Some interesting sports/labor news from SI:
In the latest labor salvo between the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team players and the U.S. Soccer Federation, the five most prominent members of the USWNT have filed an action with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (a government agency) accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination in relation to the money the federation pays to the U.S. men’s national team.
In a press release announced Thursday morning, lawyers for the five U.S. players—Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn—argue that the USWNT is paid almost four times less than the USMNT, despite producing nearly $20 million in revenues for U.S. Soccer in 2015 (per U.S. Soccer’s recently released annual financial report).
….”you have a situation where not only are their work requirements identical to the men’s requirements—the same number of minimum friendlies they have to play, the same requirements to prepare for their World Cups—but they have outperformed the men both economically and on the playing field in every possible way the last two years. So this isn’t a case where someone can come in and say the reason the men are paid more is because they are more economically successful or the men outperform the women or they’re not comparable in the same way….”
For Fiscal Year 2017, USSF projects a net profit from the Women’s team of $5M; while projecting a net loss for Men’s team of nearly $1M.
— Andrew Brandt (@AndrewBrandt) March 31, 2016
Rare case of employer, the USSF, employing both men and women. Have tried to achieve equality through CBA negotiations, now changing course
— Andrew Brandt (@AndrewBrandt) March 31, 2016
Equal pay for equal work, and better pay for better work should be a core value. And right now the US Women’s National Team is doing much better work than the men. They should get paid, especially as they are subsidizing the men.
Villago Delenda Est
Free markets only work when they’re transparent.
Obviously transparency is something the US Soccer Federation avoids like the plague.
These women are entitled to punitive damages.
WereBear
The routine stealing of women’s labor, and thus, undervaluing it, takes a whole new turn. Go for it, ladies.
philpm
Hell, the WNT should be making at least double what the MNT does, based on their performance, and also based on the fact that the leagues that the individual players play in don’t pay near what MLS or BPL or the European leagues pay.
JMG
Is it some sort of requirement that national and international soccer organizations must be socially backward and fundamentally corrupt?
NorthLeft12
This is exactly how you blow up the myth of the gender payment difference being based on performance and results.
It will be interesting to hear how the USSF defends itself against this. If they were ruthless, cheap, and had any balls they would immediately announce that they have mistakenly overpaid the men’s team for the last few years and cut their pay to equal that of the women. Then they would ask the men to return the “overpayment” along with the threat of legal action.
That is what any number of corporations would do………with the corresponding awful publicity and embarrassment.
ruemara
It’s a huge problem. I’ll be accompanying my kickboxing trainer to her first pro natural bodybuilding competition this August. The men’s division has a $20k purse. Women’s? $500. Barely would cover our tickets to fly to PA. Bullshit pay, since the women work as hard as the men. Can you believe that level of disparity? I thought at least $5k, but $500?
dedc79
So the men’s team gets paid win or lose, and the women’s team only if they win (in addition to getting paid different amounts). And right now the men’s team sucks and the women’s team is good.
Maybe the men’s team should switch to only paying for wins. My guess is that if the mens team players weren’t paid for losses and draws too, the mens team would have trouble fielding a competitive team. That’s because the mens professional leagues (particularly overseas, but even here in the US) are far more developed and lucrative than the women’s leagues. I’m not dismissing the role of sexism here; I think it’s clearly still one of the driving factors.
dedc79
@philpm:
But this is probably part of why there is a pay disparity. The US men’s team actually has to convince the most talented American players to play for them. The players on the women’s team has less leverage b/c they can’t/don’t demand big professional salaries.
Face
God dammit. The inclusion of the ONE person who is beyond detestable now makes me root for the Federation. Not surprised she jumped in on this; she needs a bigger income for all her lawyer fees.
Just One More Canuck
I’d love to see what the comparable figures are for the Canadian men’s and women’s teams. The women’s team has been pretty strong for the last five years or so (World Cup in Germany notwithstanding). The men’s team, with the exception of a few flurries of near-competence, has been historically inept. They made the World Cup once, but failed to score a single goal in three games (Mexico 1986)
Wag
This.
philpm
@dedc79: That is likely, but it still in no way accounts for the atrocious lack of results on the MNT side. If the idea is that we have to pay more to get the best American players to play for the MNT, I shouldn’t be seeing Michael Bradley spending more time per game whining at the officials than playing.
Gin & Tonic
@dedc79:
Do you think Messi, for instance, plays for the Argentine national team for the money?
dedc79
@philpm: I hear you. The Klinsmann experiment appears to have been a failure. Probably naïve to think a coach could fix the problem, but it shouldn’t have been too much to hope for that the team would at least improve. They have not. Even the match they won against Guatemala, they pretty much stumbled into three of the goals. It’s actually painful to watch, particularly if you follow any of the European leagues. I feel like the worst Premier league team (Aston Villa) would probably whoop the men’s team right now.
scav
And there’s that recent flare-up in tennis, where apparently things aren’t quite so bad — although a few men were vocally upset in the usual charming manner. Details, various data here
And Face, until you like all women, each and every one, fairness is off the table?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Face: Noooo! Leave Hope Solo alone, you bastards! She’s America’s delicate flower.
Linnaeus
@Face:
Not a fan of Hope Solo myself, after she threw Brianna Scurry under the bus, but we have to look beyond the personalities of the players.
dedc79
@Gin & Tonic:
No, Messi’s participation is more akin to an NBA star playing for the Olympic team. They make so much money that it doesn’t much matter to them anymore.
Most American soccer players play in the MLS and those salaries are generally pretty modest (I’m talking comparatively). So it actually matters to them whether and how much they get paid to play for the national team.
Amir Khalid
The argument in the comments to that story is that men’s football is the more competitive sport and the bigger business, generating more money from attendance, TV rights, merch, et cetera. Therefore the men’s team deserves more money. But that’s at the club level. It’s bullshit to apply it to the national teams.
And it’s not just in football that women athletes get shortchanged. Something like this just happened in tennis, a sport where the top women are currently a bigger draw than the top men. The women want parity of prize money; a few top men players and officials argue against it on the grounds that in the big tournaments men’s matches are best of five sets, whereas women’s matches are always best of three. (I think all tennis should be best of three sets for the spectators’ sake, even though women certainly have the stamina to play best of five if they must.)
philpm
@dedc79: Completely agree. Hell, I think most of the FA teams from England would wipe the floor with us right now. We really did luck into most of the goals the other night, and the one good one was the one disallowed on the bogus offsides.
Michael Noordijk
Hope Solo didn’t throw Brianna Scurry under the bus, she threw the coach who made that decision under the bus. She was impolitic in her disappointment, but she was also absolutely right. She was far and away better than a declining Scurry at the time, and I’ve never understood that decision.
KG
@Gin & Tonic: the top athletes in most major (men’s) sports make more money from endorsements than they do from the teams they play for, at least in the States (though I’m guessing it’s true in Euro soccer as well). There is a real economic motive for them to play for their national teams because it means additional exposure in markets that might not otherwise get them. That drives up their ability to get better (and more) endorsement deals. That’s not to say that the economic motive is the only motive – patriotism, pride, and the general competitive nature of athletes also play roles. But at the end of the day, athletes are businesses, and a lot of them are very smart (or have smart people around them).
Amir Khalid
As I understand, playing for a national team is a matter of sporting prestige; every player gets paid the same per diem, expenses, win bonuses and so on. But you get to brag about your number of caps. In the pro game you make the big telephone-number salary from your club, and the even bigger commercial endorsement bucks from sportswear and other companies.(Cristiano Ronaldo endorses hair products in Asia, for example.)
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
I should add that only the very biggest clubs in the men’s sport pay telephone number salaries, and then only to star players. At England’s League 2, the lowest of four pro levels there, I guess the players only make enough to get by.
Amaranthine RBG
ow there anything stopping the players from refusing to play unless they are paid more?
Richard Mayhew
@dedc79: Oh certainly. The US MNT is a second tier English professional team or a decent B-league mid-table team. Look at the players. How many US players are starting in A-league European ball? How many are starting on top half of the table A-league clubs?
MLS is a decent B-league on a good day and that is what the national team reflects. Decent but not amazing.
MCA1
@dedc79: Umm, no. It’s true that it matters to them whether and how much they’re getting paid by the MNT, in the sense that it might noticeably impact their pocketbook and lifestyle since they’re not cashing in in the European leagues. But that’s not a factor in whether or not they accept a call to be on the squad in the first place. Playing for your country in WC and other international competition is the highest achievement and honor in the sport. I can’t think of a single top U.S. player who’s ever declined participation on the MNT because of economics.
dedc79
@MCA1:
Right, because they pay them decently. You think they’d all play if they only got paid for wins?
daveNYC
@Michael Noordijk: I believe it was made using the same logic that had Mr. Burns sub in Homer for Darryl Strawberry in the softball game episode. Strawberry had hit a home run in every at bat that game, but subbing in Homer played the left-hander right-hander odds.
So Ryan pulled Solo, who hadn’t given up a goal in 300 minutes of play, for Scurry, who hadn’t played at all while in China because historically she’d been very good against Brazil.
Linnaeus
@Michael Noordijk:
Solo threw both the coach and Scurry under the bus in the same outburst. You don’t like the coach’s decision? Fine, but 1) you don’t go public with it and 2) you don’t do it by saying more or less that your teammate isn’t good enough. That’s what Solo did.
I don’t want this, however, to distract from my point that Hope Solo deserves equal pay for equal work as much as the other players do.
dedc79
@daveNYC: He also made don mattingly shave his sideburns
gene108
In a contrarian long view / big picture argument, most women on the U.S. National Team played college soccer somewhere in the U.S.A.
Women’s college soccer is subsidized by the football program (men) and men’s basketball revenues.
They are now just paying back the debt they owe these collegiate male athletes by paying it forward to other men.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@scav: Yeah it will be interesting to see if all the whiny male commenters on the tennis boards that I frequent, who were proudly defending the revenue/ratings-based justifications for the Men being paid more than the Women, will show the same enthusiasm for the Women’s soccer players being paid more than the Men. Something tells me, no they won’t.
OzarkHillbilly
@gene108: Most men wouldn’t exist without women. When are they going to pay for that?
EconWatcher
Comparing net profit for men’s and women’s teams is not a complete or reliable indicator. (If men’s teams generated a lot more revenue, it would suggest an economic reason to pay them more than women, even if total net profits were lower.) But according to another article, “The filing, citing figures from the USSF’s 2015 financial report, says that despite the women’s team generating nearly $20 million more revenue last year than the U.S. men’s team, the women are paid almost four times less.” If that’s correct, the whole thing does look like discrimination.
Big R
Thanks, Obama. This complaint only goes forward thanks to the Lilly Ledbetter Act.
scav
@gene108: I though most schools had a net loss or broke even with the much vaunted and ballyhooed football teams?
Hoodie
@dedc79: Seeing as they aren’t particularly good, does it matter whether the USMNT can draw top US pros using money? Your argument for paying them more only makes sense if you can get enough good players to produce results that justify the higher salaries. Granted, the competition for the USMNT is probably more intense because they’re playing the likes of Messi, but there probably aren’t enough world class US players to really compete with such teams, regardless of salary. If there were, they probably wouldn’t need the extra money anyway because they’d be raking in the bucks in the professional leagues. A better investment would be to put the money in the women’s team, where you have a long track record of success, even dominance, and where you want to continue to incentivize women to continue playing after college. We suck at men’s soccer, but we’re damn great at women’s. Seems like pure gender discrimination to me.
MCA1
@Amir Khalid: The argument about best of 5 vs. best of 3 is completely bogus. I mean, that’s 4 tournaments in the entire season, and 90% of ATP men aren’t around after the first round of any of those tournaments.
Factual quibble, though: it’s not true at the moment that the top women are a bigger draw than the top men. Serena gets crossover crowds, and that’s it right now – if she’s injured or knocked out, attendance suffers mightily in the women’s draw. It was the case, pre-Big 4 era, that the Williams sisters and Sharapova were consistently pulling in bigger ratings than the men, however. And it may soon be the case again, as Federer and Nadal fade and it’s turning into a one man show on the men’s side. Which is why it was really shortsighted for Djokovic to make the insinuations he did last week (since recanted after Billy Jean King gave him a good talking to, I think). There’s no doubt that pay equity across genders has benefitted tennis as a whole, with each side lifting the other at various points. But for most of the last decade, Rafa, Fed, Djoker and Murray have produced a golden era that’s easily been carrying both sides of the game.
In any event, the bigger problem in tennis isn’t gender inequity in pay, it’s that if you’re not in the top 50 in the world it’s hard to make a decent living, while the top 5 are making a mint.
EconWatcher
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
Well, I guess I’m one of those whiners: It’s obvious to me that sports figures who generate more revenue will get paid more; that’s just basic economics. Think about it: what’s the alternative? Should the NBA be prohibited from using its gargantuan revenues to pay its (male) players, just because the WNBA doesn’t generate enough to pay comparably?
But here, at least according to the legal complaint, women generate more revenue. So if the same organization is paying them less than men, that smells like a righteous lawsuit to me.
MCA1
@dedc79: Of course they would. They’d probably play for virtually nothing. It’s the national squad.
FWIW, while there’s plenty of grousing throughout the thread about Klinsmann and stagnation and sucking right now, the USMNT has consistently been one of the top 25 or 30 best in the world over the last quarter century, in a game that has a very short history here and is the top sport in the majority of the rest of the planet. They’ve made the final 16 in three of the last four World Cups, IIRC. They win more often than they lose, so I’m sure they’d be happy to get paid only for wins, since the majority of their contests are still against other CONCACAF teams (last week’s debacle against Guatemala notwithstanding, we still co-own CONCACAF with Mexico).
daveNYC
@OzarkHillbilly: For the rest of their lives, assuming they’re married. Heyo!
I’ll be here all week, tip your waitress and try the veal!
dedc79
@Hoodie:
I wasn’t actually arguing that they should be paid more. I was explaining one reason why they have historically been paid more (I think unfairly). I was just joking about paying them only for wins, but what I really think is that the men and women should be paid the same and should be compensated for playing even when they lose or draw.
Dennis
The women should be paid more than the men, because their efforts produce more revenue. But the reverse is true in most sports. If the WNBA achieved pay equity with the NBA via court order, it would go out of business quickly.
(Just saw that EconWatcher beat me to the punch).
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I’d like to see some numbers on that. My impression is that in terms of direct revenue, football is a money loser at all but the most successful schools. It brings in more revenue than other sports, but it’s also much more expensive to run.
Hoodie
@dedc79: If anything, the women should be paid more. They can’t get comparable compensation outside of national team competition, while the men, at least theoretically, can. This is what is so stupid and male-privileged about the USSF’s position, i.e., they are not fulfilling their mission to build soccer as a sport in the US because they apparently are blinded about a fantasy of being able to produce male players like Brazil when the male athletes with the potential to have those skills in the US generally play basketball, baseball and football because of a lack of a market for pro soccer in the US. Paying guys more for the USMNT is not going to change that. Hell, the concussion problems associated with football are more likely to do that. Soccer is one sport where US women are dominant and have a huge following, and the women’s national team is about the only way to keep the sport vibrant for women, since I would bet professional leagues don’t pay women nearly as much as men who are at the same relative skill level in their respective leagues (e.g., a top female player probably gets paid less than a mediocre B-league men’s league player).
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: Absolutely true. It is only a money maker for the power teams of the power conferences like the SEC. Elsewhere, lavish football programs are being subsidized by student activity fees. The NCAA admits this.
Paul in KY
Agree with equal pay!!! hope they win & get back pay, etc.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
So is men’s college soccer. Shouldn’t the male soccer players have their salaries cut to match the women’s since they both benefited the same way?
Calouste
@OzarkHillbilly: I assume Ted Cruz is the exception you are thinking off?
MCA1
@Dennis: “The women should be paid more than the men, because their efforts produce more revenue.”
Is that actually true on a regular basis, or just in years where there’s a Women’s World Cup? I haven’t read the primary sources on the actual complaint. Clearly their efforts produce more relative success within their game. But how are World Cup revenues distributed? What does the USSF get from TV contracts? What’s the revenue stream for the Women’s World Cup as a percentage of the men’s? I suspect that, if we’re going to be basing the argument for pay on anything other than basic fairness/equal pay for equal work grounds, that even with the USWNT’s status as a top dog in its arena, they’re not going to be on terribly good footing three out of every four years. Even if they do consistently pull in more operating revenue, establishing that as the principle on which they should be paid more is going to backfire against women athletes in almost any other sport.
Villago Delenda Est
@Calouste: Yes, he was hatched.
planetjanet
This development brings joy to my heart!
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@gene108:
Aside from whether or not it’s true, this isn’t a legal argument. The USSF isn’t the NCAA or its member schools, so whether NCAA schools subsidize women’s soccer is irrelevant to whether the USSF should pay equal wages.
Of course, even if the NCAA were involved in this dispute, it still couldn’t make that argument. As a part of their efforts to keep scholarship athletes from being considered employees of the schools, it has argued, successfully, believe it or not, that generating revenue is not a significant purpose or consideration within schools’ athletic departments. You may think that’s ridiculous, and I definitely think it’s ridiculous, but that’s a crucial part of their claim that athletes aren’t employees. So, if they went into court now and claimed that the revenues of the football and basketball teams was important because they subsidize other activities, they’d be lighting their own interests on fire, in addition to making people wonder if they’d perjured themselves over the decades.
Procopius
I realize this is not Balloon Juice’s fault, but can anybody tell me what
means? Does it mean the USMNT is paid five times the amount USWNT is paid? I’ve seen this usage more frequently in recent years, perhaps because it seems dramatic, but what the #$%^& does it mean?