10 Things Everybody Gets Wrong About WWE
3. WWE Is The Safest Company
This narrative rears its head quite often.
Whenever Kota Ibushi takes a preposterous neck-first bump, or Cody takes an unprotected chair shot, every promotion but WWE becomes an unsafe outlaw mud show, and WWE, with its piledriver ban, is held aloft as a worker's paradise.
New Japan absolutely needs to re-institute the safeguards that followed the tragic in-ring death of Mitsuharu Misawa, but two things can be true at once in this war-torn fanbase. WWE's in-ring style would be (relatively) safe, were it not for the exhausting, debilitating schedule. The flashpoint moment at Fyter Fest created more narrative than head trauma: head trauma is exacerbated with every impact. Every suplex. The secondary head impact that swiftly follows the back bumps taken multiples times, multiple nights per week is the real, significant factor.
The wear and tear of WWE's antiquated grind - house shows barely draw revenue, this is all awful, dangerous greed - accounts for their record injury count.
WWE, as a company, is almost a formal affront to workers' rights. The ban on piledrivers means next to nothing; the subsequent inflation of the schedule has worsened WWE's safety record, if anything.