Sportsfrog.com

A headline over on Deadspin caught my attention, “Peter Angelos Hates the Homeless.” This would come as no surprise to Baltimorons. There is a local urban legend, and maybe more, that Angelos didn’t like to look out of his law office windows and see homeless guys on benches, so he had the benches removed so no one could enjoy them.

But Leitch’s boys aren’t referencing that. Rather, they bring up Angelos’ backtracking on a serious social issue, the lack of a living wage, that many Americans face every day. The original work is by The Nation’s Dave Zirin, who points out that most workers in Camden Yards don’t make enough money to live on, and aren’t even guaranteed jobs when they show up to the park that day.

Furthermore, Angelos has never come through on his three-year old promise to pay them a living wage. And now he is part of the group who threatens to appeal Maryland’s new law. Why should these businessmen pay people a living wage? I mean, it would be nice and all, but why are they required to? Well, there are two reasons:

1. It’s the law.
2. Those satdiums were funded largely by public dollars.

But it might not stop the rich from trying to get richer:

“On October 1 the state’s newly passed living wage law will require state government contractors to pay their employees $11.30 an hour. Both of the city’s stadiums–Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium, where the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens play–were paid for on the public dime.

“In this solidly blue state, paying stadium workers a living wage should be common sense, but it is not. The MSA contends that stadium workers are not eligible because they are temporary workers. And what makes them temporary? That they don’t have to work ‘away’ games.”

Scumbags. I mean, to make so little and to be subjected to watching the Orioles play 81 times a year? Where’s the humanity?