Maria Pinzone thought she had landed her dream job when, in 2012, she successfully auditioned for the Jills, the cheerleading team of her beloved NFL team in her hometown, Buffalo Bills. Pinzone had long dreamed of cheering for the NFL, but as the season progressed, parts of the job began to upset her. The job required hours of practice hours and dozens of community events, all free. Bills earned more than $ 250 million as an organization that year, but Pinzone had to pay $ 650 for his uniform, and received just $ 105 for 840 hours of work.
Pinzone left the team in 2013. When another Jill confided the same questions about compensation, Pinzone took her contract to a lawyer. The meeting in late 2013 “almost felt like a prayer confession,” she told the Guardian. Something seemed strange about the contract – the Bills’ mascots, dealers, janitors and cleaning staff were all paid for their work and time, but the cheerleaders at the same stadium every week were not. But the doubt arose. “I’m crazy?” she thought. “Here I was signing up to be an NFL cheerleader – such a high profile [job]”She said,” it never occurred to me that there could be anything wrong with that contract. “
A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem, a documentary completed in 2019 and now available on demand, delves into the context of the Pinzone process and traces the prolonged and hard-won efforts by cheerleaders across the league to compel the NFL to compensate for just your most visible employee process. Since Pinzone, one of the two former cheerleaders followed by filmmaker Yu Gu while seeking compensation for the payment of minimum wages and attorney fees, and four colleagues filed a lawsuit against the Jills, their managers and the Bills in 2014, the NFL, which generated more than $ 15 billion in revenue in 2019, is under increasing scrutiny because of insufficient payments, restrictive contracts and mistreatment of its fans. Ten of the 26 NFL teams with cheerleaders have since faced lawsuits alleging theft of wages, sexual harassment, hostile work environments that embarrass the body, criminally low salaries (some as low as $ 2.85 an hour) and “Blatant discrimination”.
But in 2014, few spoke publicly about fair pay for cheerleaders, a decades-old staple of the NFL whose traditional 1960s “volunteer” position barely adapted to the league’s inflated wealth, visibility and professionalism. The highly competitive NFL cheerleading teams have developed their own arrangements justifying maximum training and minimum pay – speak or challenge loyalty to the football team and you will be on the bench. “It happened for a long time, and this culture of fear was really instilled in cheerleaders from day one,” Gu told the Guardian. “It was a great barrier to overcome.” That was, until Lacy Thibodeaux-Fields, an Oakland “Raiderette” originally from Sulfur, Louisiana and another guy in the film, filed for class action in early 2014.
Like Pinzone, Thibodeaux-Fields, agile and supernaturally bubbly, long dreamed of being a professional cheerleader – when she joined the Raiderettes in 2013, Thibodeaux-Fields invested 10,560 hours in 18 years of dance training, a work calculated on the screen in a woman’s work. The NFL did not reward this experience and the terms of the job were unsustainable: the Raiderettes were not paid until the end of the season, nine months after they started practicing. Thibodeaux-Fields was expected to pay for the necessary hair, nails and tanning for $ 225 a unit and, in all, received less than $ 5 an hour for his work, including eight-hour shifts.
Gu heard about the Thibodeaux-Fields process in the Los Angeles Times when he was a graduate student at the University of Southern California. Born in China and raised in Vancouver, Gu was familiar with the stereotypes of cheerleaders, but was perplexed by the football-obsessed culture. Deprived of American myths used by teams to justify low wages – that it was a privilege to cheer on the NFL, that brotherhood and prestige were worth more than money, that offered visibility and that has always been the case – the case of Thibodeaux-Fields seemed straightforward, “Um way to understand some of the central mythologies of American culture, ”Gu told the Guardian.
Woman’s Work has been watching Thibodeaux-Fields and Pinzone for five years, according to the lawsuits and their echoes – the painful gossip in Facebook groups, the recognition of widespread issues across the league, the slow unlearned “luck of being here” “lighting gas, recognizing it reshapes a person’s whole worldview – it intertwines in their everyday lives, sometimes terribly personal. Gu’s camera finds Thibodeaux-Fields on the floor with her children, overwhelmed with childcare and too tired to be involved with her husband after work. We looked from the passenger seat in Pinzone, days after losing her mother – her best friend and greatest cheerleader – to cancer, as she melts into tears in her car.
The naked filming of the film and not related to the judicial process demonstrates “the consequences, the repercussions of being mistreated in the workplace, of being underpaid or undervalued,” said Gu. Without a Raiderette salary, Thibodeaux-Fields relied on following her husband’s work and providing daycare for her growing family. Maria balanced the stress and time of the process with her career as an accountant and her mother’s primary care.
Thibodeaux-Fields finally reached an agreement with the Raiders, but in the case of Pinzone, a class action joined 73 other Jills (60 more opted out) that eventually included the NFL as a defendant, dragged on and is still in a tense stalemate. Days after the lawsuit was opened, Bills closed Jills, unceremoniously ending a nearly 50-year program. “I just couldn’t believe that they did that and turned everything against us, so we became the bad guys,” said Pinzone. “It was really difficult to navigate. At one point in the film, defendants offer a low-ball deal instead of paying fair wages. “The fact that they thought we would accept something so low shows what they think of us: that we are nothing,” said Pinzone during the filming of her accompanying her father to a doctor’s appointment.
The NFL, for all its recent work to deal with sexism and racism within the league, and its 2016 “women’s summit” held in the wake of the league’s domestic violence scandal, has criticized cheerleaders’ compensation at the national level. of the league. Contracts and payment for cheerleading teams are still at the discretion of individual teams and their owners. In Gu’s opinion, the league “is not justifying” the direct approach to a safe and fair working environment for cheerleaders, “I think it is because they feel they need not justify,” she said. Cheerleaders or not, with fair pay or not, people will still watch football. “Because the position of the league is that it is the responsibility of each team, there is only a lack of consistent rules and guidelines between the different teams, and there is a lack of transparency and communication between the different teams,” explained Gu.
Still, she added, it was “encouraging” to see teams changing their policies in the wake of various lawsuits – the Raiderettes changed their contract to comply with labor laws, and California deputy Lorena Gonzalez, who appears in the film, introduced legislation specifically designed to protect professional cheerleaders.
Some teams “realized[d] these women are an asset to your organization and should be compensated for that, ”said Pinzone. Although she “had no idea when we signed” how long the lawsuit, delayed by a defendant’s bankruptcy and the pandemic, would continue, Pinzone hopes for a resolution this year. “We will continue to move forward,” she said, “and we hope that once this is resolved, they will also bring the Jills back and do it the right way.”