Labor Maverick Miller Says Union Defeated Its Purpose

Marvin Miller, architect of the first strike in professional sports as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Assn. in 1972, said Wednesday that the NBA players’ union cheated its members by caving in to the demands of the owners to further limit salaries.

A union exists to establish an acceptable minimum on wages, not to set a maximum, he said.

“It is clearly not the function of a union to say, ‘Even though the employer would like to pay my members more, I’m going to agree as a union that it can’t,’ ” Miller said from New York. “The union in that case, instead of an instrument to improve wages, hours and working conditions, becomes an instrument for saying, ‘You can only get something less than the employer, or the clubs, would pay you if no union existed at all.’

“To limit the salaries that are paid to a level below what management would pay if there were no union is ridiculous.”

Miller, who depending on one’s point of view either ruined baseball or saved the most exploited workers in America, said he watched the NBA lockout “from a distance,” though he never spoke to any of the participants.

He said the fans who undoubtedly will swear off the NBA and call for a boycott of games are not being realistic.

“To say you are not going to go to a game because there was a labor dispute,” said Miller, who retired from the baseball union in 1982, “makes about as much sense as saying, ‘I’m never going to take another subway or bus because there have been local transportation strikes,’ or, ‘I’m never going to allow my garbage to be picked up because the sanitation people in my city have been on strike.’

“It’s just absurd.”