Key word here that you... aren't getting, apparently. Vince insists they aren't employees when it comes to the company benefiting them. But wants to treat them like they are when it comes to them benefiting the company.
So... basically your whole objection - whilst understandable - is inherently wrong because you're looking at it from a 'legal point of view and from common sense' of someone dealing with a business, and not a carny clusterfukk made up of handshake deals, promises made over drinks and literally operating for decades in the grey area of legality because no outsider wants to deal with the industry long enough to be able to properly attempt to regulate it. So, trying to apply either legality or rationality to anything cokeboy does is a waste of time, and in this case, actually makes you more incorrect than he is... legally.
Side note: I can pretty much guarantee that a part of why the E won't classify them as employees is because they'd open themselves up to a fukkton of wrongful termination suits in the future, when Vince feels like rolling Deavors Season around and cuts someone for gaining 10-15 over the holidays or because he woke up that moment and decided he didn't like the way they blinked and it would keep them from getting over. There's a lot of things the company gets away with because they claim independent contractors. And it's clear they're trying to scare people into compliance, and that definitely is going to hurt them, because the first person they toss in the bushes over some bullshyt like this who goes on to become something big, either in AEW or outside of wrestling altogether, it's gonna all but guarantee a reckoning in the locker room.
What really needs to happen is one of the chosen, protected few needs to actually stand up and be allies for the people in the locker room without their job security. Hell... Nia needs to make a call to Dwayne. She's been untouchable and might as well make herself useful - if they can get Rock either backing the idea of a union, or even bigger, being an integral part in forming it, shyt will change immediately. Rock's pretty much the only person outside of the wrestling circle that Vince ain't tryna have problems with.
And honestly... I'm of the opinion Rock is gonna make a play at politics in the next decade or so. I think the XFL purchase was an early step toward that to establish legitimacy. Him helping to unionize the WWE and effectively drag his old profession into this century would look amazing on that political resume. Someone in the family gotta make the call.
