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Maria Pinzone thought she’d landed her dream job when, in 2012, she successfully auditioned for the Jills, the cheering team for her hometown NFL team, the Buffalo Bills. Pinzone had long dreamed of cheering on the NFL, but as the season progressed, parts of the job started to unsettle her. The job required hours of practice and dozens of community events, all unpaid. The Bills grossed over $ 250 million as an organization that year, but Pinzone had to pay $ 650 for his uniform and was only paid $ 105 for 840 hours of work.
Pinzone left the team in 2013. When another Jill shared the same doubts about their compensation, Pinzone presented his contract to a lawyer. The meeting at the end of 2013 “almost felt like a prayer confession,” she told The Guardian. Something was wrong about the contract – mascots, dealership workers, janitors and cleaning staff at Bills were all paid for their labor and time, but the cheerleaders at the same stadium every week did not. were not. But doubt sets in. “Am I crazy? she thought. “Here I signed up to be an NFL cheerleader – such prestige [job]”She said,” it never occurred to me that there might be a problem with this contract. “
A Woman’s Work: The NFL Cheerleader Problem, a documentary completed in 2019 and now available on demand, probes the context of Pinzone’s trial and traces the cheerleaders’ prolonged and hard-won efforts of the league to force the NFL to fairly compensate its most visible. employees. From Pinzone, one of the two former cheerleaders followed by filmmaker Yu Gu as they sought compensation for arrears of minimum wage and legal fees, and four teammates filed a lawsuit against the Jills, their managers. and the Bills in 2014, the NFL, which generated more than $ 15 billion in revenue in 2019, comes under increased scrutiny for widespread underpayments, restrictive contracts and mistreatment of its pom – cheerleaders. Ten of the 26 NFL teams with cheerleaders have since faced lawsuits for salary theft, sexual harassment, hostile work environments, criminally low pay (some as low as $ 2.85 an hour) and “Blatant discrimination”.
But in 2014, few spoke publicly about fair pay for cheerleaders, a decades-long NFL staple whose traditional 1960s ‘volunteer’ position was barely suited to wealth, visibility and professionalism of the league. Highly competitive NFL cheering teams have developed their own arrangements for warranting maximum training and minimum pay – talk or challenge loyalty to the football team, and you are on the bench. “It’s been going on for such a long time, and this culture of fear has really been instilled in cheerleaders from day one,” Gu told The Guardian. “It was a huge hurdle to overcome.” That was, until Lacy Thibodeaux-Fields, an Oakland “Raiderette” from Sulfur, Louisiana and the film’s other subject, filed a class action lawsuit in early 2014.
Like Pinzone, the agile and supernaturally bubbly Thibodeaux-Fields had long dreamed of being a professional cheerleader – by the time she joined the Raiderettes in 2013, Thibodeaux-Fields had devoted 10,560 hours to 18 years of dance training. , a corpus of work calculated on the screen. in a woman’s work. The NFL did not reward this expertise, and the terms of the position were untenable: the Raiderettes were not paid until the end of the season, nine months after starting training. Thibodeaux-Fields was expected to pay for the required hair, nails and spray tan at $ 225 a pop and was, all told, paid less than $ 5 an hour for his work, including shifts. eight o’clock.
Gu first heard of the Thibodeaux-Fields trial from the Los Angeles Times when he was a graduate student at the University of Southern California. Born in China and raised in Vancouver, Gu was familiar with stereotypes of cheerleading but bewildered by the football-obsessed American culture. Stripped of the American myth used by teams to justify low pay – that it was a privilege to cheer on the NFL, that brotherhood and prestige were worth more than money, that it provided visibility and had always been so – the Thibodeaux-Fields case seemed simple. , “A way to understand some of the fundamental mythologies of American culture,” Gu told The Guardian.
A Woman’s Work watches Thibodeaux-Fields and Pinzone for five years, as the lawsuits and their echoes – the hurtful gossip on Facebook groups, the recognition of issues spread throughout the league, the slow unlearning of the ‘lucky to be here’ , the way to recognize it reframes the vision of the world as a whole – weaves in their daily life, sometimes very personal. Gu’s camera finds Thibodeaux-Fields on the floor with her children, overwhelmed by babysitting and too exhausted to engage with her husband after work. We watch from the passenger seat in Pinzone, days after losing her mother – her own best friend and greatest cheerleader – to cancer, as she bursts into tears in her car.
The unvarnished footage from the film, unrelated to the trial, demonstrates “the consequences, the repercussions, of being abused in the workplace, of being underpaid or undervalued,” Gu said. Without a Raiderette salary, Thibodeaux-Fields depended on her husband’s work and childcare for her growing family. Maria balanced the stress and length of the pursuit with her accounting career and primary care for her mother.
Thibodeaux-Fields eventually came to a settlement with the Raiders, but the Pinzone case, a class action lawsuit joined by 73 other Jills (60 others chose not to participate) that ultimately included the NFL as a defendant, dragged on. and is still in a tense stalemate. . Days after the lawsuit was filed, the Bills shut down the Jills, unceremoniously ending an almost 50-year-old program. “I just couldn’t believe they did that and turned it around, so we got the bad guys,” Pinzone said. “It was really difficult to navigate. At one point in the film, the defendants come up with a modest settlement agreement rather than paying fair wage arrears. “The fact that they thought we would accept something so low shows what they think of us: that we are nothing,” Pinzone says of footage of her accompanying her father to a medical appointment.
The NFL, for all of its recent work aimed at addressing sexism and racism within the league, and its 2016 “Women’s Summit” held in the wake of the league’s domestic violence scandal, has made an effort address cheerleader compensation at the league level. Cheerleading team contracts and payment are always at the discretion of the individual teams and their owners. In Gu’s opinion, the league “doesn’t justify” the hands-off approach to a safe and fair work environment for cheerleaders, “I think because they feel they haven’t. to justify it, ”she said. Cheerleaders or not, fair pay or not, people will always watch football. “Because the league’s position is that it’s the responsibility of each team, there is just a lack of consistent rules and guidelines between the different teams, and there is a lack of transparency and communication between the different teams, ”Gu explained.
Still, she added, it was “heartwarming” to see teams change policy following multiple lawsuits – the Raiderettes changed their contracts to comply with labor law, and California MP Lorena Gonzalez, who appears in the film, introduced legislation. aimed specifically at protecting professional cheerleaders.
Some teams have “realized[d] these women are an asset to their organization and they should be paid for it, ”Pinzone said. Although she “had no idea when we signed up” how long the trial, delayed by a defendant’s bankruptcy and the pandemic, would last, Pinzone is hoping for a resolution this year. “We’re just going to keep moving forward,” she said, “and let’s hope that once that is sorted out they too will bring the Jills back and do it the right way.
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