February 20, 2022

Labor Tensions Just Came for MLB Spring Training

Closed and locked gates at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium on the first day of the Major League Baseball lockout, December 2, 2021./Image of Sports/Newscom/ZUMA

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Since December, Major League Baseball players have been locked out of their training facilities, thanks to a disagreement between their union and team owners. With the off-season coming to an end, the dispute is now guaranteed to postpone the start of spring training—and could potentially delay Opening Day.

This season’s lockout is the MLB Players Association’s first work stoppage since the 1994 season, when a labor dispute ended the season early and canceled the World Series. This time, players are demanding better pay for younger players (who are often underpaid relative to their contributions), changes to the free agency framework, and a major increase in the competitive balance tax, which sets a ceiling on teams’ total payroll and serves as an unofficial salary cap. All this inside baseball amounts to a guarantee that spring training, originally scheduled for February 26, won’t start until March 5 at the earliest.

In 1994, players launched a mid-season strike over a salary cap demanded by team owners, who argued that runaway salaries were threatening the league’s financial solvency. That strike was ended by none other than then-federal district court judge Sonia Sotomayor, who ruled that team owners couldn’t get around the strike by hiring non-union replacement players (otherwise known as scabs). Sotomayor’s ruling once again bound players and owners to the terms of their previous collective bargaining agreement, and players voted to return to work. Baseball remains the only major sport in the US to lack a salary cap.

The 1994-95 strike was a financial and public relations disaster—just think of all the money lost by canceling the World Series—and players and owners have tried to play nice, or at least keep up the pretense, ever since. Owners say that this year’s lockout, the first since 1990, was an attempt to spur negotiations and reach an agreement by the time teams are set to play ball.

Meanwhile, as players and owners engage in serious, complicated negotiations, New York’s much-maligned ex-mayor Bill de Blasio is proving that it’s never too late for him to make a mockery of himself online:

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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