As noted before, WWE recently froze pay raises and promotions for their employees due to generating lower than expected results from their recent fiscal quarter report. This decision quickly led to a lot of anger within the company from both employees and talent, who have also been dealing with a lack of raises and big contract offers for the past few months.
Dave Meltzer reported in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter that WWE held several meetings over the past week informing their employees of their decision to freeze pay raises and promotions. Meltzer reported that a meeting was held on February 11th with recently hired Vice President of Creative Writing Operations Christine Lubrano informing the company’s creative team of the pay freeze decision. A similar meeting was held on February 12th with Vice President of Talent Relations Mark Carrano and the company’s backstage producers/agents.
Meltzer reported that this decision was made by Vince McMahon, Bruce Prichard, WWE Executive Vice President Brad Blum, and WWE President Nick Khan.
Meltzer also reported that WWE officials recently gave many of their employees a stock award of 64 shares in total worth around $3000 that becomes fully vested in March. Meltzer reported that not all of WWE’s employees will eventually receive this stocks package. It is also currently not known if this stock reward is directly tied to the recent unhappiness within the company over the decision to freeze pay raises and promotions.
In an interesting note, PWInsider’s Mike Johnson reported that WWE recently issued a new filing to the SEC that lowered the amount of shares in company stock that Nick Khan received as a performance bonus. Johnson reported that WWE’ filing stated that the original amount of 15,310 was an error on their part and instead Khan was only meant to receive 10,464 shares.