Since the beginning of downhill skateboarding The Industry borrowed the model of Flow Sponsorship from other Extreme Sports to generate their advertisements at a low cost. For those of you who do not know, Flow Sponsorship is when a company gives product in exchange for labor. Generally the deal is a company gives a young skater a skateboard and asks for photos or video clips in return, if the rider delivers they will receive more boards. All the while the company is careful to dangle the promise of real monetary support if they just keep it up. The question I am posing today is whether or not this is a fair trade for riders.

Team Managers will generally fall back onto explanations such as “hey our products cost a lot of money and we are just making a trade”, or “the skaters are out riding anyway, why should they get paid to take a few minutes to snap a picture?”, or “when we flow riders we give them a huge platform to build a name for themselves, that alone is valuable enough.” These excuses might hold up momentarily but after some inspection into the finances of most brands and application of basic ethics it is easy to see the exploitation that is at work here.

Before we begin pulling apart these arguments from brands we should first decide what fair compensation for skateboarding would be. As a base we will take the minimum wage of a worker in The USA of $7.25 hourly. I understand that this is not a fair measurement for the large and diverse scene we see all over the globe, and even within the USA this is hardly sufficient pay for most to survive but I digress. For the sake of this argument we will begin with that number. Now on top of this we must take into account the legal and health risk involved in downhill skateboarding, to account for this we will simply give the riders “hazard pay” by doubling their hourly pay to $14.50. After all we must keep in mind that every time a skater goes out to film and shoot photos they are quite easily subject to arrest or bodily injury. The brands profiting off of the rider’s image are most certainly responsible for protecting their riders in those instances, this higher wage helps to account for that. This amount is in my opinion the absolute bare minimum acceptable, and rider’s which have a large following of fans certainly should be arguing for more than this. For the sake of simplicity we will leave Child Labor Laws completely out of this discussion, although maybe that is a discussion for another day.

So when a rider goes out to skateboard, and they are snapping a few instagram photos, they’re filming a video, or planning an event, how do you measure their time “worked”? For videos it is simple, lets pay the rider for each hour they spent filming plus an additional amount for the use of their image, say $50 minimum for image use. For photos if it is a photo session the same applies. For the instances of a quick instagram photo which likely only took a few minutes an amount can be agreed upon per photo for the use of their image, lets say minimum $5 per for instagram. For event planning or other activities things get murky, the rider and brand should agree on an amount based on good faith and time put in but that amount should certainly not be $0. With these simple ground rules and the clear distinction that the use of a rider’s image and his time skateboarding are in fact valuable we can begin to inspect how this value can be traded for product and other compensations.

While it may be true that the retail price for a downhill skateboard , trucks, and wheels is high, the cost of those products to the brand themselves is not. I will concede that brands need to create a return on investment through their Teams and paying them money on top of traded products makes that more difficult. However, a skateboard deck on average costs a brand $25 to produce and $15 to ship. A set of wheels costs on average $7 to produce, and a box of a few sets is shipped for $15. A set of trucks are generally $15 to produce, $7 to ship. Of these types of sponsorship I must point out that because of the rate at which new wheels are worn down, Wheel Sponsorship in my opinion is the most valuable, and most likely to be a fair trade for riders. If what is asked of the rider in return for these investments matches the cost of the product and shipment, then the deal can be considered fair and ethical. However, when brands begin asking for video projects, several photos a week, event organization, and other tasks which take many hours to complete the exchange on the part of the rider is rarely fair. In short if the hours and image use put in by the rider as described in the previous paragraph exceed the cost value of the products they receive from the brand, exploitation is afoot.

Next on the chopping block “skaters skate anyway”. This excuse is far simpler to knock down. This argument has existed for ages throughout human history. It can easily be rephrased as “does the artist deserve to paid. Is the enjoyment of his craft not payment enough?” This is brought up constantly by Capitalists who wish to exploit artists and the argument quite simply should be turned around on them. The enjoyment the artist (or skater) feels while performing his craft is irrelevant; if one’s art is being used to generate profit the artist is entitled to a fair piece of that profit. Yes skateboarders will continue to skateboard even if they are not sponsored or payed. However if a brand uses a person’s image to sell skateboards, that person is obviously deserving of a portion.

The question of is a platform alone sufficient compensation? I should quite simply laugh at this excuse because of the three it is the most reaching, but for the sake of argument we will get into it. This type of statement is an attempt to make a marketing tool (Social Media) appear to instead be a service that the brand offers in order to devalue the worker. By this logic the brand should open their platform to the free market and turn a profit there. Access to a popular platform is a service in many industries like news (controversially), public speech, entertainment, etc. That is clearly not the case here. Social Media Feeds in this instance are a marketing tool used to sell products, yes they do generate fandom for riders as a side effect but this is not the primary function of the platform. The irony is that their feed has value solely because people contribute their image. Without the image of the rider there is no following for the feed thus the value of the feed is generated by the riders.

At this point the need to compensate riders for their time and image is hopefully clear. To sum up, the cost value (not market value) of the product can certainly be traded against the value a rider generates but in today’s practice it is rarely sufficient without additional pay or other compensation. The next topic is the fact that if brands paid all of their flow riders in the ways which I have described many would be simply financially unable. We then could suggest to those brands to cut their team down to a size that they can fairly compensate. An alternative solution would be compensation in the form of Company Equity.

Additionally we should inspect and provide value for the costs of skateboarding and producing media for the rider. Producing skate media is not without expense. Required to make most videos is a camera rig ($500-$4,000), a car ($5,000-$20,000), gasoline ($35 daily), a computer ($500-$2,000), and internet access ($35 monthly). A brand should be required to provide or contribute to the cost of all of these purchases. Whether that be renting cameras and cars for their riders, contributing money to the purchase of a computer, covering the cost of gasoline, etc; these costs can not be ignored. In most instances another individual is required to film or drive, those individuals should also seek compensation for their time.

Equity is in short a share of company ownership that includes access to profit share and voting rights. Most equity today is issued in the form of company stock and in my opinion would absolutely be fair compensation for labor and use of image. For brands who simply can not afford to pay their riders because of their current financial situation this is the path I believe should be followed. There are many other forms of equity distribution utilized by Worker’s Coops and Syndicates which some might find extreme but some brands are beginning to use this model today in hopes of motivating riders to become more involved in growing the brand. It is my belief that when individuals are fairly compensated they are more motivated to contribute to the growth of an organization, this is known economically as The Equity Theory.

We should also inspect the way that brands pit riders against each other in competition in order to extort extra work from them for lower pay. Brands almost always create a multi tiered class system of riders almost identical to the oppressive class structure we see in the real world today. Riders begin working with a company as flow riders and are held at that level until they “prove themselves” or “pay their dues” and earn the opportunity to turn pro. More accurately I should say “Pro” in gigantic sarcastic quotation marks because in our entire industry there is most likely only 3-5 people who actually survive as Professional Downhill Skateboarders. Whether brands recognize it or not dangling promises of future support in front of young flow riders is frequently used as a tool to make them work harder and contribute more for less money based on the promise that one day they’ll “make it big”. This is humored quite well with the old saying “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!” This promise is used to pit teams of flow riders against each other in competition and rewards are given to the most popular among them, not those who put in the most work, and collectively the entire group loses enormous compensation. This practice is exactly the same as the promise of “promotion” we see in corporate structures used to extort extra unpaid work from employees. This type of manipulation through hierarchical structure should be rejected as exploitation whether it appears in skateboarding, in corporations, or anywhere else.

Why brands felt that Flow Sponsorship as compensation was appropriate is at best ignorance and at worst greed. Left economists have written for ages about why this type of exploitation is immoral and was the source of me finally seeing . However in my opinion even the staunchest capitalists in the business world today would roll their eyes at the foolishness of young riders to accept these terrible flow sponsorship deal from brands (or perhaps give a wink to the bosses which pulled these schemes off). I believe many groms are simply so excited about the recognition that accompanies sponsorship that they are quick to agree to just about anything to validate their budding skills. I challenge young skaters today to seriously consider their own value as a rider before they agree to work with a brand. And I challenge Team Managers and Brand Owners to take a long look in the mirror and reflect on the exploitation that they have engaged in for the last several years in our industry. Riders and Brand Owners should both be interested in creating fair trades so that both are highly motivated to work and collaborate on a brand together.

-Alex Ameen