The weeks following WrestleMania are traditionally a time that WWE retools its roster for the upcoming year and beyond. Despite there not being a true “offseason” in professional wrestling, like any sport the time between WrestleMania and SummerSlam is when new talent is pushed up the card, old faces are scaled back, and unfortunately some wrestlers are released all together.
It’s certainly not usual to see pay scales change over time in professional wrestling, moving both up and down as a result of a wrestler’s position inside the company, but it is unheard of that talent has been asked to take massive pay reductions while under contract in an effort to push them into lower-paying roles. Especially when pay at the TKO executive level (WWE’s parent company) has exploded to double, and even triple their multi-million dollar salaries.
This is not a case of cutting pay because the business is changing, or that wrestling revenue is down, but rather the end-game of making payroll as cheap as possible, following the UFC model of grossly underpaying talent. The core difference is that MMA fighters are allowed to pursue and sign their own independent sponsorship deals to bolster their earnings, which WWE wrestlers cannot.
On the contrary, TKO is in a great place financially right now thanks to long-term media rights deals being cemented in the last two years, providing unprecedented wealth and stability.
In this model the only people who gain are predictably at the executive level. It’s also yet another example of the need to address the biggest taboo inside professional wrestling locker rooms: Unionization. The current structure, most notably in WWE, but used by other companies too, is to file talent as “independent contractors,” which is a phony designation designed for focused contract work on a project, not to replace being a full-time employee, as wrestlers often are. This model has allowed WWE to skirt around providing benefits, and adhering to federal employee protections. The fear of unionization has traditionally been the immense power wielded by both Vince and Linda McMahon through their political and judicial relationships, but those no longer exist in a TKO world.
Corporations will always try to get as much out of workers for as little as possible in order to keep stock prices high and executives wealthy — that’s a feature of capitalism, not a bug. However, when wrestlers are given ultimatums to take massive pay cuts or lose their jobs for no discernible reason, then something has to give. Unionization is the path forward, and hopefully, these discussions are happening amongst talent.
