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| Yeah they wanted out, but was now the right time? No. Photo Credit: WWE.com |
A funny thing happened between then and now though. COVID-19 swept through the world and ground everyday life to a near standstill. Although WWE and AEW have continued on with new content, their total operations, especially WWE, have taken a sizeable hit. WWE's business doesn't just include televised shows; they're the one company that still does untelevised, unavailable-for-streaming house shows. And because McMahon has repeatedly abused the independent contractor label for his benefit, not many wrestlers have guarantees in their contract that allow them to get paid if they're not working. So people like Wilder and Dawson don't get paid if they don't work matches, and if they're not on TV, they're not working at all. It's a shitty thing to do for anyone, not exclusive to McMahon in this scenario (I'm furloughed from my shoot dayjob right now), but still, if you're not on television or someone like Brock Lesnar or Roman Reigns, you're in financial precarity right now.
It's a rock-and-a-hard place sort of deal. If The Revival kept their jobs and didn't appear on television between now and the end of the end of the world, they'd not get paid. If they got cut from WWE, well, they'd not get paid because no other company really is running and even the companies that are, like AEW, might not want to take on a new contract until after things died down, especially after taking on two new contracts in Lance Archer and Brodie Lee right before COVID-19 hit. As fate would have it, today, Friday, April 10, 2020, McMahon gave them option B. Dawson and Wilder are free to hit a free agent market that doesn't exist after turning in all names associated with them that have trademarks owned by McMahon.
Without context, it shouldn't matter either way, but there's never a context-free way to look at the way WWE deals in business, especially when dealing with labor that the company has brutally suppressed from unionizing for 35-plus years now. The Revival are the first unhappy act to have their release granted to them during uncertain times, but it feels like they won't be the last. Releasing talent from the company without any avenue for them to make money is like not releasing them at all, at least for the time being. It's a slap in the face, a turn of the screw. Sure, eventually, The Revival will land in AEW under a different team name, and they'll have a match with the Bucks that will inspire a lot of takes. They could be okay in the long run. So would people like Mike and Maria Kanellis or Lio Rush or other people who have expressed unhappiness in the past or who may still express it in the present. That doesn't mean granting them a Pyrrhic release at a time where WWE would take no direct hit from their unemployment with the company wouldn't feel like a grievous insult.
Wrestlers are, or at least seem to be, the most prideful people on the planet, but I guess an industry where you fake fight leads to needing a lot of pride, a lot of ego. It's not a good nor is it a bad thing; it's just the nature of the beast. Whether or not a neutral observer thinks these wrestlers should nut up and shut up is irrelevant. At the end of the day, The Revival were treated shabbily from initial unhappiness to their anticlimactic release from the company. Even worse, there's a chance they may not hold it against McMahon for too long because for as prideful as wrestlers are, they're also categorically the one industry where labor is almost as anti-themselves as the bookers and promoters for whom they work. They don't know it, but wrestlers are perhaps the most historically downtrodden group of workers in the country because they're almost disrespected on a ritual basis, but eventually, only a few of them see their own worth enough to speak out about it, and those people, from as psycho as Ryback to as with it as David Starr end up suffering professional consequences without anyone ever asking why it's okay they face sanctions.
It shouldn't matter if Dawson and Wilder, under whatever names they go with in their post-WWE careers, will end up alright. They seemed to have wanted a release sooner than now, and the fact that McMahon can hold them hostage until the world starts burning around everyone feels like the kind of capitalist malfeasance that people around the country and world are waking up to seeing is grotesquely wrong. The answer is unionization, across all companies, for everyone from Brock Lesnar down to the youngest Young Lion in the Fale Dojo. Now more than ever, wrestling, not just in WWE, but across the board, needs collective bargaining to make sure that when a wrestler wants to leave a company, they can with the same ease that the owner can fire them at-will. Wrestling isn't going to improve until wrestlers start seeing their own self-worth. That worth isn't in drawing power or cool moves or heady promos. It's in realizing that McMahon and Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Tony Khan and BUSHIROAD Corporation can have the rings and the venues and the money, but if they don't have wrestlers, they don't have wrestling.
Until that day, companies are going to be able to act with near dictatorial impunity with human resources decisions. While it doesn't matter if The Revival will end up on their feet, the fact that they more than likely will will justify these decisions to fans who don't see wrestling as a battleground between labor and capital in its purest, most primal form. But it is definitely a place where the struggle continues, the place where capital probably holds the biggest stranglehold over labor compared to nearly any other business. Wrestling is the reason why I'm here and why so many other people, myself included, watch and enjoy, but what if it could be something more? If you think it can, rethink whatever it is you think about situations like these and realize what it could be like if wrestlers, not McMahons or anyone else who pushes a pencil, had true freedom.
