Illinois Senator Dick Durbin introduced a bill Wednesday that, if passed, would strengthen labor protections for minor league baseball players.
The Fair Ball Act would make minor league players subject to minimum wage and overtime laws if players lacked a collective bargaining agreement. ESPN first reported Wednesday.
The bill aims to roll back a piece of the 2018 Save America’s Pastime Act, which exempted teams from following federal minimum wage and overtime. Under the newly proposed bill, those exemptions would only apply if players were covered by a collective bargaining agreement, which is a contract negotiated directly between a union and its employer.
The bill comes two years after minor league players successfully unionized under the Major League Baseball Players Association and achieved a collective bargaining agreement with MLB. But under the Save America’s Pastime Act, minimum wage and overtime laws would not apply if that collective bargaining agreement were to lapse. Durbin’s office said that if that were to happen, players could earn $8,000 less per season.
“Workers deserve a fair playing field everywhere — including in baseball,” Durbin said in a statement Wednesday. “Executives at MLB lobbied Congress hard for federal wage and hour law exemptions in order to avoid legal liability with the 2018 Save America’s Pastime Act. While I commend MLB for voluntarily recognizing the unionization of Minor League Baseball players in 2022, it is time to roll back SAPA in deference to the gains made by that historic unionization. I’m proud to stand with these workers, unions, and the integrity of the sport. I stand ready to pass the Fair Ball Act into law.”
The Democratic senator said that the goal of the bill is to incentivize MLB to maintain a collective bargaining agreement and to prevent MLB from using the minimum wage and overtime exemptions as leverage during future negotiations.
The MLBPA came out in support of the bill Wednesday.
“For decades, the living and working conditions faced by Minor League ballplayers were indefensible. Whether in the form of poverty-level wages, substandard living conditions, or inadequate food and nutrition (to name just a few), Minor Leaguers were treated as second-class citizens instead of the world-class athletes that they are,” wrote MLBPA executive director Tony Clark in a letter to Durbin’s office Wednesday.
“The Fair Ball Act appropriately narrows SAPA so that Minor League ballplayers will be exempted from federal wage and hour laws if and only if their compensation has been determined via good faith collective bargaining,” Clark said. “This is a win for Minor Leaguers, for baseball, and indeed for workers and collective bargaining as a whole.”
The Athletic has reached out to the MLB for comment.
The Fair Ball Act is the latest push to improve working conditions for minor league baseball players. Previously, a group of players brought a class-action lawsuit against MLB claiming minimum wage and overtime violations, which MLB settled for $185 million in 2022.
The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal, John Hickenlooper, Chris Murphy, Peter Welch and Ron Wyden, and has the support of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and the National Employment Law Project.
(Photo: Jasper Colt / USA Today)
