We Got Ours
The brightest spot in the labor picture these days shines from a most unexpected light: Major League Baseball. The just-concluded winter meetings, where agents and owners haggle over contracts, were not about how to make the game more rewarding for the fans. It was much grubbier, even by baseball's grubby standards: those meetings were strictly about labor versus management.
On one side you had wealthy team owners flush with cash from record ticket prices and extravagant cable and marketing deals that are the rewards of this flourishing economy. On the other were the baseball players?the workers?wanting a piece of that action. And they got it. Over four days, almost three-quarters of a billion dollars' worth of chips slid across the table from management to the workers.
Labor won. So why all the whining?
Listen to WFAN and you hear Danny from the Bronx sniveling about the truckload of money the Texas Rangers backed up to Alex Rodriguez's house. Michael from Whitestone mewled in this past Sunday's Post, "I love baseball, but MLB can keep its spoiled millionaires..." Obscene salaries? Maybe. But if Local 3621 delivered for them the way the baseball players' union just did for its members, you'd hear no grumbling.
Fishmongers or first-basemen, they're all working guys?you can't pick and choose which union is more huggable. Laura Vecsey, a sportswriter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a paper that along with the Seattle Times is in the midst of a strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, exemplifies perfectly the hypocrisy we're seeing around our city. Vecsey, ostensibly a champion of the worker, left a picket line to blast A-Rod on her union's website: "Rodriguez has no heart. He has no soul. He has no pride. He has no inner voice that gives him unwavering direction." Vecsey is pro-labor except when a member of her home baseball team defects for a better opportunity? Why isn't she happy for Rodriguez's gains as a worker? Why isn't she slapping Seattle Mariners management for failing to pay him right? At $25 million a year, A-Rod can buy an inner voice.
Louie calling from the car phone blames Mike Mussina for the extra buck he has to fork over for his seat in the upper deck, but it's not Mussina's fault. Remember, if Louie gets a cost-of-living adjustment, his pals don't blame his union when they have to pay more to get their drains snaked. Same thing here. Labor costs are part of the business, and we should cheer our unionfolk, whether he's an ironworker slinging rebar in midtown or a proud sanitationman's son like John Franco setting up games for the Mets. If you don't like the prices, complain to the ones who make them. (It's not the guys on the bench.)
In fact, the ones who set the ticket prices must be feeling pretty surly these days, and their mood will likely not brighten anytime before next November, when management and labor sit down to renegotiate a new contract. It won't be pretty. Baseball fans should be ready for the ninth work interruption since 1972: look for management to retaliate for labor's current success with a lockout. So don't count on Opening Day 2002 to be in the month of April?chances are good that the city's stadiums will still be empty. But there's a bright side to the impending labor strife. If we can't root for our workingmen on the field, the next best thing is rooting for them as they walk a picket line.