The Fall Guy, Starring Terry Taylor

Pictured: The Worst

Via (who else) Cageside Seats

Another day, another S. Bruce expose on Impact Wrestling. This time, it's calling the former TNA to the carpet for their shoddy treatment of their administrative staff. Yep, it's not just the wrestlers who don't earn a livable wage. The executives and office staff do too. They often have to work ballbustingly long hours due to understaffing to make terrible wages. One guy, working 50 hours a week doing merchandise sales for them, took home $20K a year. $20K a year. That's fucking insane. Presumably, that's after taxes, since if it was before taxes, it's dangerously close or under the minimum wage line. Still, that's what full-time fry cooks earn in a year. Another high-ranking executive, who was not named but intimated to have a lot of responsibilities within the company, had to work part-time at Disney as a waitress.

In what seems to be the capstone of the piece, apparently, Terry Taylor, who has been named in several lawsuits against TNA/Impact, was apparently the primary fall guy for the company. Whatever Dixie Carter or other executive type Andy Barton wanted to heap on the wrestlers, be it a low-ball offer or a refusal to pay for medical, they made Taylor do it. In a way, I'm not surprised by this news; I figured out that this might have been the case listening to Jay Lethal's episode of the Art of Wrestling podcast. He spoke so glowingly about Taylor, and yet Taylor was supposed to be this monster. Well, turns out he was just a creation of Dixie's, albeit a spineless one who didn't have the courage to speak up for the wrestlers that he wanted to stand up for.

Now again, the natural defense here for Impact is "Well, those people didn't have to work for TNA!" And you'd be right if you said that to a point. The stranglehold that companies have on workers in ununionized labor is pretty bad. People say unions are corrupt, and I tend to agree with that, but they're absolutely necessary to keep regular industries from doing the same kind of shit that Impact is pulling and keeping America from becoming a third-world country. Livable wages, health care and having a friendly workplace aren't some magical luxuries, they're to be expected of a place that has people working for them. The moment you start denying that is the moment you deny yourself the opportunity to make a decent wage in your mind.