The UFC women’s bantamweight fighter has started Project Spearhead, an effort to get UFC athletes to unionize, she confirmed with MMA Fighting on Monday. Unlike past labor movement failures, Smith vows that this attempt for organization will be driven mainly by fighters. She will start out as the interim president of Project Spearhead and Kajan Johnson, a UFC lightweight, is the interim vice president.
“This is kind of just another in a long string of efforts, but I think a lot of things separate it from the other ones,” Smith told MMA Fighting. “One of them being that this has no outside influences. This is for the fighters, it was come up with by me — a fighter.”
The website for Project Spearhead launched Friday. On it is a step-by-step explanation of the unionization process and a link to download authorization cards, which would ignite said process if signed by enough athletes. The site says that the UFC is “misclassifying” fighters as independent contractors, when they are really treated like employees. As it is now, UFC fighters would not be able to be in a union, because they are independent contractors, per U.S. labor law.
“Project Spearhead is here to force the issue - the UFC can choose to either pay into our needs and respect us as employees with a say in all decisions affecting us or treat us like the independent contractors that we are being called and lighten up with the USADA supervision, uniforms and restrictions,” the site reads.
Leslie Smith launches Project Spearhead, a fighter-driven effort to get UFC athletes unionized
A few years ago, Jeff Boras invited any UFC fighter to a meeting about forming a union & only Leslie showed
Last edited by a moderator: