Like the Curt Flood example, you will not get redress from the courts. They will point the finger at Congress. You will not get redress from Congress, they are bought and paid for by entities more powerful, better connected and better funded than you and your union.
You might get redress from your union when they negotiate a new CBA with management. You might want to contact your player reps and see how much this means to the brethren..
History is a great teacher if only folks would listen and learn from it.
MLBPA where are you? MIA?
from nbcsports.com
http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2016/07/22/minor-league-players-wage-suit-against-major-league-baseball-suffers-a-huge-setback/
Minor League Players' Wage Suit against Major League Baseball suffers a huge setback
A judge handed minor leaguers looking to hold Major League Baseball liable for underpaying and exploiting them a huge setback today, ruling that the case cannot go forward as a class action. Minor leaguers who want to sue over their pay and treatment still can, but they'll have to do it individually. The ruling saps the minor leaguers of their leverage, as Major League Baseball would likely be able to fend off individual cases which, by themselves, might only amount to several thousand dollars per claim.
The background: in 2014, former Miami Marlins player Aaron Senne sued Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, and three major league clubs claiming that minor leaguers are underpaid and exploited in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. He was later joined by former Royals minor leaguer Michael Liberto and Giants farmhand Oliver Odle. Eventually others joined and the suit had been expanded to 22 teams as defendants.
The upshot of the case is that, while the minor league season lasts only part of the year, players are required to do all sorts of things outside of merely playing games for which they are not compensated. Training, meetings, appearances and the like. When all of that time is added up, the players claim, their already low salaries are effectively far below minimum wage in violation of the law. Major League Baseball has countered this by claiming that minor leaguers are basically part time seasonal workers — like landscapers and pool boys — who are not subject to federal labor laws.
Last year the judge gave the case conditional certification, allowing the players to try to establish that it should go forward as a class action. This would streamline the case from the plaintiffs' perspective and give them the power of collective action by asserting hundreds or more similar cases into one proceeding. The judge's ruling today, however, was that the cases really weren't factually similar and thus collective action was not appropriate because figuring out how many hours each player worked and what was required of him varied too greatly among the players.
"The difficulties associated with determining what activities constitute 'work' in the context of winter training are compounded by the fact that there appear to be no official records documenting these activities. Because it may be impossible to determine from official records the types of conditioning activities in which the players engaged, membership in the state classes based on winter training would depend largely upon the players' ability to remember, with a reasonable amount of detail, what they did during the off-season (often for multiple years and for many, several years in the past) to stay fit."
The judge said that, in light of this, each case would be unique and would require "individualized inquiries" to find damages and liability. That phrase –"individualized inquiries" — constitutes magic words which sink would-be class actions. If a company overcharges all of its customers by $8 due to an error repeated a million times, it's easy to look at one set of facts and judge them together. If you had to look at a million different wrongs, that's no class action. And so it is not a class action for the players.
As many courts who have dealt with these sorts of cases have noted, for many plaintiffs, a class action is the only practical method of adjudicating Fair Labor Standards Act cases because individual plaintiffs are frequently unable to bear the costs of separate trials. They are, by definition, (allegedly) exploited workers. They're not going to be able to pay legal costs and fight off a multi-billion dollar business in order to collect the few thousand dollars they were underpaid. At the same time, however, the defendants have rights too and, if the facts of each players' treatment truly differ (e.g. the Yankees make their minor leaguers do more than the Brewers do) it's not fair to bind one defendant's defense to the acts of another.
So, where does this leave the players? Not dead. Not yet, at least. Their claims have not been dismissed on the merits. They have only been denied the right to act collectively. The individual plaintiffs can now file separate lawsuits against their former employers and Major League Baseball under the same theories. It would be harder to land a big blow in such a scenario, but if enough do, it could end up being death by a thousand cuts for the clubs and the league. Their legal fees might go up and, eventually, if they lose enough of these cases, more might be filed. There are a lot of former minor leaguers, after all, and once there's some blood in the water, more of them — and their lawyers — may enter the frenzy. Decertification is certainly a win for the league right now, but it's not necessarily a permanent win.
There are likewise some other quasi-collective forms this case could take such as multi-district litigation in which the cases, while individual, are coordinated in a loose fashion. That could lead to some efficiencies for suing players even if it's not as robust as a class action.
We've written quite a bit about minor league pay and treatment in this space by now, so you probably know where we stand on it. We believe that minor leaguers are exploited and underpaid and we believe that Major League Baseball has been happy to exploit and underpay them for some time. Ultimately we believe that this state of affairs cannot and will not persist and that eventually, somehow, baseball will either see fit to pay its workers fairly or, more likely, will be forced to do so by a court or by collective bargaining of some fashion.
Today, however, was a big setback for the minor leaguers. Today's ruling will give Major League Baseball and its clubs more time and more comfort in which to underpay them. There's no doubt about it.
Sent from my iPhone
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