The importance of good optics
As I am employed in the optics field in real life, I am something of an expert
It is so, so important for baseball teams to look like they are good citizens. For example, in non-plague years, when a team is extorting its municipality for a new billion dollar stadium that the team somehow ends up owning outright after paying about 20% of the costs, they always commission bullshit studies that tout the extremely positive economic impact of developing the land around a new stadium.
These studies never mention that the net benefit to the city is zero, of course; the money that people spend in the New Downtown Ballpark district is offset by them suddenly not spending money in the Old And Has Been Nice For A While district. Oh well! New ballparks are fun.
So in the spirit of hey, let’s convince everyone that we’re good, responsible citizens who are a net positive for our communities, every major league team is going to set aside $1 million to pay the temporary workers who will not be able to make money working concessions or cleaning the ballpark or working the ticket office or doing a number of other tasks for which they would ordinarily be compensated (with money!) on game days.
This is a good thing. It’s also not a lot, at least for people rich enough to own a baseball team. The reason they’re not doing more is that they don’t have to. They paid money for good PR. The transaction is over.
It’s probably a net positive that business owners of all kinds, not just limited to sports, feel public pressure to take care of their workers. It’s definitely a net minus that there isn’t a strong enough social safety net to do it for them. It’s a net minus that you can work for someone or maybe a whole boardroom full of someones, like really work your ass off, and still get drastically underpaid because those someones like it when the money goes to them, not you.
Like, they could have all this money and all they have to do is decide they get it. That is a very easy call.
And that’s the situation that the minor leaguers are in, and have always been in, and will be in for the foreseeable future. They are not only getting nothing right now, but they’re also ineligible for unemployment benefits. And even when (if) the minor league season starts, they’ll still be drastically underpaid.
Why? Because the owners aren’t taking a PR hit for it. The Blue Jays started paying their minor leaguers a little better last year, and they got some positive press for it, but if the rest of the league isn’t being shamed into doing better, then they’re not going to do better. The Giants announced plans this year to increase minor league pay too, which puts us on a one-team-per-year pace.
It’s just not enough. Even those salary increases aren’t really enough, because they all start from the normal minor league wages across the league, and those wages are so criminally low that Congress put a clause in the 2018 tax bill exempting minor leaguers from minimum wage laws, just so teams could continue to pay them badly. The only way to change any of this is for the PR hit that major league owners take for perpetuating it to be costlier than the money they’d have to pay to their employees.
That will take time, effort, a certain national catastrophe ending so that people aren’t too overwhelmed to care about this issue, and some good fortune. That’s it! Should have it knocked out by Monday morning.
Rich people, by and large, aren’t going to do the right thing just because it’s the right thing. You have to give them a reason, and if that reason is just to improve their optics, hey, why not? Doing something good for selfish reasons beats not doing something good. Pay your employees enough to live on, people. Even if they’re temporary. Even if you call them seasonal interns.