Identification of Collective Bargaining Issues for the Korea Baseball Organization

The purpose of this study was to identify current collective bargaining issues facing the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) and, further, to examine these same issues in Major League Baseball (MLB). In order to help the KBO plan for the future, this study was designed to forecast future collective bargaining issues for the KBO, particularly those that may prove important during the next decade. In addition, this study was intended to explore what differences and similarities exist between the forecasts of experts toward bargaining issues of the KBO and the current content of the bargaining agreement of MLB. An understanding of what issues have been addressed by MLB would help the KBO resolve disputes and establish strategies for collective bargaining in the near future. In order to accomplish the purpose of this study, five research questions were formulated: (a) What do the experts think about the current collective bargaining issues of the Korea Baseball Organization? (b) What do the experts think about the collective bargaining issues of Major League Baseball? (c) What do the experts anticipate about the collective bargaining issues of the Korea Baseball Organization during the next decade? (d) What is the content of the most recent collective bargaining agreements of Major League Baseball? and (e) What differences and similarities exist between the forecast of experts toward bargaining issues of the Korea Baseball Organization and the current content of the bargaining agreement of Major League Baseball? These five research questions were tested by both the Delphi technique and document analysis. The Delphi technique was used to forecast future collective bargaining issues of the Korea Baseball Organization through the opinions of experts. In conducting the Delphi technique, a survey questionnaire was used as the instrument. Thirty-seven experts, selected by a nominating procedure, responded to the questions. Over the two rounds, the collected data were analyzed by both median and interquartile range to determine the consensus of expert opinion. Document analysis was used to identify the kinds of issues important in the MLB collective bargaining agreement by analyzing the contents of two recent MLB collective bargaining agreements. The survey results obtained from the Delphi technique were compared with the results of document analysis. This study found that Korean experts perceived the period of free agency, players' equipment, and both medical and rehabilitation service as the most important labor-management issues. Most of the experts expected that the various collective bargaining issues of MLB will eventually appear in the bargaining agenda between players and owners of the KBO. It was found that the issues believed most important for the near future were annual salary, pensions, minimum salary, and arbitration. Given that these issues were dealt with by the MLB in the 1970's, this finding was considered evidence that the labor-management relations of the KBO are about thirty years behind those of the MLB. More recent issues appearing in the MLB agreement of 1997, such as luxury tax, payroll tax, industry growth fund, antitrust, and revenue-sharing plans, were not perceived by Korean experts as important issues, either currently or for the near future. This finding suggests, therefore, that even though both the KBO and MLB had different collective bargaining foci at the time of the study, the forecasts of the experts related primarily to issues that were important at an earlier period for MLB. This finding provided supporting evidence for the importance of this study, in which the collective bargaining process of MLB can be exemplified as a guideline for the collective bargaining process of KBO. If the path of the collective bargaining process of the KBO more-or-less follows the path of that of MLB, one can reasonably predict the next set of bargaining issues of the KBO by examining the history and strategies of bargaining issues that appeared in MLB.