Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives, and those of our children coming down the pike.

I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

In today's program, we'll be talking about unionization among professional baseball players.

We'll be talking about full-time workers who end up being poor by American standards, and we'll talk about the special conditions

and positions of pregnant women in the American labor force, because all of those particular

issues touch very large questions in our society, which is why we choose them for analysis.

So let's begin with baseball.

For those of you who may not know, we have a professional baseball system here in the United

States, 30 teams making up major league baseball.

But each of those teams maintains what are called minor league teams. This is where

young men, and hopefully in the future, at least young women who are very good at playing baseball,

get a chance to show just how good they are by playing a regular season against other teams, all of the same

apparatus. It's a whole world of minor league baseball. But those particular players have been

ripped off by the capitalists who own and operate major league baseball. What do I mean? Well, they are paid very

poorly. They are supposed to be so excited about the prospect that if they do well in minor

league baseball, well, then they will be lifted up into the Major League teams. Now, it turns out

that the players in the major leagues, those

30 teams, are already unionized. They learned years ago that if they didn't want to be

ripped off by the people who hired them and purchased them for playing in the teams, they better be unionized, and they have been.

And the union is called the Major League Baseball Players Association, MLBPA. And the interesting thing

was this summer, summer of 2022, the MLBPA decided to try to organize the minor

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