Miller Says Ueberroth No Hit in Strike Talks

The Major League Baseball Players Assn. won a major victory in its one-day strike last week, and most of the nation’s news media hailed Commissioner Peter Ueberroth for his seemingly heroic, behind-the-scenes role in bringing about the settlement.

The praise was so unreserved, in fact, that many political observers said it might well encourage him to run for the U.S. Senate or some other high office.

Many reporters discounted Ueberroth’s uncharacteristically modest denial of any role in ending the strike. However, off the record, almost all of the 26 club owners have agreed that Ueberroth did little, if anything, to get the settlement.

Ueberroth was not directly available for comment, but spokesman Richard Levin says that, while Ueberroth does not claim any credit for bringing about the settlement, he does say he helped by “encouraging both sides to remain at the bargaining table and helping to keep down the harsh rhetoric between them.”

However, one baseball insider--Marvin Miller--is not reluctant to give his view--and it’s all negative. Miller is the elder statesman of the players’ union, which he founded, and negotiated the new contract along with Donald Fehr, the union’s acting executive director.

Miller scorns Ueberroth’s claim that he is not a tool of the owners. After all, Miller says, “they hired (Ueberroth), pay his salary and can fire him. It is simply absurd for him to contend he is the ‘commissioner of baseball for the fans.’ ”

Ueberroth has said that, if he decides to seek a second five-year term as baseball commissioner, he will accept only if the players and umpires join the owners in approving his appointment. No previous commissioner has sought such player approval.

Miller contends that, if Ueberroth “does try for it, he certainly will be a one-term commissioner.”

According to Miller, the only contribution Ueberroth made to the negotiations was “a collection of ragtag ideas, all but one of which were quickly dismissed by everyone involved as an idiotic attempt to inject himself in the discussions.”

The exception, Miller says, was Ueberroth’s proposal to limit to 100% the salary increase a player could be awarded in a salary arbitration case.

“And that dumb idea, which the owners finally dropped, was the only real issue in the dispute, the one that delayed a settlement and caused the strike,” Miller said. (Levin denies that Ueberroth proposed to limit the salary increase in arbitration cases.)

Miller also insists that Ueberroth has been wrongly credited with privately persuading the owners to drop their strange demand that the contract include a provision that would limit how much the owners could pay their superstar players. (The players now average $363,000 a year.) It’s as if the owners were saying: “We’re being too generous. Stop us.”

The owners do offer salaries that run into the millions of dollars for top-rated players. But a union contract hardly seems the proper vehicle for helping them to curb their generosity. Miller said the idea was dropped by the owners “long before Ueberroth said publicly he didn’t think it would work. But his remark got the owners off the hook because they could imply they had dropped it because Ueberroth urged them to do it.”

At any rate, the players gained significantly more than the owners with the new contract.

The union lost on only one significant issue: The players agreed that they would have to wait three years instead of two after joining a club before they are eligible for arbitration of any salary disputes.

That setback will not affect any current players. (A similar gambit is being used in other industries these days. Employers find workers generally unwilling to strike over issues that will hurt only future workers, not themselves.)

On the pension issue, the players did make a compromise of sorts, but even there they will come out ahead.

Under the old contract, the pension fund got 33% of the revenue derived from the showing of games on television, which has grown to $186 million annually from $46.5 million in 1981. The union wanted to retain that percentage but instead accepted just 18% of that money. That figure will push the pension fund’s income to about $33.5 million a year, more than double what it is now.

An additional $20 million of the TV revenue will be given to clubs that are not doing well financially, something that Miller said was the union’s own innovative idea.

“While the owners exaggerated their overall losses, we know five or six of the clubs have been having serious financial problems, and we certainly wanted to act in a responsible fashion to help solve those problems,” he said.

In other words, Miller says, clubs that are “raking in money, like the Dodgers and the Yankees,” will help less successful clubs.

And the players’ pension benefits will jump substantially. For instance, a player with 20 years in the major leagues will, at age 62, get more than $90,000 a year. Under the old plan, a player with 20 years in the majors would, at 65, have received about $57,000.

Other gains for the players included:

- A 50% increase in the present $40,000-a-year minimum salary as well as cost-of-living increases.

- A new formula for figuring the players’ share of income from the World Series. If it had been used last year, the new formula would have added $500,000 to the players’ pool of $2.8 million.

- Elimination of a contract provision that the owners said in 1981 was so crucial that they accepted a 50-day strike that year to win: the right of a team that loses a player to another team to be compensated by getting another ranking professional player as a substitute.

Thus, it seems clear that, even if Miller is mistaken and Ueberroth did play a secret but important role in the negotiations, he didn’t help his employers, the owners, and certainly won no gratitude from the players.

Retirees’ Health Care

Company-financed pensions for retirees are quite common these days, but a recent study shows that most employers also continue to provide medical care after workers retire.

A survey of 762 medium and large employers showed that 91% provide full medical coverage to retirees before age 65 and that 86% provide coverage after age 65, when Medicare begins. The survey was made by Hewitt Associates of Lincolnshire, Ill.

Of those responding, 48% not only continue medical-care programs but also do not require former workers to contribute toward the coverage. Only 14% of those firms surveyed provided no medical program for retirees.

Only 3% of the firms require workers to pay all of the costs of the medical programs after retirement. Twenty percent ask for worker contributions of $8 to $16 a month, and the rest ask workers to contribute $16 to $56 a month.

Hewitt says medical plans for retirees are “fast moving to the forefront of ‘hot topics’ in retirement planning.”

UFW May Expand

Cesar Chavez’s California-based United Farm Workers may soon expand its operations by merging with the Ohio-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), which represents migrant workers in the Midwest.

The merger was approved enthusiastically Aug. 3 by delegates to the third annual FLOC convention in Toledo, Ohio.

But FLOC President Baldemar Valesquez says that, while “we want to make one and only one union for all the farm workers in the United States, we will not go ahead with the merger plan until we have something more to offer the UFW than another struggle.”

Valesquez is hoping that his union will soon have a meaningful victory to show Chavez after more than six years of a FLOC boycott of Campbell Soup products. The boycott was launched as the union’s attempt to win recognition as bargaining agent for workers employed on farms selling products to Campbell. The company, on the other hand, says that the employees actually work for the farmers, not Campbell, and that it is up to the farmers, their workers and the union to settle the matter of union representation.

Now former U.S. Secretary of Labor John T. Dunlop, a Harvard University professor and one of the nation’s best-known experts in labor relations, is developing a system to resolve the dispute.

Last week he named four other experts to serve with him on a privately funded commission. The four are Douglas Fraser, former United Auto Workers president; Msgr. George Higgins, a prominent Catholic leader who has long been active in labor-management affairs; Don Paarlberg, a top economist and executive in the Department of Agriculture in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and Thomas Anderson, head of one of the largest agribusinesses in the Midwest--The Andersons, based in Maumee, Ohio.

The Dunlop commission, the first of its kind in the country, will set up methods for allowing the workers to decide whether they want union representation, to judge the fairness of employers’ and union conduct and to fix penalties for “unfair” actions.

Commission members can also serve as arbitrators in any contract dispute between employers and the union.

The powers of the commission are even more extensive than those that the California Legislature gave the Agricultural Labor Relations Board in 1975.

Tomato growers in Ohio have already formed an association, and their workers will be the first to decide on representation. Plans for cucumber growers are still being developed.

Another commission assignment is to formulate farm labor laws that will be presented to the legislatures of Michigan and Ohio. So far, only California has labor laws that cover farm workers.