MLB union’s handling of Biogenesis scandal highlights collective bargaining weaknesses

The fallout from the Biogenesis scandal in Major League Baseball – New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez fighting a long suspension, a dozen other players accepting 50-game suspensions – reveals a big problem with U.S. labor law: how unions deal with disciplinary problems. How far should a union be willing to go to protect a member...

The fallout from the Biogenesis scandal in Major League Baseball – New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez fighting a long suspension, a dozen other players accepting 50-game suspensions – reveals a big problem with U.S. labor law: how unions deal with disciplinary problems.

How far should a union be willing to go to protect a member when he’s clearly broken the rules?

ESPN’s Howard Bryant has written about the conflict that is bubbling up in the Major League Baseball Players Association, or MLBPA, between players who have been accused of using performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs, and the rest of its membership, who have been put at an unfair disadvantage by having to play against oppnents who have gotten bigger and stronger thanks to using these illegal substances. After years of defending its members aggressively, the union has made the difficult decision to allow Major League Baseball to enforce its rules against steroids with less union interference. Howard writes:

The PED battle is no longer just an ethical clash between users and testers, but also a fight for the direction and future of the Players Association. For the first time, perhaps in decades, the fight isn’t only union versus management, but players versus players, some of them apparently willing to potentially undo some of the organization’s greatest gains.

In short, not all players in the union are thrilled with how the union has handled the Biogenesis debacle.

Labor law, both at the federal level and in Illinois, gives unions a difficult, perhaps impossible task – to represent a bargaining unit with a large number of workers. Those workers may have very different jobs and skill levels, and even if they have the exact same job they could have very different interests, especially in terms of discipline. In baseball most players want to know that the steroid ban will be enforced. A player who is accused of “juicing,” however (rightly or wrongly), will have a strong interest in using all the appeals and processes to either prove his innocence or avoid penalties.

Something similar applies in every workplace: Some people have better self control than others (and even the best of us have lapses). But a co-worker who is incompetent, or goofs off excessively, or abuses drugs, or simply fails to show up for work at all, only makes more work for everyone else. A union that has to represent all workers has an unavoidable conflict – protect the employee who is called up for discipline or protect everyone else.

Unions have been known to go too far and have sometimes wound up preserving jobs for people who don’t deserve to keep them. For instance, when the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees negotiated a ridiculously loose attendance policy with the state of Illinois – one with no practical consequences for up to 10 unexcused absences – what they did was make work harder for conscientious state workers who have to pick up the slack for absent co-workers.

Similarly, the MLBPA got pressure from players who hated seeing honors and big free-agent deals going to cheaters. Eventually, the union decided that it was not going to go out of its way to protect steroid users. In other workplaces, it might be teachers who have to spend time reviewing material that an inept faculty member failed to cover well, or an assembly-line worker whose job is more dangerous because a co-worker is intoxicated.

Collective bargaining – having one union represent all workers – creates problems. The same union winds up representing workers who break the rules and workers who follow them. That’s just one reason why workers don’t always come out ahead when there’s a union in the workplace. That’s also a reason why workers should not be forced to join or pay dues to a union. After all, it’s one thing when your co-worker gets away with cheating. It’s another thing when you have to pay for getting him off the hook.