Union Perspectives

The professional sports teams’ unions could help their fans, by advocating on their behalf. It is the fans who pay for their very good wages through their purchasing power. Take baseball, they need fans who make enough money to afford the coast of tickets, parking and hot dogs at the stadiums. The Major League Baseball Professional Association should make sure that players aren’t forced to cross other unions’ picket lines as both the Yankees and Dodgers did last year at Boston hotels where workers were on strike. It would have been a significant gesture for a few Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox players to show up and join the hotel workers’ picket line. One way to avoid putting major league players in this embarrassing situation would be to insert language in their contracts that requires teams to stay in union hotels and prohibits therefrom staying in hotels where the workers are in the midst of labor disputes with management. Maybe if the players were given a little education on th