It's been a relatively slow off-season for the Rochester Red Wings. Their parent club, the Minnesota Twins, didn't really sign any high-impact minor-league free agents, except possibly Matthew LeCroy, a hitter with Major League experience who should bolster the Wings at the plate.

The team doesn't have to worry too much about the bottom line, either: thanks to nice weather, a run to the playoffs, and the resulting high attendance, the Wings --- a publicly owned company under the Rochester Community Baseball umbrella --- made another tidy profit in 2006.

But there was some trouble brewing in December. A coalition of local unions threatened to withdraw their advertising from Frontier Field, back out of the team's annual Labor Night, and even boycott Wings games in 2007 unless RCB let a "labor peace agreement" specify what the company and the union could and could not do during the organizing campaign.

RCB fired back with its own press release, asserting that a labor peace agreement would forbid the ball club to talk to workers about the option of not unionizing. Most of the Wings' food-service workers are high school or college kids employed part time over the summer, RCB officials said, making them "a poor fit" for unionization. They also said no employee complaints had been made to prompt the unions' stance.

Red Wings general manager Dan Mason recently reiterated the club's stance to City. "The thing we want to stress is that we aren't an anti-union organization," he said, noting that the stadium's ushers and ticket sellers are unionized. "We just feel like a union is unnecessary for those particular jobs." He added that the team hasn't heard anything from the unions since the initial flurry.

But last week UNITE chief of staff Mike Roberts disputed RCB's assertion that the food-service workers are not good candidates for unionization. While he acknowledged that some are high school and college students or volunteers from various charities, many of the employees --- such as beer sellers in the stands --- make their living plying their trade at numerous stadiums in the area. "We know who works in the stadium," he says. "That's our business."

It's not surprising that the team wasn't aware of any complaints by the workers, he said, because many workers wouldn't feel comfortable raising the issue with their employer.

Roberts acknowledges that the organization campaign has been quiet in the last month or so, but he says union officials are working behind the scenes to develop a comprehensive plan for the future. Everything, he says, hinges on the workers' desires. "It goes forward," he says, "if the workers want it to."