Federal judge rules minor leaguers are year-round MLB employees

Major League Baseball and its teams long have claimed minor league players are seasonal employees, more akin to apprentices than full-time workers. A judge shredded that claim Tuesday, in a ruling that affirmed close to $2 million in penalties and could make the league as well as its teams liable for more.

In a 181-page ruling, Judge Joseph Spero ruled that minor leaguers should be classified as employees “throughout the calendar year” under federal labor law, that MLB as well as individual teams jointly employ minor leaguers, that travel time can be counted as work hours, and that work was done during spring training, when players are not compensated.

Spero took particular aim at the MLB contention that minor league players should be considered as “creative professionals” akin to artists, who can set their own schedule.

He ruled the court had not “found any authority” to support the claim that “an employee may be simultaneously classified as a qualifying creative professional during one portion of the year and a non-qualifying employee during another portion of the year where that employee is bound by a contract that governs the relationship between the employee and the employer for the entire calendar year.”

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The decisions resolved several pretrial questions in the case of Senne vs. MLB, set for trial June 1 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The suit, filed in 2014, alleges violations of federal wage laws in several jurisdictions, including California, Arizona and Florida. The penalties affirmed in Tuesday’s ruling involve liability of $1,882,650 for violations of recordkeeping requirements under California wage laws, with other potential liabilities to be determined at trial.

In 2018, after lobbying from the league, Congress passed a law exempting MLB and its teams from having to pay minor league players more than the minimum wage for a 40-hour week, no matter how many hours in a day or how many days in a week a player worked.

Earlier Tuesday, a California state senator said he planned to introduce a bill that would allow minor leagues full protection under state labor laws. He also said the bill would reduce the time a team could control a minor league player from seven seasons to four.