While a few baseball players make headline-grabbing amounts of money, 40% of MLB players make the league minimum of $570,000 during careers that average just four years, and during which many spend significant chunks of time in the minor leagues, Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier reported earlier in the year,L during the MLB’s lockout of players. And in the minor leagues? Most players earn less than $14,000 per season.
Now, minor league players are moving to unionize. This week, the Major League Baseball Players Association announced that more than half of minor league players had voted to unionize, and asked the league to voluntarily recognize the union. The MLBPA also moved to affiliate itself with the AFL-CIO, which suggests the union is gearing up to take on the league.
● Wisconsin nurses set to strike, as employer claims it's banned from bargaining.
● Starbucks lost its appeal and will rehire the Memphis Seven, workers it fired in an obvious act of retaliation for their union activism.
● A day after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California’s fast food law, opponents began trying to block it, the Sacramento Bee’s Mathew Miranda reports. Here’s more background on that law from the Economic Policy Institute.
● Also from EPI: California is on the brink of enacting the first significant law to combat international labor recruitment abuses and protect 300,000 temporary migrant workers. Will Newsom sign the bill?
● Why Petco workers are organizing the company's first union:
● Really neat story at In These Times, reported by Steven Beda: The working-class loggers who save an old-growth forest.