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Money is respect. For too long, an American football player opened a check telling her that it was discounted goods and that her gold medals were cheap.
Finally, members of the U.S. women’s national team will be rightly valued as the national treasure they are. The new “identical compensation” deal for American football teams – negotiated by mutual agreement with their male counterparts – will pay women equal salaries and bonuses from the World Cup. This is a revolutionary deal, and it is appropriate because a revolt was needed to get here. Never forget how difficult it was to win such a basic contract.
It took 25 years, strikes and downtime and a siege-like rebellion – all to win a simple, fair fiscal recognition of an unprecedented women’s team that won four World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals that blew the door. open to a fresh world audience pouring new dollars into the pockets of the old suit. There is no more depreciation of 38 cents per dollar for women who win trophies, while men do exponentially more for losing in the group stage.
US women’s and men’s national football teams close pay gap with game-changing deal
There are no more salaries that are read as personal insults from their uncompromising federation. In 1996, the women’s Olympic gold medal team “made about $ 10 a day,” Julie Foody recalled. When they asked for bonuses, a football official told them, “Don’t be greedy” and offered them to be happy that they received a T-shirt with the inscription “USA”.
Three years later, they packed up the Rose Bowl and beat China to win the 1999 World Cup – and believed they were eligible for a modest raise, especially after the federation signed a $ 120 million deal with Nike. So, entering the 2000 Olympics, women demanded $ 5,000 a month, compared to $ 3,150. The federation objected. When Foody and Mia Ham assembled the team to go on strike, a football official said contemptuously, “They are currently unemployed.” Only when the women threatened to miss the entire Olympics did they gain their meager increase. “They have essentially ignored our successes over the last three years – including winning the World Cup and winning an Olympic gold medal,” said then-team captain Carla Overbeck.
Until 2015, the Women’s World Cup final was the most watched football game on the American network, men or women – more Americans watched it than the NBA finals – and stimulated a $ 20 million increase in the federation’s revenue. Still, the federation still carried out petty fiscal insults. He gave women only $ 60 a day for food, while he paid men $ 75. This time, when the women complained and demanded fairer conditions, the officials called them “irrational” – as if they were hysterical.
They filed a federal lawsuit for discrimination – and fought it for six years while still winning medals.
“Everyone is wondering what’s next and what we want to get out of it all,” said Megan Rapino wearily after her last World Cup victory. “This is to stop talking about equal pay and whether we deserve it.”
They are worth it – they have always been worth it. The $ 24 million agreement they reached with the federation in February was a simple admission of guilt and little pay.
All of this — every nasty, petty battle — mattered. As the president of the players’ association Becky Sauerbrunn admitted, the new agreement was reached only because of “the solid foundation laid by the generations of players of the women’s national team who were before the current team”. That’s as much a win for the 99ers, who won $ 10, as it was for Alex Morgan.
But, strangely, this is not the real victory. The American women’s soccer movement has never been strictly about pay, but only to cover a man’s salary. This is an important struggle – and a painfully slow one, given how the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963 and we are still counting the progress in cents. But women’s football involves a much bigger, broader and more dynamic change – one that can meet the most radical and intriguing definition of feminism expressed by Germaine Greer, who has always distinguished between “feminism of equality ”and“ feminism of liberation ”. Greer asked the sharpest question: “Equality – with what?” The feminism of equality seeks a limited and lame idea of equality. Liberal feminism seeks a complete rethinking of possibilities.
Since February: In its agreement, USWNT US Soccer has essentially admitted: Everything was true
“Equality is a conservative goal,” she said in 2015. That means you have an idea of what you want from women that men have. But what do men have? They have the corporate world. They have the competition. They have the corporate structure that gives you a first-class face, and everyone else struggles to get up there and drop out. ”
In this context, a problem such as equal pay for women “becomes just a showcase,” Greer said. “You look feminist because you have women doing things. But they do nothing for women. “
The US national team has done something for women over the last 30 years – in fact, great things, things we are just beginning to fully realize. The astronomically steep growth of the Women’s World Cup is difficult to understand: the event, although only 30 years old, gathered 1.1 billion viewers in 2019, with record audiences in Brazil, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. And this is becoming an unthinkable opportunity: In England, the Women’s Super League has signed an eight-figure deal with Sky Sports, CBS Sports and the BBC.
For the past 30 years, female football activists from Foudy to Rapinoe have not just won a pay battle; they gained entirely new opportunities for women and redefined what women’s bodies, women’s work, and women’s relationships could be — and proved that they could bear children while they did. Perhaps the most radical part of the new contract is not pay, but childcare for both women. and men’s teams. The contract is good – but the principle of things is true liberation.
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