Gimme a… living wage
Reprints
Despite years of litigation over whether the National Football League teams violate wage and labor laws when it comes to paying cheerleaders, a recent analysis found that the peppiest players in America’s favorite pastime are still the losers.
As Fast Company reported just in time for Sunday’s Super Bowl, teams agreed to pay their squads “in line with wage standards” and were forced to pay settlements, and “for a while it seemed as if real change was imminent. But was it?”
The answer is nothing to rah-rah-rah about: no.
As the news outlet points out, a report in 2022 from NBC News “pinpointed the average pay for NFL cheerleaders to be about $150 a game, or roughly $22,500 a year, which is not much different than what it was reported to be in the original Raiders lawsuit. Although the rate varies depending on the profile of the squad, it’s clear that cheerleading, even at the highest levels, is a discipline in which compensation doesn’t match the level of hard work that goes into it.”
