Sonia Sotomayor Saves Baseball Negotiations

Easing negotiations: How Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling “saved” baseball

As Judge Sonia Sotomayor goes through confirmation hearings for retiring Justice David Souter’s spot on the United States Supreme Court, we will no doubt be hearing a lot about her opinions and rulings. One that is particularly interesting is Sotomayor’s injunction in 1995 that ended that year’s Major League Baseball players strike. The ruling had everything to do with negotiations.

During the 1995 strike, players were at odds with baseball team owners about salary caps. When the owners took back salary caps, they then abolished salary arbitrations and forced player negotiations to go through the baseball commissioner’s office. The players cited unfair labor practices in a court case that went to Judge Sotomayor, who, among other things, had to determine whether baseball owners were undermining collective bargaining and engaging in unfair labor practices.

Baseball players and owners were at a stalemate, and tension and anger had all but stopped any negotiations on salaries. Judge Sotomayor’s ruling restored the terms of the previous agreement between owners and players, and it was done before the baseball season’s opening day, effectively allowing the season to go on as normal.

In the end, Sotomayor’s ruling resulted in putting the negotiators from both sides back on track. As Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association says in a May 26 New York Times article: “Her ruling did not produce an agreement, but it gave the parties time to get on with normal business and get back to the bargaining table and produce an agreement.” (Read the full article from the New York Times here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/sports/baseball/27sandomir.html

The same New York Times article quotes Daniel Silverman, then the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board New York office as saying that “Sotomayor shrewdly understood that although labor law permitted each side in a negotiation to choose its representative, the competition among clubs for players’ services would have been diminished if all deals were negotiated by the commissioner’s office.”

Sotomayor leveled the negotiation “playing field” by putting owners and players back at square one, and allowing them to start negotiating from there and not from what was perceived as an unfair salary situation.