U.S. Soccer and Players Guarantee Equal Pay in New Contracts
Labor peace will be expensive: U.S. Soccer has committed to single-game payments for most matches of $18,000 per player for games won, and as much as $24,000 per game for wins at certain major tournaments — cementing the status of the U.S. men and women as two of the highest-paid national teams in the world. And the federation will surrender to the men and women on those teams 90 percent of the money it receives from FIFA for sending teams to the next two World Cups.
The split of prize money, then, is a notable concession by the American men, who have previously been awarded the bulk of those multimillion-dollar payments by U.S. Soccer, and a potential seven-figure windfall for the women. The 24 teams at the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France, for example, competed for a prize pool of $30 million; the 32 men’s teams that will compete in Qatar in November will split $450 million.
Timeline: U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team’s Fight for Equal Pay
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March 2016. The fight began when five prominent players filed a federal claim of wage discrimination, saying U.S. Soccer paid them far less than players on the men’s team. The federation pushed back forcefully.
February 2020. Ahead of the trial, both sides proposed resolutions that showed just how far apart they remained. U.S. Soccer asked for a declaration that the players’ claims were without merit, while the players put a price tag on what they considered a fair outcome: $67 million.
November 2021. U.S. Soccer and the players reached an agreement that resolved claims about unequal working conditions. The deal — a rare moment of détente — was a necessary step for the players before they could appeal their larger defeat in court.
February 2022. The six-year legal battle came to an end with a settlement that included $24 million in payments from U.S. Soccer to the players and, perhaps more notably, a promise by the federation to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams going forward.
May 2022. U.S. Soccer and its women’s and men’s national teams agreed to landmark labor deals that guarantee equal pay. Under the agreements, the players will for the first time receive the same pay and prize money, including at World Cups.
“When we got together as a group, certainly we saw that there was not going to be a way forward without the equalization of prize money,” said Walker Zimmerman, a defender on the men’s team and a member of his union’s leadership group. He said the process of persuading the rest of his teammates to share the money involved “difficult conversations, a lot of listening, a lot of learning.”
The team’s willingness to part with some of the money, though, removed what the federation and the players alike had long agreed was the one seemingly insurmountable obstacle to a deal.
“They were true champions of this,” Parlow Cone said of the men’s team’s embrace of equalizing pay more broadly and prize money specifically. “It’s not easy to give up the money they’re giving up. To know it’s the right thing to do, and then to step up and do it, I think they should be applauded.”
While several of the women praised the men’s willingness to narrow the biggest pay discrepancies, and cited that as a big reason for the new contracts, veterans of the equal pay fight — and the C.B.A. talks — were more measured in their reactions.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/sports/soccer/us-soccer-equal-pay-deal.html