Major League Baseball umpires. Don’t really need to explain any more than that. CB Bucknor, Laz Diaz and Angel Hernandez are people that non baseball fans should even know, and yet they do.
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I'm anti-union, but it's more the union's relationship with the government. Unions and their employer, yeah whatever, but the employer should have the right to tell them all to piss off without government intervention. If you want to stay, earn the right to be missed. Union demands have gotten out of hand.
MLB is probably the worst too. There's some excellent umpires, Pat Hoberg is notable for calling a perfect strike zone in last years world series. He's also not known to be an egotistical prick. Getting a job as an umpire is about like replacing a supreme court justice though, you have to wait for them to die.
I'd be fine with them too as long as some "separation of union and state" principle was enforced. No government money flowing into unions, no political power wielded by unions. Nobody can be stopped from participating in a union, nobody can be forced to participate in a union.
But I really don't see why a sportsball entertainment company full of entitled millionaires needs them. Do Starcraft esports teams have unions?
The original reasons for the players unions were because of pay, unironically, because even certain stars used to have to work during the offseason because of not making enough. In fact, the MLB All-Star game was originally designed to be a scheme to help those All-Stars get more money for their retirement, while the owners just took everything. Considering how sports are how a lot of people still get out of poverty, and most teams are owned by billionaires who wouldn't spit on us to stop a fire, I don't hate that traditional athletes have unions, I hate that esports players don't have unions, because of not taking heed of what happened back in the day.
Also, the entire reason "free agency" exists is because of lawsuits, because teams used to be able to just extend you until they wanted to get rid of you, you had no choice as to what team you wanted to play for.
In MLB specifically, the reason that players want to at least play for ten years is because that's when they're guaranteed a full retirement, as while yes, the stars get paid huge amounts of money, the non-stars are still in the steepest tax bracket.
Team owners being pieces of shit is why players' unions exist.
Edit: https://www.mlbplayers.com/history
https://nflpa.com/about/history
https://nbpa.com/about
I used to think player unions were unnecessary too, until I learned just how terrible owners were, and a lot of them, still are.