“There can be few workplaces quite as zany as a wrestling ring,” writes sociologist Gregory Hollin in his study of “precarious workers, post-truth politics, and inauthentic activism” in the professional wrestling entertainment business.

While warfare is the preferred metaphor for boxing, labor is the actual metaphor of choice for pro-wrestling. Pro-wrestlers are “workers” who “sell” their performances and their responses to their co-workers’ performances, acting out rage or pain, etc.; the script or storyline of the performance is “a work”; second-string performers are “jobbers.”

In a neoliberal economy where everyone is supposed to be their own brand, an independent contractor at the mercy of corporate power, the actual labor of pro-wrestling leaves much to be desired. It’s as precarious as any in the gig-economy, with low wages and little protective regulation or union support. Payment for a match in northern England, the site of Hollin’s field work in 2019, was £20 (about $25 today), with wrestlers expected to volunteer several hours beforehand setting up the venue. One of Hollin’s subjects, a university graduate with a degree in theater, reported working forty-eight matches in twenty-six days traveling the “length and breadth of the British Isles.” No basic health care provision—although acting, pro-wrestling is by definition highly physical—is provided for performers, and some venues even lack access to water.

Confusingly, performers bounce between staying in character of the “work”—an “activity (a match, a rivalry, a persona) that is scripted, performed and exists exclusively within the world of wrestling”—and the “shoot,” the “activity that exists ‘for real’ and outside of the performance.” A wrestler thus usually has two names: a worked name, as in The Undertaker, and a shoot name, as in Mark William Calaway, who performed as the undead Undertaker.

The work/shoot distinction can be slippery. Before the current “reality era” of pro-wrestling, which gleefully admits its fakery, “kayfabe” ruled. Kayfabe is pro-wrestling argot meaning “wrestling’s denial that wrestling is fake.”

Hollin details a unionization effort in the UK led by American wrestler Luke Night that some considered a worked shoot.

“Night combined an emergent, bottom-up approach to unionization with strategic alliances with long-time stakeholders such as Equity, an established trade union for performers and creative practitioners, and the Industrial Workers of the World, a century-old labor union,” he writes.

But Night also made unionization central to his performance. This “clearly resonated with fans,” but it made other wrestlers leery. Was this just more kayfabe, just another “scam to sell t-shirts”?

Wrestlers, as much as anyone, didn’t want to be taken for “marks” or suckers, even as many agreed with an agenda that called for better pay, “guaranteed provision of food and water, the presence of a qualified and competent medic, [and] basic first aid training for attendees at training schools.” In the eyes of his peers, Night’s folding of unionization into his performance “delegitimized claims about his capacity to organize and change labor practices within the wrestling industry.”

The instability caused by permanently questioning if this “real” or “play,” writes Hollin, “seems highly detrimental in the context of organizing precarious labor, for while there is agreement over the diagnosis, the fear of being a dupe forestalls the possibility of change.”

Luke Night ended up being blackballed from the industry after June 2020 when #SpeakingOut began to trend on social media, detailing the “emotional, physical, and sexual abuse” suffered, mostly, by women in the wrestling community. Night was at the center of the scandal, “with several women alleging sexual assault” by him. (Hollin notes that only afterward did he see that Night had signed his consent form for this study with his worked name, not his legal name.)

Hollin concludes that it’s “incredibly depressing” that “a crushing inability to act intersectional killed any chance of improved working conditions.” He also writes that pro-wrestling, which was post-truth from the get-go, has been taken as a metaphor for everything now, particularly politics. Not for nothing is the reality TV star President-elect already in World Wrestling Entertainment’s WWE Hall of Fame.

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