As more traditional unions scramble to retain some vestige of power and influence against inroads made by union-busting law firms and replacement-worker tactics, the Major League Baseball Players Association and its cousins in the other three major professional sports have gained a recognition and a power reminiscent of the once-mighty steelworkers, mine workers and auto workers.
But on this day that once celebrated a flourishing labor movement in the United States, sports unions have also encountered an unparalleled degree of unrest as their members' employers try to regain control of an escalating salary structure.
Baseball players are in the 25th day of a strike, hockey players are headed for a possible lockout at the start of their season Oct. 1 if they don't have a new collective bargaining agreement, basketball players face a tortured negotiation in their effort to shed sports' first ceiling on salaries and football players began a season yesterday significantly affected by such a cap.
If hockey owners lock out the players, and the baseball players are still on strike, it would be the first time two sports have been shut down at the same time.
Through July of this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, the country had only 19 work stoppages, down from 28 for the first seven months of 1993. There were 35 stoppages each in 1993 and 1992, a blip on the labor scene of 1952, when 470 shutdowns idled 2.75 million workers.
Work stoppages, bureau records show, began declining in 1980, coinciding with the beginning of the Reagan years, the worst years in the labor movement's history. Just under 16 percent of the work force belongs to unions today compared with 35.5 percent right after World War II.
While New York unions can't even muster enough support for a Labor Day parade today, sports strife has catapulted players averaging more than $1 million a year to the front lines of the ongoing labor-management battles that have been more traditionally fought by workers seeking an extra seven cents an hour and better conditions in their factories.
Sports unions clearly command a disproportionate influence given their relatively tiny membership. Of the 16.6 million members of all unions in this country, only about 3,500 are professional athletes.
"It's like you had a time warp and told someone that Ted Williams was wielding more power than John L. Lewis," said Dan Yager, general counsel of the Labor Policy Association of Washington. "You'd probably have said Williams was using a corked bat."
Richard Moss, who came out of the steelworkers' union to serve as general counsel of the baseball union in its first 10 years, said, "Sports unions are the unions that have made progress in the last 10 years."
But because athletes earn such lofty wages -- National Basketball Association players average $1.6 million a year, major league baseball players $1.2 million -- they prompt the question: Are sports unions a legitimate part of the union movement, or are they clubs for the wealthy?
Union leaders readily reply that they are legitimate unions; management representatives decline to grant them that status.
Thousands of Classifications
"When people hear the word union, they think of somebody working in a mine or a blue-collar job," said Gerald McEntee, president of the 1.3 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "That's altogether different now. We have nuclear engineers, architects, jockeys, parimutuel operators. In the public service, we cover thousands upon thousands of classifications."
Before baseball players had a union, Mr. McEntee added, "They were like chattel. They couldn't move from team to team. You had .330 hitters making $20,000 a year. The owners were putting away all this money. It was the same in the other sports."
Morton Bahr, president of the 625,000-member Communications Workers of America, said salaries are relative and have nothing to do with determining a union's legitimacy.
"As long as they're getting a fair share of what their employer earns, that's the key," Mr. Bahr said. "We don't focus on what the individual ballplayer gets."
David Lipsky, dean of the school of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, noted that members of other unions are high earners, too, citing the Screen Actors Guild and other entertainment unions.
An Atypical Situation
Rex Hardesty, public affairs director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said players "deserve every penny they make."
Yet Mr. Yager of the Labor Policy Association said sports bargaining "is about as typical of labor relations in this country as the Bud Bowl is to real football."
"It's a little bit of a sideshow," said Mr. Yager, whose group represents Fortune 500 companies. "You have two millionaires on both sides of the table. It's like two mega-corporations talking to each other about mergers or splits or sales. It's closer to that realm of activities than it is to real labor relations."
Mr. Yager added: "It's a relatively closed labor market. There's no international competition so none of the same elements are there as there are for steel or auto or retailing. It's a whole different dynamic."
James Waters of Towers Perrin, a management consultant firm in Saddle Brook, N.J., agreed with Yager, but acknowledged that he is puzzled by the players' view toward their unions.
An Amazing Altruism
"I'm amazed at the solidarity of the players," he said. "I'm amazed at the motives that keep them seemingly as unified as they are." Speaking specifically of baseball, Waters added, "Guys in the big leagues are motivated in preserving the game for players in the minor leagues. That amazes me. That is a kind of altruism I don't think you see in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. -- unions looking out for the next generation."
The understanding and outlook that have motivated baseball unionists through 8 work stoppages in the past 23 seasons were instilled in players by Marvin Miller and Mr. Moss when they left the United Steelworkers Union in 1966 and led the neophyte baseball union. Their efforts have been passed on through their successors and succeeding generations of players.
Yet Mr. Miller, who is generally acknowledged as the No. 1 leader in the sports labor movement, believes sports unions don't fit in the labor movement generally.
"To give the labor movement its due," he said, "the sports unions were a kind of delayed reaction to conditions. That is, to look at baseball when I came into it in 1966 was to look at the rest of industry in 1896. What happened could be more related to what happened in the labor movement in the '30's. But I don't see any relationship anymore. I think sports unions operate independently of the rest of the labor movement."
The National Football League Players Association, however, operates within the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and its leader, Gene Upshaw, sits on the umbrella group's executive council. Upshaw's union and the N.F.L. are at peace after years of labor battles, but Upshaw has come under fire from union members who have lost jobs or suffered severe salary slashes because of the new salary cap.
The salary cap -- which places a ceiling on team payrolls -- is the common denominator in the labor unrest in the four sports, but it merely is the owners' delayed reaction to a salary level that was unheard of in the days of Joe DiMaggio, Otto Graham, George Mikan and Maurice Richard.
The National Basketball Association instituted a cap 10 years ago after convincing the players that the league was in dire economic straits. Owners in the other sports were slow to follow, but they eventually caught on to what seemed like a good management thing.
"Basketball has thrived since, and owners in other sports say it must have something to do with the cap," Mr. Moss said. "In fact, it doesn't."
The N.B.A., Mr. Miller said, experienced a tremendous increase in revenue, and that made the salary cap tenable. "The salary cap," he added, "does not add one penny of revenue. To say the salary cap was responsible is ludicrous."
Disaster for Players
The basketball union, whose labor contract has expired, now wants to dump the cap. Those players join their baseball and hockey friends in arguing that caps artificially lower salaries. Moss said they can also destroy team unity, pointing to the N.F.L., where some players have been asked to take pay cuts so other players can be signed.
"This has turned out to be a disaster to the players," he said. "You manufacture divisions among players. It wouldn't surprise me if the players revolt sometime soon."
Meanwhile, Mr. Lipsky of Cornell offered a conflict among owners as a reason for labor unrest.
"There has been a turnover in ownership in many of the leagues," he said. "New owners in baseball, for example, have paid extraordinary sums for their teams, while old owners paid what now looks like bargain-basement prices. This difference results in different attitudes and the clash is fueling the dispute. There's an old saw in labor relations that when you have instability and change, you're going to have trouble in labor relations."
In baseball, low-revenue clubs, primarily those in smaller markets, want the wealthier clubs to share more of their local revenue with them. The richer clubs have agreed to do that, but only if the players accept a cap on their salaries. Rejecting their part of the formula, the players walked out Aug. 12.
Sports strikes, or threatened strikes, are different from strikes staged by other unions for a range of reasons.
"In the 50's," said Jeffrey McGinnis, president of the Labor Policy Association, "auto workers looked at what steelworkers got, who looked at rubber workers. You'd see those patterns add on top of each other, and they resulted in a wage spiral in the 60's and early 70's. That's gone because none of those companies work in sheltered markets. Players' unions, on the other hand, work in sheltered markets."
That is, the sports leagues don't have competition either in this country or in foreign countries.
Further, except for three games during the 1987 football strike, club owners have not used replacement players. The N.F.L. probably was able to get away with the substitutes because except for stars at the skill positions, football players are more anonymous than their peers.
Baseball fans would not pay major league prices to see a minor leaguer play in place of Ken Griffey Jr. Replacement workers, though, have become the bane of union workers. "After Reagan replaced 11,000 air-traffic controllers, it was like poison ivy; it spread all over," said William Bywater, president of the International Union of Electronics Workers. "If the government could do it, companies felt it was okay to do it. But in baseball, who are they going to replace the players with?"
