Maria Pinzone thought she got her dream job when she auditioned for the Jills in 2012, the cheer team for her beloved NFL team from hometown, the Buffalo Bills. Pinzone has long dreamed of cheering in the NFL, but as the season progressed, parts of the job upset her. The work required hours to hours of practice and dozens of community events, all unpaid. The bills earned more than $ 250 million as an organization that year, but Pinzone had to pay $ 650 for her uniform and was only paid $ 105 for 840 hours of work.
Pinzone stopped the team in 2013. When another Jill expressed the same doubts about its compensation, Pinzone took her contract to a lawyer. The meeting at the end of 2013 ‘feels almost like a prayer confession’, she told the Guardian. Something feels uncomfortable about the contract: the Bills’ mascots, concessionaires, housekeepers and cleaning staff are all paid for their work and time, but the cheerleaders in the same stadium were not there every week. But there is doubt. “Am I crazy?” She thinks. “Here I signed up for an NFL cheerleader – such a high reputation [job], ‘She said,’ it just never occurred to me that there could be something wrong with the contract. ‘
A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem, a documentary completed in 2019 and now available on demand, examines the context of Pinzone’s lawsuit and traces the long-running, hard-won efforts of cheerleaders across the league to force the NFL to compensate his most visible. female employees. Since Pinzone, one of the two former cheerleaders, followed by filmmaker Yu Gu, while demanding compensation for the minimum wage and legal costs, and four teammates in 2014 filed a lawsuit against the Jills, their managers and the Bills, the The NFL, which generated more than $ 15 billion in revenue in 2019, has been scrutinized for widespread underpayment, restrictive contracts and abuse of its cheerleaders. Ten of the 26 NFL teams with cheerleaders have since faced lawsuits over wage theft, sexual harassment, hostile work environments that are physically shameful, criminal low wages (some up to $ 2.85 per hour) and ‘blatant discrimination’.
But in 2014, few people spoke publicly about fair pay for cheerleaders, a decade-long NFL staple whose traditional position of ‘volunteers’ from the 1960s barely matched the league’s wealth, visibility and professionalism. Extremely competitive NFL teams have developed their own arrangements to justify maximum training and minimum pay. Speak or dispute loyalty to the football team. “It’s been happening for so long, and this culture of fear has really been instilled in cheerleaders from day one,” Gu told the Guardian. “It was such a big barrier to overcome.” That was until Lacy Thibodeaux-Fields, an Oakland “Raiderette” from Sulfur, Louisiana and the other subject of the film, filed a lawsuit in early 2014.
Like Pinzone, Thibodeaux-Fields, agile and prematurely bubbly, long dreamed of being a professional cheerleader – by the time she joined the Raiderettes in 2013, Thibodeaux-Fields had put in 10,560 hours in 18 years of dance training, ” a job calculated on the screen. in a woman’s work. The NFL did not reward the expertise, and the working conditions were untenable: Raiderettes were only paid at the end of the season nine months after they started training. Thibodeaux-Fields is expected to pay the necessary hair, nails and spray tan at $ 225 per doll, and according to her, she pays less than $ 5 per hour for her work, including eight-hour shifts.
Gu first heard of Thibodeaux-Fields’ lawsuit in the Los Angeles Times while he was a graduate student at the University of Southern California. Gu was born in China and grew up in Vancouver and was familiar with cheerleading stereotypes, but amazed by American football-obsessed culture. Stripped of the American myth used by teams to justify low salaries – that it was the privilege to rejoice in the NFL, that sisterhood and prestige were worth more than money, that it offered visibility and always was – Thibodeaux-Fields ‘s case seems straightforward, “A way to understand some of the core mythologies of American culture,” Gu told the Guardian.
A Woman’s Work observes Thibodeaux-Fields and Pinzone for five years, while the lawsuits and their echoes – the hurtful gossip on Facebook groups, the recognition of widespread issues in the league, the slow learning of ‘happy to be here’ the eye down If you recognize it, you reflect one’s whole worldview – weave it into their everyday lives, sometimes suddenly personally. Gu’s camera finds Thibodeaux-Fields with her children on the floor, overwhelmed with childcare and addicted to calling after work with her husband. We stare from the passenger seat at Pinzone, days after she lost her mother – her own best friend and biggest cheerleader – to cancer while melting in tears in her car.
The film’s unadorned, lawsuit-unrelated footage shows “the consequences, the consequences, of being abused in the workplace, being underpaid or undervalued,” Gu said. Without a Raiderette wage, Thibodeaux-Fields relied on following her husband’s job and providing child care for their growing family. Maria balanced the tension and time of the lawsuit with her accounting career and primary care of her mother.
Thibodeaux-Fields eventually reached a settlement with the Raiders, but Pinzone’s case, a class action lawsuit involving 73 other Jills (excluding another 60) who eventually included the NFL as defendant, was delayed and is still in a tense situation. dead center. . Days after the case was filed, the Bills closed the Jills and ended a nearly 50-year-old program non-stop. “I just could not believe they did it and we turned it around, so we became the bad guys,” Pinzone said. “It was really hard to navigate through. At one point in the film, the defendants offer a low-ball settlement agreement rather than paying a fair refund. “The fact that they thought we would accept something so low shows what they think of us: that we are nothing,” Pinzone said of the recording of her father accompanying her to a medical appointment.
The NFL, for all its recent work to address sexism and racism within the league, and its’ women’s summit in 2016 following the league’s domestic violence scandal, has pointed out that league – level cheerleader compensation is being addressed . Contracts and payment for the cheerleading groups are still at the discretion of individual teams and their owners. According to Gu, the league is the ‘not’ fair ‘practical approach to safe and fair working environment for cheerleaders,’ I think because they feel they do not have to justify it, ‘she said. Cheerleaders or no, fair payment or not, people will still watch football. “Because the league’s position is that it is the responsibility of each team, there is just a lack of consistent rules and guidelines in the different teams, and there is a lack of transparency and communication between the different teams,” said Gu. explain.
However, she added that it was ‘encouraging’ to see teams change their policies following various lawsuits – the Raiderettes changed their contract to comply with labor laws, and California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who appears in the film, introduced legislation. specifically aimed at protecting professional cheerleaders.
Some teams “realized[d] these women are an asset to their organization and they should be compensated for that, ”Pinzone said. Although she ‘had no idea when we entered’ how long the case, delayed by the bankruptcy of one accused and the pandemic, would last, Pinzone is hopeful for this year’s resolution. “We’re just going to keep going,” she said, “and we hope that as soon as it works out, the Jills will bring it back and do it right.”