Football season may be over, but that’s not stopping one NFL cheerleader.
Her name is Alexa Brenneman, and she’s just kicked off a campaign aimed at forcing pro football teams to pay cheerleaders the minimum wage.
This is the gist of the lawsuit filed by Brenneman, a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader. For her time as a Ben-Gals cheerleader this past season, Brenneman was paid a total of $855, which works out to just about $2.85 an hour — far less than Ohio’s minimum wage of $7.95 an hour.
It’s a cause that may look familiar, given the related furor over unpaid internships at Condé Nast, NBC Universal, Viacom, Sony, etc.
Like the Bengals’ cheerleader, former interns are arguing that they are both under-compensated and exploited by their employers. When one of these intern lawsuits hit the media giant Condé Nast, the company responded by abolishing its internship program altogether.
Now, we’re not going to get into the legal Âtechnicalities. We have just two broad points: The first is that no one forces anyone to be a cheerleader for an NFL team or to take an internship at a large media company. To the contrary, the competition is fierce.
That competition leads us to our second point: There is more to compensation than just money. The people who take this work know it. And that’s why they do it.
An NFL cheerleader, for example, might hope for a career in, say, modeling or television — not unlike Paula Abdul, who started off as a Los Angeles Lakers cheerleader.
In much the same way, an unknown singer would be delighted to have people play her song for free — because at that stage in her career, what she needs most is exposure.
The same goes for internships. When people are young and have little experience, they may seek compensation for their work in ways they think more important to them in the long term: making contacts with influential people they would otherwise never meet; getting an inside look at how things are done; finding out where the best opportunities are, etc.
We don’t see anything wrong here, especially if it’s a relationship between consenting adults. It’s no coincidence that both industries in question in the cheerleader and intern cases are glam professions.
It’s also no secret that it’s a long shot that doesn’t pay off for everyone in the ways they hope and expect.
But learning that is valuable, too.