![]() Since March, they’ve been on a picket line outside of the club, dressing in themed costumes, tracking the number of customers who go in, and bringing the number of dancers down from a high of fifteen per shift to as few as one, according to Velveeta. At the beginning of May, they called on the club owners to voluntarily recognize the union through a card check agreement backed by a majority of the dancers. Their resolve was solidified when the club owners fired another dancer, Selena, for intervening with a customer on behalf of another dancer.ĭancers walked out in March. Most of the dancers responded with enthusiasm. And so at that moment when she was fired, I offered the suggestion of coming together and organizing around that,” Velveeta says. “All the were really upset about it, because she had a leadership role within the club, and everyone looked up to her and she brought in a lot of good customers. ![]() Velveeta, a dancer who’d previously tried to organize another club she worked at with Reagan, helped lead the movement (all dancers are referred to by their stage names). When the new owners of the club fired Reagan, a popular dancer, in late February, her coworkers seized the moment to push back in unison. ![]() The first and only exotic dancer union to date was the one formed in San Francisco at the Lusty Lady peep show in 1996.Īll these years later, dancers at the North Hollywood club Star Garden are aiming to be the next. They are often in the business short-term, sporadically, and anonymously, and many dancers have had to expend their organizing capacity dealing with regulatory threats to close clubs, health and safety issues, or discriminatory hiring practices. In part, that’s because dancers are a workforce already difficult to organize. While dancers can organize against employers, it’s harder to organize around the realities of moving into a more formal economy from a cash one.īut the individual success of nearly every labor case that’s been brought against a strip club hasn’t done anything to change the industry’s overall working conditions, nor has it done much to inspire dancers to form unions. Examples of these policies litter the evidence lists of successful labor lawsuits against clubs. At other clubs, though, dancers were subjected to lengthy lists of house rules, dress codes, scheduling requirements, minimum tips to staff, and minor infractions that could get them fired. Of course, some clubs did so, and simply: dancers showed up when they pleased, paid a stage fee to rent their time in the club, and were only obligated to heed local laws and regulations. Whether these changes were due to a state labor board decision, a class action lawsuit, or a dancer’s wage and hour claim, “certain entertainers and their attorneys” would invariably be described as the parties at fault-not clubs’ inability to observe the legal requirements of the independent contractor relationship they had with their dancers. But the messages weren’t entirely unprecedented: they echoed the kinds of announcements that have been made regularly over the last thirty years when clubs have implemented one change or another that ultimately meant dancers had to pay more in order to work. These signs were posted on social media by dancers who were concerned about the implications. ![]() Regardless of the reason, dancers were given the unwelcome news that instead of taking home cash from private dance sales every night, the club would be collecting that money and issuing them a paycheck-after deducting the club’s cut and payroll withholding. They told dancers that “the club is now FORCED to make all entertainers become EMPLOYEES” in response to “lawsuits filed by certain entertainers and their attorneys.” At clubs owned by Spearmint Rhino, signs attributed the same change to a California Supreme Court decision. In October 2018, signs began to appear in the dressing rooms of California strip clubs owned by the company Déjà Vu.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |