BASEBALL’S TRUE CLEAN-UP HITTER: REFLECTIONS UPON THE PASSING OF MARVIN MILLER
By: Roger I. Abrams*
Lawrence “Yogi” Berra explained it well: “Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.” For the late Marvin Miller, however, baseball was 90% personal. The other half was skilled negotiating and enormous patience. As the most successful union leader in professional sports history, Miller designed the job of union executive director and then executed a business plan for the Major League Baseball Players Association that would be the gold standard of the union movement. In the process, he changed the national game.
When Miller accepted the Association’s offer to become its executive director in 1966, the union owned one file cabinet and had $5,400 in its bank account. He immediately negotiated a licensing deal with Coca-Cola, which increased the union’s coffers ten-fold. From this modest beginning, Miller and his talented associates grew revenue exponentially, producing millions annually for all major league ballplayers.[1]
At the bargaining table with the club owners, Miller was tenacious and unyielding. An economist from the Bronx by way of Brooklyn with a pencil-thin mustache, Miller was certainly not a “good ole boy.” He was a consummate labor relations professional with years of experience—first with the War Labor Board and then the machinists and steelworkers unions. It would take baseball club owners decades to comprehend that their players, under Miller’s leadership, had transformed their fraternal association into a trade union. He made the union an economic force that had to be taken seriously. Every collective bargaining agreement reached between the owners and Marvin Miller was preceded by a work stoppage, either a strike or a lockout. That only occurs when one side—in this case, the owners—does not fully appreciate that the other side means business.
Marvin Miller’s greatest accomplishment was to win the respect of his membership at the same time he taught the naïve ballplayers about their rights under federal labor law. He listened to his members and sought their input. Players on each club selected a union representative and an alternate, and this group became a genuine two-way conduit for ideas and legitimacy. Built from the ground up with a solidarity that would be the envy of traditional labor organizations, the Players Association became the strongest trade union in the United States.[2]
Continue reading “Two Takes on the Passing of Marvin Miller: Take Two”