In the realm of public policy, strip clubs have historically been regulated as a nuisance or moral hazard, rather than a workplace. Zoning regulations focus on keeping strip clubs away from schools and churches in order to maintain property values and ensure community safety, which strip clubs are perceived to threaten. Local ordinances specify everything from the inches of clothing that must cover a dancer’s body, to how she can accept tips, to the exact distance she must maintain between herself and customers. These laws criminalize dancers for infractions, yet they fail to ensure dancers work under safe and fair labor practices.

New policies in California, Washington state and a pending ordinance in Minneapolis are among the first to govern the stripping industry through labor regulations. A 2018 California Supreme Court decision (Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles) restricted the use of independent contractor status, making dancers, as well as thousands of other California workers, employees.

Workers classified as employees are entitled to rights such as minimum wage and overtime protections, social security, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, workplace health and safety standards, and equal employment opportunity laws. Most employees are also entitled to workplace organizing protections such as the right to join or form a union. California legislators recently passed AB5 which clarifies the Dynamex decision and writes it into the California labor code.

The bill creates exemptions for occupations such as real estate agents, insurance brokers, and hairstylists. However, dancers were included as employees in the final version of the bill.

Independent contractor status in the stripping industry

The stripping industry has been at the forefront of the move to reclassify employees as independent contractors. Independent contractor status reframes workers as entrepreneurs, shifting the risks and expenses of employment from business owners onto workers. In the 1990s, clubs began classifying dancers as independent contractors which allowed them to sidestep employer obligations, charge dancers fees to work, and prevent dancers from forming labor unions.

In the 1990s, clubs began classifying dancers as independent contractors which allowed them to sidestep employer obligations, charge dancers fees to work, and prevent dancers from forming labor unions.

Independently contracted dancers do not receive any wages from the clubs where they work. Instead, dancers pay a per-shift fee as “rent” to the strip club. This fee can range from $10-$500 per shift, but typically hovers around $40-$100. In addition, clubs often take a percentage of the sales on private dances, put surcharges on sales paid with credit or debit cards, and require dancers to tip out other club employees to supplement their minimum wage earnings from the club.

As independent contractors, dancers are also responsible for paying 100 percent of their social security tax, income tax, entertainer licensing fees, health and disability insurance, as well as costuming, make-up, and supplies. Independent contractors are excluded from anti-discrimination laws as well as workplace health and safety regulations. Consequently, overt and structural discrimination is commonplace in the stripping industry as are unsafe working conditions including sexual harrassment and assault from customers, employees, and management.

Before the Dynamex decision, the legal test used to determine independent contractor status hinged on multiple factors that cumulatively determine whether workers have enough control over their time and work to qualify for independent contractor status. In order to argue that dancers meet this standard, clubs implemented flexible scheduling policies and pay structures that enabled some dancers to earn relatively high incomes. Because of these stipulations, independent contractor status is often equated with scheduling flexibility and higher earning potential than in other occupations available to young women.

Even though courts have overwhelmingly sided with dancers who claim they should be classified as employees, independent contractor status remains an industry-wide standard.

California dancers after the Dynamex decision and AB5

Employee status is widely regarded as a win for workers because of the rights and benefits attached to it. However, simply gaining inclusion in the legal category of employee has not resulted in better pay or working conditions for California dancers.

According to dancers interviewed in the early stages of my fieldwork, clubs that have transitioned to employee status are violating existing labor laws without recourse, while dancers are still criminalized for infractions of vice laws governing their conduct. Many clubs are increasing the fees dancers are required to pay and then returning an arbitrary portion of those fees as “wages.” In addition, clubs are implementing dance and bottle quotas, restricting dancers’ schedules and break periods, and requiring dancers to do free promotions on their personal social media accounts.

Dancers who object have been met with threats, intimidation, verbal abuse, job termination, and blacklisting. Safety and security have not improved, and dancers report a general atmosphere of intimidation, hostility, and disrespect from management and police.

California dancers who have begun organizing under the new employee protections argue that the current implementation of employee status is an effort to make being an employee as unappealing as possible to dancers.

California dancers who have begun organizing under the new employee protections argue that the current implementation of employee status is an effort to make being an employee as unappealing as possible to dancers.

A pending lawsuit suggests it may also be retaliation for previous litigation dancers won against a prominent strip club chain for misclassification. Regardless of the clubs’ motivations, the agencies tasked with law enforcement are either ignoring or criminalizing dancers, rather than protecting them as workers.

Dancers at the center of new policy

Researchers suggest that effective public policies aimed at protecting and empowering marginalized groups, such as sex workers, need to be created in active partnership with those directly affected.

Washington state recently passed HB 1756 which was the result of a partnership between dancers and policymakers. The law focuses on improving dancer safety and providing crucial education to dancers and other strip club staff. Clubs will be required to install panic buttons in private dance areas, bathrooms, and dressing rooms. Dancers and staff will receive training on sexual harassment and assault reporting. In addition, new dancers will receive training about workplace rights and the financial aspects of being an independent contractor, such as filing taxes, getting health insurance, and saving for retirement. Clubs will be required to keep records of customers who acted violently toward dancers and share those records with other clubs in the same chain. If dancers’ accounts of customer violence is supported by evidence such as footage from security cameras, the club must ban the customer from all co-owned clubs for three years. Perhaps most importantly, the ordinance requires an advisory board made up of at least 50% current and former dancers to implement the changes and investigate making future changes such as changes to the fee structure.

Minneapolis also recently passed a similar ordinance focusing on the health, safety, and financial concerns that dancers identified in research conducted by the University of Minnesota.

The proposed ordinance would require clubs to have a security camera plan in place, public seating areas that can be easily sanitized, and non-dancer staff to regularly sanitize the pole. To begin addressing the exploitative fee structure, managers would no longer be allowed to accept tips from dancers. In recognition of the connections between multiple forms of gender-based violence, clubs would no longer be able to hire security staff with recent domestic violence convictions.

New strip club policies still need to address racial discrimination

While the policies in Washington and Minneapolis take important steps to protect dancers’ health, safety, and labor, they still leave crucial issues, such as racial discrimination, unaddressed.

Equal employment opportunity laws only apply to employees, but not independent contractors. If employee protections were enforced in California strip clubs, anti-discrimination laws would prohibit common practices such as restrictive quotas on the number Black and Latina dancers working at clubs catering to white, middle- and upper-class clientele. However, anti-discrimination law is notoriously unequipped to address the structural discrimination and occupational segregation in the stripping industry that result in a racially stratified workforce.

Much of the pay discrimination in strip clubs is embedded in a supposedly neutral pay structure based on merit and customer preference. In addition, the working conditions are often worse and earning potential lower at clubs hiring primarily dancers of color, than at clubs hiring primarily white dancers. Through advertising images, “low-level security,” and high tolerance for dancer harassment, these clubs bring in customers and revenue by promoting the idea that dancers of color are more sexually available, and their bodies and labor less economically valuable than white dancers’.

Through advertising images, “low-level security,” and high tolerance for dancer harassment, these clubs bring in customers and revenue by promoting the idea that dancers of color are more sexually available, and their bodies and labor less economically valuable than white dancers’.

Addressing forms of discrimination that are the product of structural racism and longstanding racist stereotypes require substantial changes both inside and outside the stripping industry. However, dancers of color who are organizing, writing, and researching recommend policy changes as simple as increasing lighting around strip clubs and providing funding for safe transportation home for dancers working at clubs in urban centers. Other recommendations include abolishing stage fees, enforcing equitable hiring and scheduling practices, and providing dancers a base pay.

Centering dancers and giving them decision making power in policies intended to benefit them is key to effectively regulating and protecting strip club labor. Dancing, and other forms of sex work, are often considered fundamentally different from other occupations, but dancers face similar issues as other women workers, including a racially stratified workforce. Ending the criminalization of dancers and shifting policy to regulating the labor conditions in strip clubs would illuminate solutions that could be useful in not only in the stripping industry, but also in other occupations.