There’s plenty of talk about wrestlers attempting to unionize, but CM Punk doesn’t see it actually coming to fruition.
Punk was the new guest on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette, and the two talked about unionization talks coming up again after Zelina Vega’s recent dismissal from WWE. Punk doesn’t think anything will happen with wrestlers trying to unionize and says some wrestlers talk about it being family, but it actually doesn’t exist.
“There’s no such thing as ‘the boys’. It’s a trope. ‘Oh, we’re on the road, and these people are our family…’ and like I said, once you’re out of the bubble, you don’t hear from anybody anymore. Those people don’t pay your bills, and there’s always going to be a handful of people that cut everybody else just to get ahead a little bit. There also seems to be people that, just by nature, are bootlickers. They just love the taste. You’re supposed to lick the boot, you’re not supposed to eat the entire thing.”
The discussion continued, talking about WWE controlling third-party interests of their talent, and Punk said he shared similar concerns when he was an active wrestler.
“So this is where I’ll get controversial and I’ll piss a lot of people off. I don’t know Xavier Woods. I met him in Atlanta, he was doing a dark match one time. He came up and asked me for advice, or maybe it was ‘hey, did you see my match?’, I don’t know. He was always a good wrestler, he could always do everything but there wasn’t like a character for him at that time. Obviously, he’s become like a pretty big Superstar and from what I understand, he’s big on Twitch. He’s a big video gamer and all this other stuff, so I don’t know what’s going on with his Twitch channel. So I don’t want to speak out of turn about that. But like I just saw he was like petitioning to get a job with G4. Does WWE get money from that? Why is it okay for him to do that but Zelina Vega can’t have a Twitch?”
“That was always my thing and I think people have labeled me a ‘complainer’ or ‘whiny’ because I would always be the guy that I’d be like, wait why is so-and-so able to do this because there was always outside interest and not just for me. I remember one particular person got a role-playing a wrestler because they knew somebody who is producing this television show for this certain channel and then when it got shuffled to the office it all of a sudden. ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Then the next thing you know, John Cena is doing it. Yeah, they would literally take every single request that came through and they would funnel it to the one person that they wanted to be the face of the company.”
Punk also told a story about a visit to a pinball factory in Chicago, and the owner told him they had wanted Punk on the machine but WWE shut it down and he didn’t know about the offer until years later. Punk says he still hears stories about outside offers that never materialized for him, and instead went to other wrestlers at WWE’s behest.
