"CBS Sports is unaware of any ongoing efforts to organize front-office workers," a piece in today's CBS Sports caveats, but there is union talk spreading in the front offices of baseball: "Still, conversations with roughly a dozen individuals with experience within the game revealed an emerging appetite for unionization at a time when a labor movement is sweeping the league. A few sources acknowledged informally discussing the possibility with their peers." The wave of unionization, it seems, may be coming for one of baseball's last holdouts.
You may, if you were a little savvy to sports news last year, have heard about last year's baseball lockout in which players held firm against ownership fuckery. Perhaps you also or alternatively heard about the expansion of baseball's player union (the MLBPA) to all 5,000 of its minor leaguers last year too. It probably goes without saying that umpires—baseball's rule arbiters—have unions; and indeed so do broadcasters, technicians, and generally even people at baseball games like concessions workers and ushers.1 Front office workers though? They do not—and it seems many want to change this.
It's not hard to see why. Most immediately, pay is bad and work is long and difficult. Front office workers cover a variety of professions—CBS News lists "scouts, analysts, database programmers, business directors, [and] HR administrators" as just some—but pay and work are commonalities shared by all. Loyalty and fealty is rewarded, and the labor system is functionally a closed loop that punishes any perceived desire to move around. Front office workers are required to gain the permission of their teams to so much as entertain moving from their jobs, and teams are given the power to prevent them from doing so with no consequence. About the only power you can still exercise within the system is to quit or become a "free agent"—and that can guarantee you never work a job in baseball again. Teams will, if nothing else, customarily defer to the employee's interest on the matter of "promotions"; but at the same time, these "promotions" seldom confer meaningful pay increases or movement up the corporate ladder.
One example of what is being asked in a front office is shown in how the scouting system works. Scouts are a backbone of baseball: they are the ones tasked with searching for and evaluating rising baseball talents. They are expected, as such, to "be on the road and attending games, practices, and workouts up to six days a week" on a year-round basis; days for them frequently last twelve hours. A first time scout, the CBS piece notes, might generously make $50,000 a year—pay that sounds decent if you don't account for more-than-full-time hours or cost of travel. Contracts are frequently just one year or straight up an at-will arrangement; there is no job security here—and this goes for virtually everyone in a front office.
Legal recourse here is for the most part out of the question: it's been tried and has failed. Most of what's being done is legal, strictly speaking, and even if that weren't true the MLB has an antitrust exemption which makes any legal matters prohibitively difficult. That mostly leaves a path for unionization, which is better equipped to handle many of the demands at play here: "more pay; fewer hours; more transparency with promotions and retention; [and] a better system for pursuing or changing jobs." It would not and will not be easy, of course. Unionization is hard; many front office jobs are "white-collar" in nature, and workers of that sort have often doubted the value of a union; the forces to be unionized against here are comically deep-pocketed; and many say that the very structure of baseball is the problem, which unionization can't help with.
But the rumbling remains for a union, doesn't it?
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For example: last month ushers at PNC Park (home of the Pittsburgh Pirates) almost went on strike.