So, this week a large amount of WWE wrestlers and staff were released this week due to COVID-19.
I wanted to let it settle a bit before writing about it so I don’t jump to any conclusions, and I see why Vince has done this major cut, and these cuts do happen often. These are done to make sure the budgets on wages are not wasted on unneeded talent or staff. However, the timing of these major cuts was horrific.
With the pandemic being around many other companies would not look to employ new staff due to the economy essentially as bad as it currently is, leaving over 30 people ( at the time of writing) unemployed.
In addition one of the main reasons that this major cut has happened was due to the failure of XFL, which bankruptcy was filed a few days ago for. Due to this Vince realised he needed to make money and decided to release a huge amount of his employees. From a business viewpoint, you could argue that it makes sense, as due to a lack of live shows, which creates a huge amount of revenue for the company, Vince needs to find a way to save money. However, from a moral viewpoint, this is evil and selfish and I believe that firstly, the moral view is the most important view and that staff should be catered for first and secondly, that if Vince was to do the morally right thing, then it wouldn’t affect his company because now casual fans are more likely to be turned away from the company due to the treatment of his staff.
However, the thing that really irritated me the most about this whole situation is this: According to Forbes, these were some ‘wrestlers’ wages for last year;
Brock Lesnar- $10 million
Shane McMahon – $2.1 million
Cain Velasquez – $5 million
Tyson Fury – $15 million
So around $30 million was wasted on people that WERE NOT NEEDED which was money that could be easily distributed to staff who were just released. All of these people barely featured on TV last year and if the time and money were spent on creating talent from within, then there would be no need for the company to waste this money on people who don’t even work full time.
TheWrestlingFallacy 