Kentucky congressman Brett Guthrie and Illinois congresswoman Cheri Bustos have come up with the brilliant idea that minor league baseball players that work as many as 50-60 hours a week don’t deserve overtime. Minor league players are only paid a minimum of $1100/month. If we assume 200 hours a month, that only comes out to $5.50/hour. I could argue over what player activities constitute working, but why bother. Even with per diems, I can’t imagine it is easy to live on that and most players don’t receive significant signing bonuses. To top it all off, players at the lowest levels are only paid for 3 months a year as if they aren’t expected to train 12 months a year. Baseball is a multi-billion dollar sport, and the teams could easily afford to pay the players double without breaking a sweat. 30 teams * 170 players * $4k ≈ $20 million in a sport with revenues of $9 billion and is less than what some MLB players make in a year. The fact that MLB is even fighting the lawsuit to get minor league pay up to the bare minimum is mildly reprehensible.
As for the idea that minor league teams would go out of business if they were forced to pay their players fairly, the first franchise that contracted one of their minor league teams would be laughed out of the league and would struggle to put a MLB team on the field in 5 years.