Major League Baseball and the Trump Administration’s Common Approach to Labor Issues

A recent report on one way that professional baseball teams have sought to slow the growth of player salaries on a systematic basis has marked similarities to a Trump administration initiative to consolidate federal agencies’ approach to collective bargaining negotiations, experts said.

Over the last several months, there has been much debate and prognostication about whether teams are working to artificially squeeze free agents and pending free agents into accepting below-market contracts. But a report last week in The Athletic revealed that one area where Major League Baseball has put forth a concerted effort to lowball players is the salary arbitration process.

Arbitration is a process that occurs in the final three years of a pro baseball player’s initial six-year contract with the team that drafted them. While players generally have no control over what they are paid for their first three years in the major leagues—and teams often elect to pay them near the league minimum—arbitration allow them to argue for a larger salary before a third-party mediator.

What The Athletic found in its reporting is that teams have made a concerted, league-wide effort to “take control” of the arbitration process as part of its power struggle with the MLB Players Association, the industry’s labor union, capped by a labor relations department that provides teams with data and training to help them perform better in arbitration.

This department provides teams with data on similar players’ performance in arbitration, in an effort to allow them to make comparable offers in the process, and offers mock arbitration sessions to give executives practice negotiating. And, importantly, it has put a heavy emphasis on lowballing players and limiting informal collaborative negotiations before the adversarial arbitration process begins, a process known as “file and trial.”

“Eventually, the league began using its internal information to promote its own valuations for all players eligible for arbitration,” The Athletic reported. “These are still, technically, recommendations. But according to several people familiar with the process, they have increasingly been treated as hard guidelines. It is understood that teams are to settle at or below the league’s recs.”

The goals of creating a centralized organization that provides advice and templates for how to counter proposals in a negotiation, and to limit negotiations to formal written offers, may sound familiar. That’s because they are similar to the stated aims of President Trump in an executive order to overhaul the collective bargaining process, one of three edicts at issue in a case that will be before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for oral arguments on Thursday.

Like the “file and trial” concept in arbitration, the executive order encourages agencies to place an emphasis on the “exchange of written proposals” in collective bargaining negotiations. And the order sets up an Interagency Labor Relations Working Group, which would create an inventory of CBA language on subjects common to labor-management contracts; develop “model ground rules” that would minimize delays and set “reasonable limits” for good faith negotiations; and analyze provisions of existing CBAs for their impacts on “management rights.”

The group also would share information and analysis on various proposals and counterproposals in contract negotiations, and come up with “governmentwide approaches” to issues that come up in collective bargaining.

Robert Tobias, former president of the National Treasury Employees Union and a distinguished practitioner in residence at American University’s School of Public Affairs, said there is a direct correlation between MLB’s tactics to slow the growth of salaries and the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on unions.

“The plan that the president proposed to monitor all collective bargaining across the government, in my view, is an attempt to usurp the statutory authority and responsibility that is vested in individual agency heads,” Tobias said. “It’s very similar to what’s recently been discovered in MLB and how they monitor the individual clubs and what they’re offering to baseball players within the context of their arbitration over salary disputes. It’s a question of centralized control versus distributed control.”

Although the Justice Department has consistently described the provisions of the workforce executive orders as non-binding “goals” for agencies, Tobias highlighted how similar arbitration goals have transformed into edicts for pro baseball teams.

“The fact of the matter is that teams are franchisees governed by Major League Baseball,” he said. “If the boss tells me to do something, I don’t ignore that. In this case, if the president is the CEO of the executive branch, and he tells me or recommends that I do something, I’m not going to ignore it.”

Donald Kettl, professor and academic director at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, said the administration likely views the fact that a handful of federal unions represent employees across dozens of agencies as something that gives frontline employees an advantage in negotiations.

“What Major League Baseball and the administration have in common is an eagerness to tamp down on the ability of people in labor to organize and bargain over better conditions,” Kettl said. “[There] is an assumption that unions have a bargaining advantage in that there is one union across many entities, but every entity has to negotiate on its own. So in that, broadly, there’s a sense of a balance with union organizations on the one side and agencies on the other, this is an effort to shift that the other way.”

But Tobias argued that thinking about labor-management relations purely in terms of power dynamics is misguided, and conflicts with the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act’s thesis that collective bargaining is “in the public interest.”

“The concept of power should be irrelevant to collective bargaining,” he said. “The whole goal is to solve problems in the workplace, and both parties are free to put forth proposals that solve problems. And if satisfactory results happen elsewhere, it’s worth bringing to the attention of [other agencies]. It’s not like I’m trying to run over you . . . Both parties have the power that the statute affords them, and that’s it.”