Baseball strike, 1981 - 7 August 1981

I suppose there have been scores, perhaps hundreds, of books written on the history of trade unions, which in the United States and Britain, to go no further, started in the late 18th Century, shortly after the Industrial Revolution got underway.

Some time, anyway, when smallness gave way to bigness, when piece work turned into mass work, so that whereas a small employer who could always get another blacksmith, another carpenter, turned into a big employer, employing hundreds and then thousands whose product was not merely needed by this village or that town, but by the whole country, and at that point the worker on raw materials like steel and copper was producing stuff that would be needed in many places, hundreds of miles apart, and at that moment, he realised that the employer needed him as much as he needed the employer.

But, I’d like somebody to write a book and so a television series on the history of strikes. Call it – to parody Rodgers and Hammerstein – "There is nothing like a strike, nothing in the world". It has become the supreme weapon of the worker, and it invariably works. Strike breaking has become a disreputable business but only, I should say, since the Second World War.

In the United States a century ago it was not only permissible, it was thought to be a civic duty of the captains of industry and they could confidently call on the army, to put down what was legally looked on as a riot. The system then was simple. Millions of immigrants were coming in from all over, and it was the custom of big business to use the latest crop of immigrants to break the strikes of the previous crop. On the premise of taking their jobs, for instance, the steel industry really got going with a pool of labour from centre and southern Europe. If the Italians went on strike a new and innocent batch of Romanians was on hand to break the strike and when the Romanians got settled in the steel mills and began to learn a thing or two and struck, the newly-arrived Hungarians could be drafted, first as strike breakers and then as employees.

This, er, rough but ever ready, system could obviously work only as long as Europe kept shipping in new supplies of labour. There came a day when there was a fierce and famous strike in Pittsburgh and when Henry Frick, Carnegie's buddy and partner in the steel business, got off a forlorn sentence that should be inscribed as a landmark in the history of labour relations. Frick, finding at last one strike that was difficult to break said, "The immigrant, however ignorant, however illiterate, always learns too soon". It’s a fact of life that housewives, let alone industries, are by now thoroughly familiar with.

Well, the United States is now harried by two national strikes – the baseball strike and the air traffic controller strike. Obviously the air strike is more serious, as a threat to the economy, to what the founding fathers called, domestic tranquillity and to the actual survival of some airlines, for it's costing them about, $35million, nearly £20million a day. But the baseball strike which, it seems certain, is about to be over, is not to be sneezed at as a symptom of the individual's new determination. even in a game. to be his own man when it comes to laying down the conditions of his work.

When the strike was threatened nearly two months ago, I turned to experts, being myself a great admirer of baseball as a unique form of ballet under pressure, but I am an innocent when it comes to the rather complicated administration of the game.

By experts, I don’t mean interested parties, on one side, or the other. One was a man who has been writing about the game for oh, I should say, thirty years or more, another was a labour writer, another was a business man. The fourth was a black boy I met in the underground, who, in a quiet shrewd way, seemed to know everything about the issues at stake. They all agreed that the strike could not happen, they enlightened, and alarmed me about the economic losses from gate recipes to airline fares, restaurants, food and drink vendors, all sorts of interests on the side, that I hadn’t thought about.. if the strike did happen, they told me it would be a token alarm, and it would last one weekend.

Well it lasted seven weeks and the problem of rearranging the season is already so complicated and so much in dispute that there will be some hot controversies before the leaves begin to fall. It was, in essence, about the right of a player not to remain the property of the club owners. For nearly a century, he has been a hired hand and the employer had the exclusive say in when he could leave. Of course, for many years, stars have been traded but they were the only players who could hope to move, onwards and upwards, and even then they signed a contract for so many years, and had to abide by it. Well, this strike was caused, if not instigated, by the owners of the teams.

A new law, five years old, made the players into free agents, so-called; that's to say that when their contract was up, they could put themselves up for sale. Baseball is like most other games in that this year’s sensation may turn into a genuine and enduring star, or he may burn out in a year or two. But what the free agent law did was to make the player, not the owner, become the bargaining agent, holding out for higher and higher salaries. And in the past five years, the top players, who only 20, only 10, years ago used to earn say, $40,000 a year, now earn half a million. One player this year, is available for $1.4million, that's the figure that goes to him.

Well, last year the owners grew restless, to put it mildly. The owner of the New York Yankees – which has been for a generation one of the two or three great teams – the new owner was a very wealthy man and a born gambler. He had, and has, little interest in local patriotism, he doesn’t care whether you come from Alaska, Ohio or Mexico, if you can play great ball. He watched the league games like an eagle and he started, last year, putting out his bids. He bought up stars from all over the country, he frankly said he was out to make the Yankees the best team that money could buy.

Now the grumbles, followed by the shouts, of protest came from the players of the teams that had been raided. Other enterprising, greedy owners began to complain too, if they lost a couple of their stars they had to go fishing for new, raw talent, in the minor leagues. The owners, in a sense, struck before the players did, they said, "We want compensation, if we sell you a great batter or pitcher, we want to be free to choose one or two from your nearly top players, and buy them, by way of compensation." That was where the players said, "Hold, enough" – they saw their teams being stripped of not only the top flight, but the second-flight men as well. They struck to stop the owners getting their sort of compensation.

Well finally, it’s about to be opened and the national sport will start again on Monday. What are the terms of the settlement? You will be relieved to hear that we are not going into them. A players' representative started to explain them to a pitcher for the New York Mets. "We went over it," said the pitcher. "Paragraph by paragraph from beginning to end. It took an hour and a half to simplify." Said an onlooking player, "If it was so simple, why did it take 50 days to get it?"

Included in the demands that had been granted the players are all sorts of exotic mysteries like performance clauses, bonuses for number of appearances, number of times at bat, number of hits, home runs and so on. Anyway it’s over. As a social matter, the upshot is that the player is not only no longer hired help, at however huge a fee, he is the bargaining agent, for himself. Other athletes please copy.

The air traffic controller strike has been brewing for some time and we thought it was all over with a tentative agreement a month ago. But the controllers' union turned it down, by a massive majority. And so it began. If the controllers were employees of big business – what we call now the private sector – we’d have the usual day and night sessions, rumours, breakthroughs, stallings, the intervention of federal arbiters wanting to help and a week, two weeks, three weeks from now, an agreement in a smoky room, at three in the morning.

But, the controllers are government employees. Like all government employees, they take an oath never to strike, so President Reagan, without spending too long on meditating whether in this day and age, anybody – a policeman, a soldier, civil servant – can be absolutely forbidden from doing what he said he wouldn’t, President Reagan formally called the strike a criminal act against the United States of America.

He gave them two days to get back to work, brought criminal charges against the strikers, saw many judges grant the charges, and 17 strikers were arrested and jailed. They were jailed not for striking, but for refusing to obey court orders, to call the strike off. They thus, technically, are in jail for contempt of court. Of the 15,000 controllers, 12,000 stood firm, 3,000 went back to work. There are 2,000 non-union men. And the army can supply about 700 men, who are quickly shifting their expertise from military to civilian air traffic.

The action of President Reagan is correct and tough, and is being highly praised in some quarters, but – looking back on similar tough correct pronouncements from those in authority – does not answer the question, "What if they break their oath? What if they defy the law?". Tennis players are not supposed to scream four-letter words at referees. They do it, and the result has been that the penalties have been softened. And once, a governor of Massachusetts proclaimed to the Boston police, "There is no right to strike against the public at any time, for any reason, anywhere". Loud cheers. But they did it.

We seem to be in an era when an oath is not enough, is no longer binding if you find, or think, that you can’t keep your wife and family in the way you want them to live. But the government says, wait till they look at the staggering fines we have imposed on them. So far, they have come to more than $5 million dollars and are going up – the fines, that is – at the rate of $100,000 for every hour they stay out.

Well, I just checked with the United States Treasury record of the debt Great Britain owes the United States, arising from the First World War. As of 31 December 1980, the outstanding debt, is – including 60 years' interest – $11,925,11,413. Anyone like to volunteer as debt collector?

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