Let me explain what happened here.
a lot of wrestlers’ income dropped because they stopped doing live shows. That meant less pay, and it also meant less merch sales.
So a lot of folks started live streaming on Twitch and YouTube, and picking up some extra cash from ads and memberships. And some others started doing custom videos on Cameo.
And the WWE, who employs(*) all these people, basically said “We don’t want you making any money that we don’t get a cut of, if not all of it” and said everyone had to stop streaming.
They claimed since they owned the trademarks of the wrestlers’ names, they should be the ones making money on them.
So the boys said “No problem, we’ll just use our real names on the streams” and the WWE claimed that they also owned the wrestlers’ real names.
They wanted to have everyone turn the stream channels over to the company, and then they could keep streaming, but any income from it would count towards their downside guarantee, AKA, the minimum money a worker could make in a year.
The wrestlers are all understandably VERY angry about this.
Now, let’s look at that (*). Wrestlers are not technically employed by the WWE, they are “independent contractors”, which is the company’s way of getting out of paying them an actual salary, and (very important) giving them medical benefits. They’re responsible for all their own expenses, travel, etc. And yet somehow, the WWE still has the ability to restrict the wrestlers from working anywhere else, where they make appearances, etc, things not ordinarily possible for contractors.
This business model has been under fire for some time now, both in the industry as well as outside - John Oliver did a scathing analysis of it back in the spring which got a lot of tongues clicking, but very little actually achieved.
To a degree, WWE is a larger scale version of the Gig Economy issue, and it’s all primed to come to a head soon.
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