The independent contractor status of a WWE wrestler will always remain a topic up for debate and if you asked the “Gimmick Attorney” Mike Dockins as to what could change that landscape for pro wrestling’s most notorious company, outside factors may need to come into play. I’m with him on that.
Dockins, an attorney out of Ohio, represents several wrestling talents across the promotional landscape, including WWE and AEW. He also hosts a monthly show on AdFreeShows.com titled “Wrestling With The Law” in which he covers a particular topic of interest as it pertains to the gavel and the “one true sport.”
I recently did a long-form interview with Dockins to discuss all sorts of legalities in the squared circle. A big topic of discussion included independent contracts in WWE and the question that always lurks in Gorilla: what will it take for those “Superstars” to be considered employees?
“So the problem that you have is it’s one of those ‘be careful what you wish for cause you might get it’ sort of situations,” Dockins said. “Because there very much is a significant cost difference for being an employee versus being a contractor, for WWE, and they’re not going to make less money, so where do those dollars come from and I think I mentioned, the way I see it working is, is you’re going to have a much smaller ‘go home’ paycheck because you have so much more going to benefits and all that.
“Now for some people, I think I would probably prefer that right? ‘I want the health insurance, I want to make sure my wife and kids are covered, I want a 401K because one day this goes away and at least I’ve got some retirement nest egg and it helps people save them from themselves, right?’ To have that money being kind of pushed back there for ya. So if the talent wants to be treated as employees they need to understand they’re going to get some benefits, but they’re going to lose some things as well and when you’re an employee there’s less discretionary dollars to be thrown around like, ‘Man, you had a hell of a match last night at TLC, Bray Wyatt! You were set on fire so we’re going to give you a $50,000 bonus.’ Like that’s not going to happen as an employee. So you gotta be careful about what you ask for and I think you’re going to have a divide in the locker room, and my personal opinion is that divide is gonna be the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. So it’s gonna be the top of the card and everybody else or the top and middle top on the way down are gonna be different in what they think and without the buy-in of almost everybody or the ability to have the top lean on the bottom or vice-versa, you’re just not going to get a consensus and that’s why if I think if it’s gonna happen, it almost has to happen from the IRS side or the NRLB side.”
Dockins used a hypothetical example:
“A Heath Slater type, be like, ‘Oh, you’re at the bottom of the card, you’re fired because you raised this as an issue and you’re causing a stink in the locker room. ‘Like what do they care? They wouldn’t fire Roman Reigns if he raised it as an issue, but he’s not going to do that right because he’s got the benefit.”
“I think that’s what has to happen is it has to come from somewhere outside of the talent if the talent can’t all agree together. They can’t fire everybody, right? So if you have the entire roster come together right? That’s kind of a union, they’re not going to fire them all.”
While the “haves” and the “have nots” topic hasn’t specifically been broached by Dockins with talent signed to WWE, he does tend to notice a common thread amongst them.
“I think anybody I talked to, client or otherwise, they all feel very much like they’re not in control of anything. That it’s just, ‘Here’s where you’re gonna be,’ ‘Here’s what you’re gonna do,’ and ‘Oh, we’re not gonna use ya. Just stay home.’ And these guys want to perform, right? They like being out in front of the crowd, doing what they do. It seems to be universal at some point, just getting a paycheck isn’t enough and they want to flex their creative muscle and whatever. That I think is pretty universal.”
That flex tends to shine a bit more by stars who are signed by All Elite Wrestling and he mentioned such on his very first episode of “Wrestling With The Law.”
“They [talent in AEW] are able to flex their creative muscle and have some independence so that’s why in that episode when I talk about it I say, ‘Look, it’s gonna sound like I’m picking on WWE, that’s not intentional, I’m not, but The fact of the matter is their contracts are very different from everybody else’s contracts. You’re not allowed to moonlight other places.’ And that to me is a huge, huge distinction that creates that difference between, you know, ‘AEW and those guys are probably independent contractors at least to some extent’ and for WWE, boy I don’t know if they have been, I don’t think they have been for a long time.”
Ardent fans of WWE and wrestling, in general, are well aware of the conventional “90-day no-compete” clause that goes with a WWE talent when they happen to be released from their contract, but does that “gray area” of independent status create any sort of wiggle room if a disgruntled star wants to break that?
“The non-compete is kind of separate and independent from contractor status or not,” Dockins said. “It’s just another term that people can agree to as part of their contract to what’s restricting them and for non-competes, the legal standard generally speaking it has to be reasonable in the time period, in geographic scope and then the scope of what it’s restricting you from. So I can’t say, ‘Dom, you can’t do any writing anywhere, all over the world for the rest of time.’ No, not likely, but you kind of start balancing those three things and it’s, ‘Okay, you can’t do wrestling writing and you can’t do that all over the world, but for three months,’ or ‘in the U.S., but for six months.’ It’s kind of a balance of what all is being restricted because particularly in this day and age courts are kind of loath to tell people you can’t have a job doing what you’re trained to do and for non-competes, it very much is different if you are a high-level executive. If you’re the Eric Bischoff running a company, he could have a much more restrictive non-compete because he was kind of the ‘secret sauce’ or at least the person turning all the dials and doing this sort of thing, but for the talent they have to be reasonable in scope in duration and restrictiveness, but that’s just something you agree to.
“Now, the real question is do they actually agree to that or do they have to agree to that? And they have to agree to that because they can’t (well, I can’t say ‘they can’t’), most guys that I’ve talked to are just happy to get what they can get when they get it. ‘I got a contract doing what I love, I’m not gonna sit here and negotiate,’ but they really don’t have much power to negotiate. It’s more or less ‘take it or leave it’ with WWE. So they don’t have much bargaining power as much as WWE tries to say, ‘Well these were freely introduced and negotiate.’ Well, there’s not really any negotiations, it’s just, ‘Here’s the contract and you might be able to tweak a few small things,’ that isn’t one of them. So, there are certain talents who have been released and it was an immediate release, but that was part of the negotiation of their release, not necessarily part of their contract because their contract would have the 90-day.”
What it boils down to is that breaking the 90-day no-compete presents more trouble than it could be worth.
“If you sign the contract, they have an enforceable contract until you have it thrown out, until you have it negated or rewritten by the courts. So you’re going to have to sue WWE to say, ‘Well this is an unreasonable unenforceable non-compete,’ Who’s gonna do that? You ride out the 90 days and do your thing.”
Dockins sees the diabolical picture being painted of WWE waving their wads of cash around, but it’s also well within their legal rights.
“They will flex on people because they can and because they are staunch defenders of their IP and staunch defenders of their rights so it’s not really vindictive it’s just doing what companies have the right to do they just get painted with this villain brush. You can’t take that on.”
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
Listen to the full interview above and be sure to subscribe to AdFreeShows.com to hear the latest episode of “Wrestling With The Law” as the lawyer lays it all out for you in a two-hour-long Q&A.
