The union representing 286 game-day workers at Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium has ratified a new contract with the team.
According to veteran KCUR and NPR reporter Frank Morris, a spokesperson for the Royals said management is pleased with the agreement, reached last week, and will soon finalize it.
“We started in December and we have just now finished,” said Rose Welch, the lead negotiator for Service Employees International Union Local 1. “It’s been a really tough contract to bargain. And [union members] made a lot of wins in this contract.”
All Royals event services workers got a $2.75 raise over three years. The first pay bump this summer will bring the lowest-paid union workers at the ballpark — ushers and bathroom attendants — up to $16 an hour.
The contract also changes the way disputes between workers and management are handled, Morris reported.
“The biggest thing that our workers are happy about [is] having a usable, functional grievance procedure that we can use when contract violations happen,” Welch said. “And finally having a written standard fair disciplinary procedure, which they didn't.”
Welch said the new contract will force the Royals to adopt a less confrontational approach to discipline issues and require supervisors to schedule training with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. In June, the union filed charges against the Royals with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that workers were screamed at while in the presence of fans.
”It’s really going to improve the working conditions of these working people and make sure that they can get back to really enjoying their jobs and serving the fans,” Welch said.
In a statement, the Royals said that the organization's pay for game-day stadium workers “falls on the higher end of the MLB wage scales across the league."
Another point of complaint among union members in their June NLRB filing was their inability to bring their own water to work.
Related: Kauffman Stadium Workers File Federal Labor Charges Against Royals
As reported by Morris, Major League Baseball developed rules against workers bringing their own cups to games a few years ago to ensure that nobody smuggled weapons, even disassembled firearms, into stadiums that way.
That left workers with management-supplied water that some didn’t think was safe to drink from relatively small uninsulated bottles. The new contract allows Kauffman workers to bring their own beverages in their own containers, as long as they don’t mind security opening the lid and checking for contraband.
All that said, most of the people working games at Kauffman Stadium are not covered by the new contract, according to Morris, who pointed out that many work for companies that provide services such as grounds maintenance to the Royals. Nevertheless, Welch said the union contract will provide leverage for those workers to boost their pay and working conditions, as well.
