Legislature’s inaction turns St. Paul Saints into minimum-wage sinners

Nuns are exempt from Minnesota’s minimum wage law. So are priests and monks.

But not Saints.

At least not the St. Paul Saints, and a failed attempt to exempt the minor league baseball team’s 22 players from the law during this year’s session of the state Legislature has left them in limbo.

Minor league baseball players have already been exempted from the federal minimum wage law and St. Paul’s minimum wage ordinance. But an attempt to go three-for-three — winning an exemption from the state — failed this session.

A bill to add Saints players to vocations already exempt from the state law — those in religious orders, camp counselors, politicians and some agricultural workers — was moving through the Legislature this year, until it wasn’t. The exemption passed the House Labor Committee with a bipartisan vote but then was not included in that chamber’s omnibus jobs and economic development bill.

And while it was in the Senate’s omnibus bill, it did not make it into the final jobs omnibus bill passed during last month’s one-day special session and subsequently signed by Gov. Tim Walz.

The bill did have public opposition from organized labor, but was it was hardly a labor priority; unions and minimum wage activists put up little opposition when the team’s players were exempted from the St. Paul $15 Now ordinance passed just last year.

Mahoney, a retired union pipefitter, did not respond to requests to comment on the deletion of the exemption from the omnibus bill. He had warned before it passed the Labor Committee, “If we play politics with this, it’s a sad day for St. Paul.”

His Senate counterpart, Sen. Eric Pratt, R-Prior Lake, said he thought the exemption made sense but was told in the House-Senate conference committee that it was a “deal-killer” for the DFL. “I was told that despite the support from the city of St. Paul, the speaker wasn’t interested in having that as part of the final bill,” said Pratt, who is chair of the Senate Jobs and Economic Growth committee. “This was one of the deal-killers. It was discussed (in conference). It was just summarily shut down by the House.

Pratt said Labor and Industries Commissioner Nancy Leppink was “non-supportive” when the bill was heard in his committee. “It boggles me why we couldn’t get this very simple thing that seemed to have bipartisan support done,” Pratt said.

So what happens now?

Through a department spokesperson, Leppink said Monday that she expects the team to comply. “Unless they are otherwise exempt, the St. Paul Saints have an obligation to comply with state minimum wage and hour rates and laws,” she said. “It is the department’s expectation that if the St. Paul Saints employment practices do not currently comply with state law, they will immediately bring their practices into compliance.”

There has never been an investigation of the team nor an enforcement action, Department of Labor and Industries spokesman James Honerman said. Going forward, he said, “Our department has the authority to enter and inspect places of employment with or without a complaint.”

For the Saints, however, meeting the state minimum wage presents a problem. Team officials say it would put them in violation of their league’s salary caps and subject the team to expulsion. Known as a second-chance league, the American Association gives players who either were never drafted by a major league team (or who were drafted and released) an opportunity to play themselves back into affiliated professional baseball.

In the team’s 26-year history, 21 players have signed to major league contracts and 130 have moved to a minor league team affiliated with a major league team, Saints Executive Vice President Tom Whaley told the House Labor Committee in March.

Asked about failure to get the exemption through the Legislature, Whaley said this week: “Right now we’re gonna let the dust settle,” he said. “We haven’t really thought about it much since it happened.”

The session was ending just as the team was beginning its 27th season, leaving the organization with little time to focus on the legislation. “We’re gonna take a look at it in another few weeks and see where we go,” Whaley said.

He noted that it has never been an issue with state regulators, putting the team in an odd position. “There’s no there there right now,” he said. “This is our 27th season and it’s not been an issue for us.”

The salary cap for the 22-players on the team this season is $125,000, Whaley said. Teams that exceed the cap can be fined and ultimately expelled. Whaley said this week that the team pays all other employees at least the applicable minimum wage, currently the state rate of $9.86. The St. Paul wage ordinance does not kick in until 2020.

The players earn as little as $1,700 a month for the four-month season. If they worked a 40-hour week, that monthly pay would barely equal the state minimum wage. But the players do not work 40-hour weeks; the team usually has six games per week and often travels on off days to cities as far away as Winnipeg, Manitoba, Cleburne, Texas, Lincoln, Nebraska and Gary, Indiana.

Said Pratt: “It’s a shame for the Saints because the state helped with CHS Field and they are a tremendous asset for the city of St. Paul. I wish we could have gotten it done.”

Pratt said there are a lot of carve-outs in the minimum wage law for jobs that don’t fit into the more-common definitions of hourly workers. Of the players, said Pratt, “Whether you want to call them interns or entertainers or whatever — they don’t have a job that really fits the standard labor rules.”

That rationale was accepted by, among others, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and the City Council. During the March legislative committee meeting, Whaley joked that, “there are not a lot of things in life, love or politics where Mayor Melvin Carter and President Donald Trump would agree on, but they agree on this.”

It hadn’t been much of an issue for the first several decades of the Saints in St. Paul. Even without a statutory exemption, it was assumed that minor league players here and across the nation were not the type of workers covered by wage and hour laws. But a pair of class-action lawsuits argued that minor leaguers should at least get minimum wages from their teams. Before that litigation could get traction, however, professional baseball successfully lobbied Congress last year to pass the Save America’s Pastime Act, which carved out a new exemption under federal law.