Why equal pay for equal work finally became a reality for the USWNT | defector

After decades of fighting for recognition and resources – and spending more than a few hours in court – there is finally equal pay for the US women’s national team. On Wednesday, the U.S. Soccer Federation in agreement with the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association and the U.S. National Soccer Team Players Association announced that they have reached a landmark collective bargaining agreement that sees both teams fall under the same compensation umbrella for the first time in history. †

The SCBA runs until 2028 and in fact does what it says: the women and the men have agreed exactly the same conditions. Both teams will be paid the same in camps, on the road and in matches, and they will be compensated at the same rate when they participate in equivalent competitions.

For many who have devoted their lives to this sport, the announcement is a huge emotional victory. It is exactly what the USWNT asked for, with renewed support from their counterparts and a healthier relationship with their federation than in many other countries. But to unravel the true meaning of the agreement, you need to look both internally at the history of sport in the United States and externally at its impact on the global game.

Casuals, for example, may never have known that USWNT players were salaried for years by the federation, had it not become a major part of the gender discrimination lawsuit filed by the team in March 2019. The federation endorsed the NWSL in its early years and paid the salaries of its biggest stars to keep the league afloat financially. That commitment to ensuring players had stable incomes quickly became both the federation’s legal defense — and its possible public downfall.

Legally, US Soccer probably had a point when they said the compensation given to the women in the 2017 CBA was not comparable to what they offered the men, if you ignore the societal forces at play. The USWNTPA chose, perhaps for one contract too long, a system that prioritized security for its core player pool over the risky, high reward of a bonus structure per service. The two sides disagreed on whether a bonus-based CBA was ever on the table at the time, but the contract as negotiated reflected the instability of the club ecosystem as the NWSL took a very cautious approach to growth. If your club doesn’t earn you a living wage, national team level guarantees become a lifeline.

There is reason to believe that US Soccer might have won the lawsuit against their most acclaimed team, but they had already done themselves irreparable harm in the court of public opinion. Public filings filed in early 2020 revealed something really ugly at the heart of the organization, arguing that women “don’t do equal work that requires equal skills. [and] effort” for the men, because “the overall football prowess required to compete at the men’s national senior team level is materially affected by the level of certain physical attributes such as speed and strength.” Suddenly, no one was hiding behind earnings or contracts Those responsible for US Soccer’s legal defense said a discrimination lawsuit was pointless because men and women are not equal and do not do equal work.

At the time, there was a lot of speculation that US Soccer would completely wreck their relationship with the USWNT, spend millions in legal fees and alienate sponsors and fans alike in a bid to win in court. But the federation allowed itself to be steered in a different direction. President Carlos Cordeiro resigned and former USWNT player Cindy Parlow Cone took his place. Immediately, the temperature dropped between the women’s team and the federation, despite significant revenue losses due to the pandemic and the team’s rocky performance at the Tokyo Olympics.

In 2022, US Soccer bet on its players and the USWNT on itself. They settled the lawsuit, subject to the ratification of a CBA, and the paradigm had now shifted. Club options† both in the US and abroad† are growing at a rapid pace and the stars of the game no longer have to fall back on contracts from national teams for fear of a league collapse. This also brings a healthy amount of parity back into the player pool, with call-up guarantees a thing of the past. USWNT players must earn their spot with their clubs as well as in the national team camp, and they will only be rewarded for their current performance.

The players also hope the agreement will have a ripple effect outside the United States. The US is not the first country to pay their men and women equally, although they were unique in their previous salary structure. The Netherlands announced in 2019 that it would gradually increase the compensation of their women’s team until it is equal to the men’s after 2023. Other teams such as Australia, New Zealand and Norway have done the same.

But the externality of what the USWNT and USMNT accomplished on Wednesday is greater than the federation itself, which is why cooperation between the two unions became essential. Parlow Cone made it clear on several occasions that the federation was ready for an economically identical model, with equal pay for both senior teams. In a way, the precedent elsewhere and the bad press that resulted from the lawsuit made that part of the negotiations a moot point.

However, US Soccer would not give in to one major problem: FIFA prize money. No one puts FIFA on a pedestal for any part of their management of the sport, but their treatment of the women’s game has mostly been an afterthought. Women didn’t even have a World Cup until 1991, and the organization often uses top women’s tournaments as a testing ground for their more controversial ideas. They tested the rules during the 2019 Women’s World Cup, which were later scrapped, and while they’ve given up on the unpopular idea of ​​holding a men’s World Cup every two years, the possibility remains as a threat to the women.

Their attitude is reflected in the FIFA bonuses handed out at each World Cup. In 2019, the total World Cup bonus money allocated to that year’s Women’s World Cup totaled $30 million, of which $4 million went to the USWNT for winning everything. In 2018, $400 million in prize money was awarded at the Men’s World Cup, of which $38 million went to France as champions. As each cycle goes by, the gap between the two tournaments has grown even wider; even when the money for the women’s World Cup doubled between 2015 and 2019, dollar-for-dollar growth on the men’s side still outpaced them.

It should be noted that, like US Soccer, FIFA is a non-profit organization that is ostensibly committed to growing the sport of soccer for all. Revenue arguments, tempting as they are, are irrelevant to these organizations by their own internal logic. If you have a mission statement that your job is to grow the game in every corner of the globe, subsidization comes with the territory until we live in an equal opportunity society. If your organization is not committed to achieving equal opportunities, the subsidy will remain there for a while.

But since FIFA’s financial reluctance towards the women’s game was what it is, US Soccer made it very clear that they couldn’t take the burden of replicating the eight-figure gap, and that the solution had to come from the players themselves. That part of Wednesday’s accord is truly historic and progressive in a way that clearly still makes some people uncomfortable.

The men and women will pool their prize money, meaning that what is earned in Qatar in 2022 and Australia in 2023 will become one (hopefully large) sum of money that will be shared equally. Perhaps more importantly, the same approach applies to the 2026 and 2027 tournaments, the first of which will be hosted in North America.† with hopes that the USMNT could make their deepest World Cup run yet.

Seeing how this is good for everyone takes a little bit of confidence and vision, and the USMNT deserves credit for having both. Rather than focusing on the men who give up, think of this as the financial burden of sexism that now affects both teams equally. Now that solidarity has been reached in writing, hopefully further pressure will be put on FIFA to close the gap they have created and encourage other federations to take the same step. If everyone participates and the USWNT continues to win, the men won’t have much to lose.

The solidarity goes both ways, as the USWNT urged to add paternity leave and other parental privileges to the men’s contract, on the understanding that men deserve non-gender treatment too. It’s also an important step towards a relationship between the men’s and women’s teams that has historically been somewhat strained as the men’s failures became cannon fodder for arguments against the Federation’s treatment of women.

Basically, the CBA financially incentivizes both teams to be the best they can be, and gives US Soccer reasons to contribute equally to their successes. There’s still work to be done, but sometimes the beauty of an act like Wednesday comes from an inherent simplicity after decades of complications. As the slogan says, equal pay for equal play: decades of work reflected in a single sentence, and now a reality.

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