Lawsuits have been filed against teams by cheerleaders for the Cincinnati Bengals, Buffalo Bills and Oakland Raiders contending they have not been fairly compensated for standing on the sidelines and jiggling their assets.
A cheerleader for the Oakland Raiderettes kicked things off when she filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the team fails to pay them minimum wage, withholds their pay until the end of the season, imposes illegal fines for minor infractions (like gaining 5 pounds) and forces them to pay their own business expenses (everything from false eyelashes to monthly salon visits).
In an another suit, a Cincinnati Ben-Gal says she worked for over 300 hours last season and was paid just $885. That works out to something like $2.85 an hour, which is well below Ohio’s minimum wage and probably not enough to pay for her hairspray.
And five former Buffalo Jills filed suit against their team alleging they were required to perform unpaid work for the team for about 20 hours a week. Unpaid activities, according to the suit, included: submitting to a weekly “jiggle test” (where cheer coaches “scrutinized the women’s stomach, arms, legs, hips, and butt while she does jumping jacks”); parading around casinos in bikinis “for the gratification of the predominantly male crowd”; and offering themselves up as prizes at a golf tournament, where they were required to sit on men’s laps on the golf carts, submerge themselves in a dunk tank and perform backflips for tips.
While all those things are questionable on many levels, left unanswered is the biggest question of all:
Why are there pro football cheerleaders?
Why are there women in skimpy outfits jiggling on the sidelines of all but seven of the league’s 32 franchises? (My Cleveland Browns, I’m proud to say, are one of the seven, although that could be because they wouldn’t have much to cheer about.) Are the pro games so boring they need dancing girls to keep fans awake? Do these so-called cheerleaders actually lead any cheers, or are they merely eye-candy?
Cheerleaders are an integral part of the college football experience, of course. Marching bands, rah-rah-rah and all that. But whatever it is that the women jiggling on the NFL sidelines are selling, it certainly isn’t school spirit.
The good news is that if the cheerleaders win their suits, it could be a Pyrrhic victory. Rather than pay a decent salary, the teams might decide to do away with cheerleaders altogether.
I’d cheer for that.
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