WWE fans might want to see this

[Cobra Mgr]

Last Week Tonight w/John Oliver

Sorry for some of the language, but it is an HBO show.

[Westheim]

There is a case to be made that the language Oliver allows on the show is not worse than the language McMahon allows on his show...

[MorseMoose]

John Oliver is brilliant. The sad thing is that this is a tiny fraction of what is appalling about Vince McMahon and the WWE.

[Cobra Mgr]

I've always looked @ McMahon as wrestling's George Steinbrenner. He can do some generous things out of loyalty to his former employees, but then be just as cold & callous as Mr.Burns.

[STLRS95]

Stone Cold with the bedpan. Classic!

[nutt]

Watched it when it aired. Good piece but he used 15-20 year information that is greatly outdated.

[MorseMoose]

My guess is a lot of the clips were as old as they were based on rights. The content was current, the clips were generally older.

[STLRS95]

WWE invited Oliver to Wrestlemania to see how they operate. Watch this all be an act to power bomb him through a table. HaHa!

[Bluenoser]

Figures - probably a "Canadian" thing.

[nutt]

Originally Posted by MorseMoose

My guess is a lot of the clips were as old as they were based on rights. The content was current, the clips were generally older.

Yes/No.

Stories were covered that either didn't relate to the company currently or stories that were anywhere between 5-20 years old. From the Art of Wrestling Podcast (CM Punk) to Wrestling with Shadows (Bret Hart doc).

This is a direct quote from the WON this week about it....

At the same time, things have changed greatly. It’s far from perfect and never will be. But when talking that subject, it is very fair to bring up the high death rate but it’s probably even more fair to update statistics over the last several years. And this also goes across all companies. WWE can say they’ve instituted policies that have helped. And there is something to that. They’ve also been more careful who they’ve hired. But it’s not like we have wrestlers in other companies regularly dropping dead young, and there was a period where this happened at a catastrophic level. It’s a combination of younger wrestlers being fans and learning from what happened to the previous generation and a turn away from the level of drug use in the past.

There was probably something to the effects of the cocktail of heavy steroids and lots of pain killers. While both exist today to a degree, it’s no longer largely necessary to have an unnatural physique to be able to make big money in the industry. There are always exceptions to every rule but as a general viewpoint of the 80s and 90s, that was the case.

[MorseMoose]

I don't know WON, but if they're affiliated with the WWE, they should be ashamed of themselves. If they're not, they're now complicit. They are literally blaming the wrestlers. "more careful who they've hired" is a bull**** response.

This is like getting mad at athletes for going to a team for more money. Fans calling them, "Greedy". No. The billionaire owners are the greedy ones. You don't blame the wrestlers, you blame the ownership. McMahon has gotten rich off the backs of those guys that they're now blaming. And he continues getting rich off of the backs of the current generation.

Let's give it a few years and see what the impact is without the steroids and pain killers - if it's to be believed. And, I don't (re: CM Punk).

[nutt]

Originally Posted by MorseMoose

I don't know WON, but if they're affiliated with the WWE, they should be ashamed of themselves. If they're not, they're now complicit. They are literally blaming the wrestlers. "more careful who they've hired" is a bull**** response.

This is like getting mad at athletes for going to a team for more money. Fans calling them, "Greedy". No. The billionaire owners are the greedy ones. You don't blame the wrestlers, you blame the ownership. McMahon has gotten rich off the backs of those guys that they're now blaming. And he continues getting rich off of the backs of the current generation.

Let's give it a few years and see what the impact is without the steroids and pain killers - if it's to be believed. And, I don't (re: CM Punk).

WON is the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It was a great piece don't get me wrong but it would've been more effective if they would have focused on more recent injuries and tell all.

[rudel.dietrich]

Originally Posted by nutt

WON is the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It was a great piece don't get me wrong but it would've been more effective if they would have focused on more recent injuries and tell all.

What current wrestler is going to speak up? They are on contacts that can be terminated at any time for any reason and the WWE is powerful enough to blackball any wrestler who speaks out.

[MorseMoose]

Originally Posted by nutt

WON is the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It was a great piece don't get me wrong but it would've been more effective if they would have focused on more recent injuries and tell all.

Like Rudel said, how could they address anything current? It's crazy think that CM Punk is as long ago as it is. But, that is pretty current in terms of the scope of this piece.

Also, if they were providing the support and health care that these guys deserve, I'd think they'd be promoting it and making it public that they're doing things that are different than the past.

[rudel.dietrich]

In many cases too this is a family business.
Ric Flair was around for decades in many different promotions and probably saw lots during that time.
But is he going to speak up and jeopardize his daughters career?

Without a union these promotions have tons of power and for the most part these athletes are not coming from middle class backgrounds. This is there one shot to ‘make it’.
They have to abuse pain killers and perform through injuries.
If they don’t then there are hundreds in the local circuits ready and willing to take their spot.

Only a handful have enough power to say no. But why do you think people like the Rock and Cena branched out into acting and other things.
So that they could have the power to say no and actually be able to walk when they were 60.
Most will never get that chance. So they have to keep laying it all on the line week in and week out.

I am not a fan of the sport but the stories of young deaths, murders, suicides etc are horrible.
For a buisness that makes that much money they should have an obligation to take better care of their employees.

[Westheim]

Psshht! They are not employees.

I know, it's crazy. I don't know how they get past the IRS with that. I only know that this would not be possible in Germany. The federal social insurance agency would have slammed them into the ground (or a set of ladders, or a burning table) at their first chance to audit WWE/WWF, because every single one of those contract excerpts on its own is such a huge red flag that you could never get that **** to fly in Germany...

[rudel.dietrich]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Psshht! They are not employees.

I know, it's crazy. I don't know how they get past the IRS with that. I only know that this would not be possible in Germany. The federal social insurance agency would have slammed them into the ground (or a set of ladders, or a burning table) at their first chance to audit WWE/WWF, because every single one of those contract excerpts on its own is such a huge red flag that you could never get that **** to fly in Germany...

Well you know, regulation and worker rights gets in the way of all that wonderful American freedom.

[Balustrade]

Originally Posted by rudel.dietrich

but why do you think people like the rock and cena branched out into acting and other things.

sag

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Psshht! They are not employees.

I know, it's crazy. I don't know how they get past the IRS with that.

The clauses in the "personal services" contracts that treat the wrestlers as independent contractors are almost certainly illegal and unenforceable. I doubt, however, that the IRS would be interested in them, as the wrestlers should be paying their payroll taxes and the IRS doesn't really care who pays those taxes as long as they get paid. Of course, I believe the WWE is committing tax fraud by having its employees pay the taxes that it should be paying, but that's not the sort of thing that the IRS is going to get excited about unless there's a big controversy.

The government agencies that should be most interested in this situation are the unemployment departments in the states where the WWE operates and where the wrestlers are located (which is pretty much everywhere). Employers have to pay into the unemployment compensation fund for every employee, but they don't have to pay for independent contractors. So treating employees as independent contractors means the employer keeps all the money that would otherwise go into the unemployment fund. That's fraud, and that's something that the states should be looking into (in the US, there's no federal unemployment compensation program - that's something that is administered by the individual states).

There's no way that the wrestlers are independent contractors. As Oliver points out, they have exclusivity clauses in their contracts. How can an independent contractor be employed exclusively by one company? The absurdity of that situation is stunning. And those exclusivity clauses are probably unenforceable as well. Courts do not favor those types of clauses and interpret them narrowly. The fact that those clauses are also part of a broader scheme by the WWE to restrain trade and create a monopoly is also a good reason to strike them down.

So why doesn't someone do something about this? Well, I think John Oliver explained it: these wrestlers often have no other marketable skills, and the WWE is literally the only game in town. It's very similar to the situation in organized baseball during the era of the reserve clause. Up until the Curt Flood case, courts routinely held that the reserve clause was illegal, but individual players who made a stink about the clause were bought off or blackballed by baseball. It would have taken collective action by the players to force a showdown with the major leagues, but, for a variety of reasons, that didn't happen until the 1970s.

The wrestlers are in the same boat. What they need to do is form a union to take on the WWE. But the WWE is using the same tactics that major league baseball used during the reserve-clause era: blackball troublemakers, buy off stars, and trust that the rest won't organize because they're all stuck in a "prisoner's dilemma." Vince McMahon, in short, is just a modern-day version of Kennesaw Mountain Landis.

[MorseMoose]

AEW has the potential to upset the current atmosphere of professional wrestling. It has a major financial backer who doesn't appear to be scared to push back against those in power. They've come out and said that they want to be able to provide benefits to their wrestlers, hopefully that means going a direction away from the independent contractor label. If they can be successful, I have to think they can push WWE to make some changes as well.

At least, I'm hoping!