Thursday, March 1, 2012

Vince Russo Is a Decent Human Being, No Sarcasm

Social activism trumps being bad at your job
Via TNA Insider

In an interview with Unlimited Wrestling Radio, now-former TNA wrestler Brian Kendrick relayed information that Vince Russo urged the lower-card members of the locker room to unionize and that they'd have his implicit support. Obviously, this hasn't come about, but the fact that Russo came out in support of it makes him deserving of major plaudits to me.

I've written a lot of terrible, bad, awful words about Russo on this blog over the years. Hell, one of my most famous tags implicates him as wrestling's Antichrist. All of them have centered around his writing and influence on the creative side of things. All of those words stand, but now that it's known he's in support of unionization, I'm going to back off the insulting language. See, pro wrestling is the one industry in America that needs a union but doesn't have it because promoters are scum, and the biggest promoters have it way too cushy. As we've seen through the Occupy movement and the squeezing of American jobs for lower cost wage employees overseas, the people in charge of big business have a disproportionate amount of power even in industries where there are unions. I guess when folks can afford lobbyists, things are going to be coming up Milhouse for them more often than not.

With pro wrestlers, it's even worse because they're not contracted employees and thus are not under the same set of legal guidelines or scrutiny that other companies have. The independent contractor label is key here, and as long as WWE and TNA can get away with calling their obviously contracted employees independent contractors, there will be no unionization. The push can only come from wrestlers if they're in high ranking positions within the big companies, and honestly, most of those guys have it good anyway. It really has to come from the office. The fact that Russo is part of the office and feels this way is a big step in the right direction.

Obviously, there's the whole point that "well, he didn't say anything either" but people need to understand that if someone is the only person within a group who feels the way they do, they either have to have massive huevos to speak up and have their opinions heard. That speaks to my point about mob mentality from my TWIOT post this morning. Who knows, maybe Russo did speak up and we didn't hear about it. Maybe he never did. Either way, the fact that he even suggested it is a good thing. Good on Vinny Ru. His writing still sucks shit, but that's okay. The important thing is that his priorities are in the right place when it comes to worker safety.

h/t to @podjohnnyringo for the link on Twitter