the league stand to gain anything from making such a gesture? MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said Wednesday morning that they’re at least talking about it. But let’s at least entertain the possibility, if only for argument’s sake, that MLB might recognize the union voluntarily. Procedurally, MLB has nothing to lose by playing hardball and insisting on an election.Īnd the smart money is on MLB doing precisely that. This is, it bears repeating, the league that lobbied Congress to exempt it from minimum wage law. Or maybe it’s a matter of principle for MLB even a charitable reading of the league’s bargaining tactics over the 2020 restart and the recent lockout reveals a side that prefers to fight over every inch of territory when it comes to labor relations. Even a remote chance of winning an election could be worth chasing. And because minor league players are so grievously underpaid, MLB stands to lose quite a bit of money by going to the bargaining table. It’s unlikely the MLBPA would lose an election, but it’s theoretically possible. After the MLBPA racked up a majority of signatures in a little over a week, it seems likely that more signatures are on the way, but that’s not a done deal. If a card check reveals a 75% majority in favor of unionizing, that’s a lot to ask, but if it’s closer to 50/50, management might have a real chance of winning the election. There are only a few weeks left in the minor league season, but that’s still an opportunity for the league to talk players into voting no. It takes time to organize an election the few weeks from petition to election isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but management can use that time to persuade and cajole workers into voting against unionization. MLB has thus far refrained from revealing its strategy, but there are advantages to forcing a formal election. The proposition is this: If you bring this to a formal vote, you will lose, so why not save yourself the time, aggravation, and legal fees? That allows them to present the formation of a union to management as a fait accompli. However, the default play for unions is to start the card drive before any public announcement at a small, centralized workplace like a coffee shop, retail store, or newsroom, organizers usually try to get as much as 75% of workers to sign cards before any public announcement. Union recognition doesn’t always follow this pattern the successful effort to unionize Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse involved filing for an election with only 30% of the workforce’s signatures - the labor movement’s equivalent of shooting the moon. But as of right now, it’s common for an employer to insist on this formality. Up until the late 1960s, an employer had to establish a good-faith reason to hold an election rather than accepting a card check as proof of majority support, and the NLRB’s new general counsel is pushing for a return to that standard. The rules are the same - a simple majority wins - but these votes are counted by secret ballot. If MLB chooses not to recognize the union voluntarily, the question goes to an election administered by the National Labor Relations Board. That’s not always as simple as it sounds sometimes the employer and union haggle over the specific composition of the bargaining unit - i.e., which workers count as workers for the purposes of defining the guild - and sometimes the employer just drags things out for the sake of it. The first is to voluntarily recognize the union, at which point the two parties shake hands and schedule the first few bargaining sessions. When a labor union asserts that it has the support of a majority of workers, the employer has two options.

(I need to start going to cooler parties.) And since minor league ballplayers are merely one of many groups undertaking high-profile unionization efforts these days, knowing how this works might help you impress people the next time, say, the Starbucks union comes up at a party. So let’s trace out the next few steps in a process that will likely take months, if not years, to complete.

The hardest thing to do in sports is hit a baseball, but following the internecine contours of collective bargaining procedure has to be up there on the list.

Means of production