Minor Leaguers Suing MLB Over Low Pay Clear Important Legal Hurdle
By Sam Dunn
The MLB's proposal to ransack the minor leagues and eliminate as many as 42 teams may very well go through in some form. But right up until the bitter end, you can bet that the players who stand to be most affected by drastic changes will be fighting tooth and nail to the last man.
And right on cue, a group of minor leaguers suing Major League Baseball over alleged illegally low wages scored a victory in court Friday. The MLB had sought to prevent their case from going forward as a class action suit, and that effort has failed, per insider Bill Shaikin.
The minor leaguers suing MLB over wages took another step forward today, when a federal appeals court declined another MLB request that the suit not be heard as a class action. The case itself has not gone to trial, but class action greatly increases potential MLB liability.
— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) January 3, 2020
Life is tough for a minor league player. With that in mind, this is a meaningful moment of progress on the long road to fair pay.
In the big picture, the main sticking point for players petitioning the suit is that minor league pay, in many cases, falls below legal minumum wage thresholds when computed on a per-hour basis. The case, officially known as Senne v. Kansas City Royals, first began when a group of former players sued in US District Court in California more than five years ago.
My goal for the next decade is to continue talking shit on how shitty the minor league pay is, no matter how many times my account gets suspended, and hopefully the pay structure in the minor leagues change for the players at some point.
— Eric Sim (@esim69) December 31, 2019
Fuck you MLB.
Allowing this proceeding to move ahead as a class action could open the floodgates for many more players to join the suit. There's power in numbers -- to say nothing of the widespread support in the US Congress for protecting against Commissioner Rob Manfred going ahead with any proposed minor league contraction scheme.
This has been a long, long road. It will be ever-longer. But fairness and dignity in labor are worth fighting for.