‘It’s a slap in the face’: Jamaican women’s soccer team goes on strike after 9 months without pay

This summer time, the Reggae Girlz of Jamaica made historical past once they turned the primary Caribbean workforce to play in the Ladies’s Phrase Cup. Although they did not win a match in France, it nonetheless felt like ladies’s football in Jamaica was on the best way up.

However lower than three months later, that progress is in jeopardy because the Jamaican Football Federation has not paid the Reggae Girlz any of the cash it has been contractually obligated to pay them since January.

On Monday, the gamers launched a “No Pay, No Play” campaign on social media, and announced that until the JFF pays them all of the cash they are owed, the women won't be attending any coaching camps or competing in any occasions — including an important Olympic qualifying event on the end of this month.

“We’re prepared to sacrifice that as a result of sufficient is enough,” Nicole McClure, a goalkeeper  on the group, advised ThinkProgress in a telephone call on Monday night time. “The culture of this organization has been corrupt for years now. We’re sick of being profiting from.”

#reggaegirlz #nopaynoplay #jamaica #jfffootball pic.twitter.com/dGTKz08chB

— Cheyna Matthews (@Cheynalee_) September 2, 2019

In Might, the Reggae Girlz — excluding those who needed to retain their NCAA eligibility by adhering to the requirements of amateurism — signed a contract with the JFF. In accordance with McClure, the contract included backpay courting again to January, and lasted until August 30, 2019. The quantity owed every participant varies between approximately $500 to $1,200 per thirty days, and was purported to be paid out on the 14th of every month.

At the very end of August, proper before the contract expired, the JFF stated it was wiring 50% of the money it owed to the gamers. Even when the promised 50% hits their financial institution accounts this week, players say it’s not sufficient to cease the boycott.

“It’s a slap within the face, it’s hush-hush cash,” McClure stated. “It’s simply actually disheartening. It’s messed up, because we have been legally promised this. There’s no strategy to go around it.”

The gamers obtained a lot of the $50-per-day stipends they have been owed in the course of the period of the World Cup in France, however that money was simply to get them via the event. The month-to-month salaries have been supposed to permit the gamers to reside as professionals, and maybe give them more time to train and apply in lieu of taking over second and third jobs. 

“For me personally, I don’t get paid for my membership staff,” McClure stated. “I was banking on the month-to-month stipend. Ladies footballers don’t get paid almost enough to survive on their own. On common, we don’t receives a commission almost as much as the last individual on the lads’s staff.”

The JFF reportedly advised the gamers that it hasn’t paid them because it hasn’t but acquired the Ladies’s World Cup prize cash from FIFA, the worldwide governing physique of football. Nevertheless, McClure stated that the contract did not tie monthly funds to FIFA prize cash in any approach.

FIFA ought to be listening to this dispute, nevertheless. FIFA introduced it is going to broaden the sector from 24 teams to 32 groups at the 2023 Ladies’s World Cup and improve the prize cash. However right now, FIFA does a horrible job holding federations accountable for treating ladies’s football packages correctly when it comes to improvement, assets, and cost.

The Reggae Girlz are a primary example of this. In 2008, after the staff did not qualify for the Beijing Olympics, the JFF disbanded the group. It wasn’t absolutely introduced back to life until 2014, when Cedella Marley — the daughter of Jamaican music legend Bob Marley — turned a benefactor for the workforce and helped it discover sponsors and companions. However even then, the players and their households needed to do plenty of private fundraising so as to simply make the trip to France occur. They stated it was value it, as a result of they felt they have been constructing one thing that future Jamaican ladies may benefit from, and profitable institutional help alongside the best way.

But those at the prime aren’t keeping up with their end of the discount.

“We created history, paved the trail for future generations, without the JFF’s help,” McClure stated. “It’s as if every thing that we have now finished means absolutely nothing to them.”

Src: ‘It’s a slap in the face’: Jamaican women’s soccer team goes on strike after 9 months without pay
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