IT'S PAST TIME: UNIONIZATION AND SELF-DETERMINISM IN MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL.

For more than a century, labor disputes have tormented the relationship between American professional baseball players and management. Although Major League Baseball players unionized in the 19608, disagreements ouer workplace conditions and ever-growing profit allocations endured for decades. The first thirty years of collective bargaining between players and League post-unionization fostered notable improvements in players' labor conditions. However, those years were also plagued by acrimonious negotiations, grievances, lawsuits, lockouts, strikes, and eventually, the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. The story in Minor League Baseball is altogether different. Its players, despite their close nexus with the Major League game, did not unionize alongside their Major League counterparts sixty years ago, and the workforce has suffered the consequences. Further frustrating MiLB labor progress is the sport's long-standing exemption from antitrust law and its exclusion from minimum wage and overtime requirements at both the federal and state level. These harms perpetuated seuere working conditions, including long hours, grueling travel schedules, minimal job security, and fixed wages, placing Minor League players squarely in the throes of poverty, However, recent events signal change. Following a grassroots labor movement, Minor League players unionized in 2022 and signed their first collective bargaining agreement prior to the 2023 season. Nevertheless, the path ahead remains unclear for the blue-collar workers of baseball. as they must negotiate with a League that has been notoriously unwilling to make euen the minutest of concessions without intimidation, anticompetitiveness, and endless litigation. This Note employs lessons from the history of labor in the sport to detail the terms of equitable labor conditions and posits that collective bargaining, while imperfect, presents a vital opportunity for players in the Minor Leagues to hold accountable the cartel that is Mooor League Baseball and escape the century-old grasp of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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