WNBA Strike Fuels Buzz as Fans Witness Long-Expected Equal Pay Struggle Resonance
WNBA collective bargaining agreement negotiations lasted dozens of hours per day for four days over the past week, but yielded no contract. The contentious dispute between the WNBPA and the league has become a pressure cooker, with a new deal needed by Monday to avoid disrupting the league calendar. “We have to get it done by Monday.
I should say, we have to get it done without disrupting some part of the fact that we’ve got to run this two-team expansion [draft],” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told reporters Friday. “We’ve got to get expansion going. We’ve got to get free agency going.
We’ve got to get the college draft, which is now a month from today. ” The league has enjoyed a recent popularity boom and recently secured a new TV deal with The Walt Disney Company (ESPN), NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video for a combined $2. 2 billion over the next 11 years.
That’s fueled the most recent, hotly contested push by the players to renegotiate their revenue-sharing percentage with the influx of new cash. While under the previous CBA, the women’s players collected around 9 percent of the league revenue, the NBA players collected a 50 percent share. It’s a battle other women’s sports know all too well.
Here are brief timelines of WNBA players’ fight for better compensation, as well as the labor landscapes in other women’s sports. Women’s Basketball 2003: The first salary cap was introduced into the league at $622,000 per team, increasing incrementally per year. 2020: The salary cap jumped 30 percent under a new CBA, but revenue sharing wasn’t triggered due to a lack of ticket sales during COVID-19 shutdowns.
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