Michael Arria is the US correspondent for Mondoweiss.
If you peel back the curtain of professional baseball, there’s a labor battle between players and owners that has been raging for more than a century. And in recent years, fans have started to side more with the players.
Jackie Robinson is popularly portrayed as a mainstream figure who broke baseball’s color line by quietly enduring racist abuse. But he was much more a lifelong activist and defiant crusader for civil rights.
NBA players are well-paid today, but it wasn’t always so. As a new labor history of the league shows, pro basketball players had to unionize and threaten strikes to get out from under the thumb of owners and win a bigger piece of the financial pie.
After being nonunion for more than 100 years, Minor League Baseball players just had their union recognized by Major League Baseball. We spoke with a former minor leaguer involved in the unionization drive about the players’ impressive victory.
When you think of poorly paid workers, minor league baseball players probably aren’t the first group that comes to mind. But minor leaguers suffer paltry compensation — and a drive to unionize them is now officially underway.
Tonight is Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. You probably won’t hear it on the broadcast, but there’s labor unrest brewing involving minor-league players, concession workers, and Bernie Sanders — and the target is baseball’s oligarchic business model.
Communists fighting the color line. Baseball players resisting owners. America’s pastime has a fascinating, untold history of radical struggles against racial injustice and labor exploitation.
Major League Baseball is mired in a lockout, as team owners refuse to budge just weeks before Opening Day. It’s a perfect time to look back at when the players revolted against the owners and started their own league: the 1890 Players’ League.
In a landmark memo this week, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that athletes at private colleges are workers with the right to negotiate and unionize. Maybe the tide is finally turning against the NCAA’s feudal-like conditions.
Minor league baseball players make poverty wages and, because they don’t have a union, enjoy little say over their working conditions. A new organization of retired players is trying to change that.
Major League Baseball is threatening to sever ties with scores of minor league teams in an apparent attempt to cut costs. But Bernie Sanders is resisting the plan — and insisting that MLB instead grant minor leaguers a living wage and union representation.
When it comes to the United States’ saber-rattling and waging war around the world, we’ve seen a consistent pattern: Democrats tee up the ball for Trump’s aggression, then express outrage when his administration takes a swing.
More than any other media outlet, MSNBC embodies the politics and sensibility of Trump-era liberalism. But the network that many call the “liberal Fox News” wasn’t always liberal.
Bernie Sanders is using his bully pulpit to take on capitalists that pay poverty wages. His latest target: the Walton family.
Minor league baseball players get paid little and enjoy even fewer labor rights. The only solution is organizing.
There’s a new commissioner, but professional basketball is just as exploitative as ever.