I know we’re pretty far away from the 2022 baseball season. But for those of you who follow baseball in the off-season, you might have noticed there’s a baseball lockout. Owners started the fight almost two months ago by calling a lockout, and the baseball lockout continues.
What’s happening here?
The Baseball Lockout
ESPN and Sports Illustrated provide helpful overviews of the basic facts. The collective bargaining agreement between players and owners expired last month. After it expired, owners initiated a work stoppage. This means, in short, that owners prevented players from engaging in baseball activity with their teams. They did so in order to pressure the players’ union.
All this comes on the heels of a lingering labor dispute between players and owners. Not to mention the heavy pandemic impacts on the 2020 and 2021 baseball seasons. During the 2020 season, owners repeatedly tried to get players to accept less money than their contracts granted them. Players fought back, and mostly the players won. I covered this in a 2020 post.
Baseball Labor and Leftism
What should we think about all this as leftists? At a basic level, players are workers and owners are capitalists. That’s clear enough. Players do work that makes money for largely idle, rent collecting owners. So we should naturally gravitate toward players over owners.
Of course, baseball owners employ lots and lots of workers. And players – at least the players who make the full MLB rosters – stand near the top of a hierarchy of workers. Minor League players are in a far worse position. Groundskeepers, ticket takers, and so on – many, many workers – also work for baseball owners. And they make out quite a bit worse in everything than the players do.
That doesn’t mean we should take the side of the owners. It’s not like they’d pay others more if only they didn’t have to pay players as much. They wouldn’t. In fact, they’d likely put any savings directly into their own pockets.
But telling this tale allows us to see some of the nuances of labor disputes. It allows us to see, for example, the difficulty of building solidarity between unionized, highly-paid workers and non-union and/or low-paid workers.
Where’s the Lockout Headed?
It’s hard to say where all this is headed. My sense is that no one – neither owners nor players – actually wants to limit or cancel the season. So, that shared desire will push the sides toward agreement. But they’ve been playing a limited game of chicken on this for a couple of years now. In light of that, it wouldn’t surprise me too much to see some games get canceled, either.
