Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: nick khan, Triple H, wrestling, wwe

Wrestlers Grateful as WWE Partially Untwists Knife in Backs

Published Fri, 01 Apr 2022 13:38:10 -0500

Greetings, comrades! It is I, your El Presidente, bringing you the lastest wrestling news and hot goss making its way around the dirt sheets. WWE has decided to give its independent contractors a bigger cut of the profits from third-party deals WWE made wrestlers turn over to WWE control in 2020, according to a new report by Fightful Select. WWE President Nick Khan, who took over the leadership of WWE shortly before the company began confiscating the Twitch, Cameo, and other third-party deals of its talent and has also overseen an era of cost-cutting layoffs and talent releases, reportedly held a meeting with talent ahead of WrestleMania where the new cut of profits was revealed. The meeting may be one the most diabolically brilliant moves of Khan's tenure as President.

Okay, okay, I hear you, comrades. "Your excellency, we need some context for all of this." Let me explain it for you. New first leaked that WWE was asking its wrestlers to end third party deals so that WWE could establish them through the company in October of 2020, with the changeover happening a month later. The news was controversial, both for the remarkable cruelty of taking money away from performers during a pandemic that has reduced their income from wrestling due to a lack of live shows, the naked greed of doing it at the same time as WWE, for that same lack of live shows, was reporting record profits, and for the textbook example of hypocrisy in classifying WWE talent as "independent contractors" to avoid various employment protections while simultaneously treating them nothing like independent contractors by any definition of the word. Furthermore, since the cut of profits from the newly restructured deals would count against the "downside guarantee" of talent, the money they are paid even while not performing, and since live performances were, as previously mentioned, greatly reduced, it meant that, effectively, most talent would see none of the money from the deals, since the money paid above the downside guarantee would not increase. Comrades, the whole thing was such a brilliant example of how to screw over people at your mercy that I used it as a blueprint for rewriting my country's tax laws, so gracias, Nick Khan, for the new presidential megayacht your ideas paid for. Haw haw haw haw!

But as impressive as the original screwjob was, even more brilliant was the way Khan ensured that talent would be happy with the return of some percentage of the lost revenue that was taken from them by the third party deal takeover. You see, Khan paired the announcement with the return of Triple H to the company for the first time since his heart attack last year and following his retirement announcement earlier this week. By doing so, Khan ensured the emotional goodwill of everyone at the meeting, and according to Fightul's report, it worked, with wrestlers viewing the meeting as positive for them. More positive, of course, would be for independent contractors to be making all of the money they were making before WWE took it from them in the first place, but by taking it away, waiting almost two years, and then returning a portion of those revenues while also saying "Hey, look, it's beloved WWE icon Triple H, aren't you glad he isn't dead?", Khan was able to make it seem as if WWE was doing its talent a generous favor. He even got Sean Ross Sapp to refer to it as "huge good news" for talent. Nick Khan was the true Cerebral Assassin in the room that day.

Bravo, Nick Khan. Game respects game, and if you are ever looking for a cabinet position in a Latin American dictatorship after you're done at WWE, be sure to give me a call, comrade. Until next time: socialism or death!

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