The WNBA players’ new labor deal does more than raise salaries. It gives the league’s athletes a seven-year contract with a bigger salary cap, a richer parental leave package and protections for pregnant players, while also lifting minimum pay to around $300,000 and guaranteeing 12-person rosters.
Last month, players unanimously ratified the agreement after eight straight days of bargaining in New York and hundreds of hours of negotiation. A’ja Wilson, who signed the richest contract in WNBA history, secured a $1.2 million raise as part of a structure that will push the supermax salary to $2 million as league revenue increases and give players 20 percent gross revenue sharing. Candace Parker’s name still carries weight in any conversation about the league’s labor direction, but the new deal is being shaped by the current generation of players who pushed for a far more ambitious baseline.
The scale of the agreement helps explain why. The WNBA is entering its 30th season and is the oldest active women’s pro league in the country, and its new terms now sit alongside a wider race among women’s sports leagues to improve pay and working conditions. The players’ association wanted more than simple parity with the NBA; it wanted a standard of living that could hold up on its own, from housing stipends for certain athletes to higher bonuses for awards and honors.
That ambition still runs into the realities of the men’s game. The NBA has a soft salary cap that starts at $154.6 million, Jayson Tatum will earn an annual average of $62.8 million over the life of his current five-year contract and the WNBA’s $1.4 million supermax still falls short of the $2.05 million minimum salary for a second-year NBA player. Even so, the new WNBA structure makes its players the highest-earning women’s professional athletes in a team sport by a long shot, and it does so at a moment when alternative leagues are bidding aggressively for talent; Unrivaled, for example, offered players upwards of $220,000 for an eight-week season.
The next flash point is whether the new money and protections will be enough to keep the league’s best players from looking elsewhere when the calendar allows it. For now, the players have locked in the strongest labor package women’s team sports have seen in this country, and they did it by refusing to settle for a smaller win.