“We’ve had enough”: Jockeys to make a stand, insists Damian Lane

Superstar jockey Damian Lane says jockeys have had enough of going without pay for their work at jump outs.

As of December 1, jockeys in Victoria will refuse to participate in jump outs if a fee isn’t arranged for their work with Lane suggesting the entire jockey room are united in this stance.

Lane says there’s no industry in the world where people work for 10 to 20 hours a week without getting paid, insisting that enough is enough.

“This is not a new topic of discussion and not a new problem that jockeys have been facing in Victoria,” Lane told SENTrack.

“This has been an ongoing discussion as long as Matt Hyland has been at the VJA and every time this topic comes up it gets kicked down the road where we get told, ‘we might do this and we might do that’.

“There’s been three CEOs at Racing Victoria during that period and we’ve never made any headway so basically our members have had enough and want to be paid for their work, there’s no other industry where you go to work and do 10-20 hours of free labour every week, so we’ve had enough.

“Their position was that they’re happy to pull their services for these unpaid jump outs and that discussion happened around eight weeks ago and we went to Racing Victoria and said that this is how our members feel and obviously we don’t to blindside anyone so we’re going to set a date for December 1 because we want something to be resolved by then.”

As for who pays the jockeys for their work, Lane says that’s not the concern of the riders as they don’t care how they get paid but rather that they do get paid for the hours they put in.

“They obviously need to work through it with relevant stakeholders and some of those stakeholders have pushed back strongly obviously,” Lane said.

“They basically said there was no room for compromise, so this is where we’ve landed.

“We get paid $110 for an official trial and if you can tell what the difference between an official trial and an official jump out these days well tell me why we get paid $110 for one and $0 for the other.

“Where the money comes from is not our concern, the reality is owners have been getting a free kick with a free service for many a year now and we want that service paid for and that’s not really our concern where that money comes from.

“The jockeys are united and that’s why we’ve come to these conclusions, that’s a ridiculous response we get paid on race day due to the services we provide on the race day and I already know what their responses are because we’ve heard it for eight years.

“We’re not interested, we get paid race days for the services we provide on race day and not the services we provide at jump outs.

Lane continued: “If they don’t want to pay jockeys then they don’t get the jockeys for the services and that’s the reality from here on out.

“We are willing to come into a room with all the relevant stakeholders and discuss how and what payment looks like, we’re not interested in discussing whether we should or why we should be getting paid as we’re past that, we’ve done that for many a year.

“All our riders are united and we want a resolution, we’ve been trying to get a resolution but we’ve basically been told there’s no chance of this happening so this is where we’ve landed and our riders are united.

“They want to be paid for their services and on Monday if the conversation is the same and the industry and owners don’t have the money then we won’t ride at the jump outs.

“If we weren’t confident that we’re united then we wouldn’t be this far down the road.

“80 per cent of the jockeys aren’t getting paid and they’re all on the same page so if one person wavers then it brings it down from everyone else so they’re all on board.”