'We are the same': As stadium workers prepare for pinch of MLB lockout, they understand players' fight

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When Opening Day arrives and Seattle’s T-Mobile Park remains deserted due to Major League Baseball’s lockout, Otis Williams will have to come up with a Plan B.

As a cook who pulls together a full-time income working Seattle’s major sporting venues, Williams will see his most plentiful and consistent source of income – the 81 Seattle Mariners home games – choked off. Already due to miss six games after MLB cancelled two series, Williams, 47, worries about providing for his five children, ages 7 to 23, and coming up with quarterly tuition payments for his daughter, who studies nursing at Eastern Washington University.

Yet Williams will not engage in a blame game with MLB players, many who make more in one game than he does in several years. And while Williams’ cohorts are engaged in their own fight, hoping the Mariners and their vendors match the neighboring Seattle Seahawks’ $22 minimum wage for concessionaires, he sees a common cause with players seeking a minimum wage – $725,000 – on a far larger scale.

“We are the same,” Williams tells Paste BN Sports. “I let people know, well, they’re not all millionaires. Especially the (minor-league) guys. But we’re definitely with the players. Because these billionaire owners, they weren’t worried about the stimulus check. They weren’t worried about none of that stuff.

“We’re all fighting for livable wages. I know that all players are not millionaires and they have families and have worked their butts off to get where they’re at. Everybody has bills. A baseball player has been doing that since they were 7 years old. That’s all they know. And they get hurt a lot and can’t play all the time and they’re going to need a pension, or medical, later in life. It’s just like us.

“Just because I don’t make a certain amount of money doesn’t mean I don’t have to take care of my family. A lockout hurting guys that make more money than me doesn’t mean they’re surviving. Especially when it comes to the farm leagues. I probably make more money than them.”

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s Tuesday announcement that games would be cancelled after negotiations between the league and the MLB Players’ Association broke down is just another blow for stadium workers. The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered sports in March 2020, commencing a two-year cycle during which stadiums reopened without fans, and then only to partial attendance for most of 2021.

For stadium workers, that meant subsisting largely on stimulus checks from the government. After public pressure, some teams, for a period, provided stipends to their stadium workers – but not to all concessionaires, who work for third party catering and event service corporations. Many workers, Williams said, did not come back after the pandemic, having moved in with their children – or vice versa – or discovering alternate means of income.

This year was to be different. COVID-19 restrictions have dissipated as a largely-vaccinated population faces few restrictions to attend live sporting events. So the lockout is an additional gut punch for those in the live events industry.

Solidarity in tough times

Yet despite the challenges, many workers found their voice during the pandemic. A group of concession workers in San Francisco picketed Oracle Park in summer 2020 during Giants home games held without fans to demand the club aid their survival during the shutdown. More than a year later, a rank-and-file committee of 50 workers successfully bargained for a new contract that averted a strike and guaranteed Oracle Park workers more affordable family health care, a $7 an hour wage increase and COVID safety measures.

“That’s a tough group,” says D. Taylor, president of Unite HERE, which represents 300,000 workers in the live event, hotel and convention sector. “They know the profitability of the Giants, and they held firm. They achieved the kind of contract that allows them to provide for their families.

“In baseball, when you have 81 home games, that’s almost full time. They want to make it a decent job with benefits. Listen, there’s nothing more than I want those workers to get back to work (after the lockout). At the same time, our folks understand about fighting greedy and corporate ownership and they are a tough group.

“I also think the players will be helpful to our workers. They have been great.”

To that end, the MLBPA on Friday announced a $1 million donation, via the AFL-CIO, to stadium workers and “others who face financial hardship through no fault of their own due to the MLB franchise owners’ lockout.”

The players and owners hit a logjam in bargaining on Tuesday over relatively arcane details that have significant impacts, such as a luxury tax ceiling in which the difference is roughly $20 million per year. A dispute over how much money would be circulated to high-achieving minimum-wage players would result in a difference of about $2.5 million per team, per year – a large sum on paper but one that diminishes in the grand scheme of a $10 billion industry.

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'They want to squeeze'

That’s one reason why Taylor – who oversees dozens of negotiations per year – finds these negotiations particularly insidious. To great fanfare, MLB locked out the players on Dec. 1 and proceeded not to negotiate for 43 more days. Any semblance of concerted, good-faith bargaining did not arise until eight days before the league’s decision to cancel games, when players and owners met for more than a week of negotiations in Jupiter, Florida, where Manfred subsequently announced the cancellation of games.

This, Taylor says, simply is not normal bargaining behavior.

“I think the baseball owners have been much more aggressive than almost any of our other properties,” says Taylor. “No. 1, they locked them out. They’re not on strike. No. 2, if you have a labor confrontation, you try to get back to the table and find a solution.

“Clearly, they want to squeeze – squeeze the players just like owners want to squeeze our folks. Then you have the guy who is their puppet, the commissioner, who is supposed to represent the best interests of the game. The quote-unquote independence of the commissioner really is a joke. Why should he be the spokesperson? I saw him speak the other day. He forgot to say he locked them out. He forgot to say he didn’t negotiate. It was just a squeeze play.”

Beyond the direct impact on their workers, there’s a reason why Unite HERE and the AFL-CIO are keeping a watchful eye on these negotiations. Since MLB players, led by Curt Flood, fought for free agency in the 1970s and former MLBPA executive director Marvin Miller led them through multiple work stoppages and achieved other gains like salary arbitration, the MLBPA has been viewed as the gold standard for sports unions. In the 40 decades since then-President Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers, unions have further been marginalized or busted before they can organize.

This fight over service-time suppression and franchises’ ability to spend more than $230 million on payroll without a tax isn’t exactly a last stand for laborers. But the symbolism is clear.

“They really paved the way for other professional leagues,” says Taylor. “I have a lot of confidence in them. Clearly owners are betting workers will be weak. I’m betting on the workers.

“You think of someone like Max Scherzer. He has a huge contract, but he’s one of the leaders of the players’ association. That says it all. He’s not just thinking of himself.”

Scherzer is due to make $43.3 million this season in the first year of a contract that could guarantee him $130 million over three years. He’ll gross more than $350 million in career earnings.

'They are manipulated, too'

Williams, meanwhile, no longer lives in Seattle. Rising rents and costs in a city fueled by Amazon and big tech forced him far out of the city and he commutes by bus 90 minutes each way to work. He is pleased that his co-workers successfully lobbied Levy Restaurants for a $22 to $24 starting wage at Seattle Seahawks games. Now, he hopes his cohorts can convince the Mariners and their food services group, Sodexho Live, to up the minimum at Mariners games from $18 an hour and match the pay they received across the street.

He says that of the more than 600 workers at Mariners games, only 48 are able to work the 950 hours required to earn health insurance. He’s concerned the lockout may impact many who will fall short of that goal.

So Williams watches the calendar and the negotiations, hoping he’ll soon be back helming his team of roughly 10 employees cooking up eats at the Hit It Here Café and the Diamond Club. Yet he sees the parallels between his cohorts grinding in the kitchen and those on the field, drawing an immediate comparison from corporations aiming to limit the number of workers receiving health care to owners and front offices containing costs by suppressing the service time of young players.

Similarly, he recognizes what’s worth fighting for.

“That’s why we feel like we’re equal with the players,” says Williams. “We understand that they are manipulated, too. And we’re still worried. We’re all watching the TV, the Internet, saying please, c’mon.

“But we don’t want them to take something that’s not going to work for them.”