Minor leaguers to join MLBPA?

[DrungoHazewood]

The MLBPA has sent out cards to minor league players to vote for an election that would allow them to join.  This would be very interesting, since the history of the player's association has been very focused on just MLB players, with little attention and no membership for minor leaguers or prospective amateur draftees/signees.

At any time there are 5000+ affiliated minor leaguers along with hundreds of indy league minor leaguers (who I don't believe are included in this).  But just 780 MLB players at any one time. I wonder if they're at all concerned about the major leaguers being heavily out-voted on any issue that might involve the very different treatment of the two groups?

[Aglets]

I wonder if the minor leaguers would like the minimum salary in the minor leagues to be higher than the minimum salary in MLB.   Would be an interesting vote.

[forphase1]

I can imagine how badly this could end up turning out.  Time will tell of course.

[DrungoHazewood]

Maybe @Frobby can offer up some legal insight, but I wonder how this might impact the CBA?  I don't know this for sure, but right now decisions made about the minor leagues can be made unilaterally, right? If the Majors want to cut loose 40 affiliated teams they just do it.  But what happens if the 1000 players on those 40 teams are now union members? Will the CBA now cover things like how many affiliated teams and affiliated minor league players the MLB supports?

What spurred this thought is the idea that if minor leaguers are unionized, this would heavily incentivize the MLB owners to minimize the number of affiliates. If the MLBPA wants a $50k minimum salary in the minors the owners might say, sure... but we're going to just two or three levels of affiliated minors.  Let everyone else go to the indy leagues or Mexico or Korea or the unemployment office or something.

[forphase1]

That's certainly possible.   While it's changing due to coal being phased out, unions have a lot of clout here in WV and my mom was in a union while we were growing up.   I don't want to turn this political, but I've certainly seen the end results of unionization where fewer workers have jobs as the jobs get more and more expensive from the business viewpoint.  So yeah I could see MLB further contracting the minors if the salaries paid to the minor league dramatically increases. 

From a legal standpoint I doubt the current CBA took the possible unionization of the minors into account. Without seeing the whole CBA, it's hard to guess how it would be handled really.  They're could be some clauses or language to cover unforeseen issues, or it could be that there are a few years where they are unionized, but without any real protections until the next CBA when this massive change would need addressed.  Could be very ugly really.