Tag Archives: income inequality

Baseball striking out on player pay equity

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Is it so much to ask of an organization to pay its employees a fair wage? Trials and tribulations are part of the journey to the show, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of living a decent life. As fans, we should demand the very best athletes that our dollars can buy. It doesn’t seem that those with two or more jobs get to focus solely on baseball.

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By Bret Thixton  May 18, 2014  http://www.myjournalcourier.com

Under the federal minimum wage, an individual working full-time can expect to earn around $15,080. Most Minor League Baseball players earn between $3,000 and $7,500 in a five month season. The average Major League Baseball player will make $3.39 million in a year.

When thinking of income inequality, the discussion has rarely focused on the professional sports world. While there exist income differences among the major sports, a glaring issue exists in the world of baseball. The numbers above point to a huge gap in the salaries for the athletes in our national pastime.

There can be a number of Minor League affiliates associated with a Major League organization. From AAA to rookie leagues, this system is designed to prepare players to make the leap to the MLB. The development of these players is important to Major League clubs as they work toward the ultimate goal of winning the World Series. However, only a very select few of these players will ever make it to the show. The players who don’t make it to the big leagues serve simply as agents of making sure the ones who do are ready.

The importance of these players can’t be understated. Because of them, the players that eventually make the big leap are prepared for the competition at the highest level.

The MLB has been able to get away with these low wages due to a historical exemption from antitrust laws. They are allowed to set salaries and working conditions without players suing under the Sherman Act. This, combined with the inability to unionize, has led to low wages and no major lawsuits.

A new lawsuit, Senne v. MLB, sparked discussion over the payment of these minor leaguers. This lawsuit, brought on by three former Minor Leaguers, claims that wages were unlawfully low. It is currently in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for violations of wage and overtime laws.

The usage of contracts is what the MLB will rely on as they prepare to face legal action. Because players voluntarily agreed to these contracts of their pay, they aren’t guaranteed any more pay. The Fair Labor Standards Act classifies players as professional employees, making players exempt. The players either deal with these terms or do not play.

However, the other side is arguing that the MLB is violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and other laws that guarantee minimum wage and overtime pay. In a sport where you must constantly train and perform, it’s easy to put in more than 40 hours in a week. The players who are suing the league claim to put in 60 or 70 hours in a typical work week.

The MLB and MiLB enjoy the low wages for the players and the low cost of attendance for the games, as they are quite popular in the cities they play in. They state that an increase in wages would be passed onto fans. That is not fair, nor the right answer to the issue.

When Alex Rodriguez gets paid $29 million per year, it’s hard to justify not paying the Minor Leaguers a fair wage. By subtracting just $1 million off the top contract in each organization, an organization could pass around $5,000 to each and every player in their MiLB affiliated clubs.

It may not be fair to take money away from those who pull in the top contracts. But at some point, the MLB needs to understand the true value of its Minor League systems. Minor Leaguers playing today make less than those in 1976, while mega deals seem to break records every year.

These minor leaguers often get jobs in the off-season to make ends meet. This doesn’t allow them to focus on baseball in the off-season or play in other winter leagues.

Is it so much to ask of an organization to pay its employees a fair wage? Trials and tribulations are part of the journey to the show, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of living a decent life. As fans, we should demand the very best athletes that our dollars can buy. It doesn’t seem that those with two or more jobs get to focus solely on baseball.

In a culture that worships veterans and the journey to the majors, baseball has lost sight of the importance that these young men bring to the game itself.

OECD report says reducing income inequality requires wealthy pay more tax

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The fact such an organization is recommending higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy shows how bad inequality has become.

Ottawa (12 May 2014) — A new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes it clear that we cannot reduce income inequality without the wealthy paying more tax. According to the OECD, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have contributed to the increase in income inequality over the last 30 years.

Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations worsen income inequality

The report also makes it clear that inequality is a growing problem in Canada. In Canada, 37 per cent of income growth in the period studied when to the wealthiest one per cent of Canadians. Only the United States, where the wealthiest one per cent received 47 per cent of income growth, was worse.

Among the changes to the tax system that the OECD identifies as contributing to income inequality are cutting income tax rates for high income earners and corporations, and taxing dividends and capital gains at a lower rate than wages and salaries. Both of these happened in Canada.

OCED report exposes two of the myths about income inequality

The first myth is that income inequality isn’t a problem in Canada, which is popular with conservative politicians and commentators who don’t want to admit that most Canadians have been badly hurt by their policies.

A second myth is that we can reduce income inequality without asking corporations and the wealthy to pay their fare share. As the OECD study makes clear, increasing the tax paid by large corporations and the wealthy is a first step to reducing income inequality. Until the wealthy and large corporations pay their share, there will not be the funds required for the programs and services that low and middle income Canadians need to get ahead.

“The OECD is hardly a radical organization,” says James Clancy, National President of the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE). The National Union has been running its All Together Now! campaign about income inequality for over four years.

“OCED members are governments committed to free market economies. Its priorities include restoring confidence in markets. The fact such an organization is recommending higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy shows how bad inequality has become.” said Clancy. 

More information:

All Together Now! campaign

NUPGE

The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada’s largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE

Union women work to shatter labour’s glass ceiling

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By H.G. Watson     December 4, 2013   http://rabble.ca

Photo: flickr/Ian Sane

The labour movement’s female ranks are growing, but women are still struggling to have their voices heard and to fill executive positions.

“Sadly, I still find myself in the trenches,” said Yolanda McClean, the Diversity Vice-President of CUPE, speaking at the microphones during the women’s forum at the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) convention.

Women, even in unionized workplaces, face workplace harassment and income inequality.

For those that might consider leadership positions, there are still barriers in the way of taking executive roles at the local or national levels — including a lack of available childcare and mentoring — despite the fact that there are more women unionized than ever before.

A recent Globe and Mail article found that the rate of men who are unionized is dropping while rates for women have held steady. The losses for men is found in the declining manufacturing sector while unionization rates in health care, education and public administration — industries largely dominated by women — have grown.

Men still take up many of the top positions in labour unions and councils, a situation that has certainly not gone unnoticed by union sisters. At the Unifor founding convention in August, Lindsay Hinshelwood, a member of the former CAW local 707 in Oakville, Ontario, ran against Jerry Dias to challenge what she called the “old boys club” of leadership.

“Traditional power structures still exist within the labour movement which is really unfortunate,” said Nicole Wall, a Toronto based regional representative of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

She, along with her mother, labour activist Carol Wall, sat on a panel about the challenges women face in the labour movement last Tuesday at the OFL convention.

They were joined by Katie Arnup, a national representative for communications at Unifor, Sue Genge, who was formerly with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and Michele Landsberg, a journalist who has written extensively on labour issues.

Landsberg recounted that when she attempted to write a story about maternity leaves many years ago, she was laughed off the phone by many of the union leaders when she asked if they would include leave provisions in collective agreements.

“I’ve heard a woman say that she ran for an elected position and she was told she’d get in trouble with her union supervisor because they didn’t want a woman running,” she said.

If there is anyone who knows the challenges of becoming not only active in labour, but a leader, it would be Nancy Hutchison. The secretary-treasurer of the OFL was the first woman to work in the gold mine in the Campbell Red Lake Mine in 1977. Hutchison became the president of her union local, and eventually rose through the ranks of the United Steelworkers to take a place on their national executive as the Canadian National Health, Safety and Environment Department Leader.

“Very rarely will a sister come up and say, ‘it’s my first year working here and I want to be involved in the union,'” she said. “It’s up to us to look for [leadership] qualities.”

Mentorship opportunities and access to childcare were two of the key barriers she identified for women who may consider running for leadership positions.

At the OFL convention, there were several impassioned speeches in support of a universal childcare system. Others also advocated for maternity leaves to be included in collective agreements — a situation that they argue benefits families overall, not just women.

But according to Landsberg, union culture has to become more inclusive — or risk disappearing altogether.

“The union movement has done amazing things for changing the scene for women externally,” she said, noting that unions supported Charter challenges that helped secure the right to choice.

“But internally, they haven’t done as much and they have to because that is the future of unionizing –they need the women or they are gone.”

Why Are The Rich Getting A Free Ride?

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Why are the levels of income inequality continuing to rise when Canada is one of the wealthiest nations in the world?

Published on Nov 22, 2013 SUBSCRIBE and check out our other videos! http://www.operationmaple.com http://www.facebook.com/operationmaple http://twitter.com/#!/operationmaple

Editorial: The Government as a Low-Wage Employer

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New York Times  By THE EDITORIAL BOARD     August 12, 2013

In 1965, in a nation torn by racial strife, President Johnson signed an executive order mandating nondiscrimination in employment by government contractors. Now, as President Obama has observed, the nation is divided by a different threat: widening income inequality. He could respond much as Mr. Johnson did — with an executive order aimed, this time, at raising the pay of millions of poorly paid employees of government contractors.

Recent studies have shown how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, grants, loans, concessions and property leases currently flow to companies that pay low wages and provide few if any benefits, even as executive pay among federal contractors has risen. In effect, tax dollars are being used to fuel the low-wage economy and, in the process, worsen inequality.

This research has been underscored by a recent complaint filed with the Labor Department by Good Jobs Nation, a group representing low-wage workers employed under federal concession agreements. The complaint alleges that food franchises operating at federal buildings in the District of Columbia have ignored minimum-wage and overtime laws. The group has also organized walkouts by low-wage workers of vendors licensed to operate at Smithsonian museums, actions that have dovetailed with recent walkouts by fast-food workers around the nation.

Many laws and executive actions, mostly from the 1930s and 1960s, require fair pay for employees of federal contractors. But over time, those protections have been eroded by special-interest exemptions, complex contracting processes and lax enforcement. A new executive order could ensure that the awarding of contracts is based on the quality of jobs created, challenging the notion that the best contractor is the one with the lowest labor costs.

Mr. Obama also could tell federal agencies to conduct reviews of contracts to see if the work should be done in-house. There is compelling evidence that using private-sector contractors is often costlier than using government employees, even when contractors pay workers little.

Nearly 50 years after one executive order helped to end discrimination in government contracting, another one is needed to help ensure fair pay in that same sector.