Deja vu does that, I think, but it isn’t the inevitable outcome; there are places (my friend’s club in Montana for example) where dancers are employees, make minimum wage, and keep their tips and dance money. Deja Vu does it because no one has seriously tried to challenge it since they started, but that doesn’t mean they would get away with it if someone did.
Sapphire tried to pull that trick after they lost their suit and the courts weren’t having it.
And also—it’s something that could be legislated against to make it illegal.
But again, you’re dealing with a population that doesn’t know what their rights are, how to navigate the legal/labour system, and is terrified to complain in case they lose shifts.
So the likelihood is strippers most places will remain treated as employees without any of the benefits, paying through the nose to not get unemployment or workers comp.
And also, does this anon think that sex workers are just mindless automatons? If strip clubs paid flat minimum wage, then the only people who would work there would probably be hobby-dancers and the like. Because dancers are treated so strictly like employees, one of the only advantages of working in a strip club as opposed to other niches of the sex industry is the opportunity to make cash in reasonably big lump sums without doing your own admin. So if clubs actually tried to implement a minimum-wage-only scheme, it seems likely that that club would suddenly have an awful lot of trouble hiring.
It’s amazing that “the people who create the lion’s share of the value should reap the lion’s share of the profit” is such an incomprehensible idea once you add tits to the equation.
A big part of the problem is just sheet ignorance about the differences between employee status and IC status and a lot of scary and TRUE stories about clubs [like déjà vu] that have continued to find ways to fuck dancers over despite employee status; but again with the ignorance, those things aren’t legal and can also be legislated against.
Idk it’s a problem of access to information which is why it bums me out that people with access to information and access to privilege and social capital that makes them very very low risk have invested themselves so heavily in an illegal and exploitative status quo, to the point of spreading misinformation and obfuscating the truth. There are good arguments to be made for IC status without lying, but if you insist on lying the best we can hope for is a maintenance of the status quo!
Like look at bartenders! Bartenders don’t report their full tips!
And people can’t extrapolate from real legit jobs they’ve had to stripping: there’s no reason stripping would come up on a background check—that’s not what background checks are FOR. Am I the only stripper to have gone through several? It’s mandatory if you work with children.
The real risks of discrimination come from being outed and could ALSO be addressed with antidiscrimination legislation like the kind Tara is pushing and that I’m starting to work on with Stephanie and Katie.
Dancers here are so wound up with manipulative bullshit that they have no idea what’s real.
Deja Vu has it written into dancer contracts that dancers can’t engage in class action lawsuits against the company. And it’s such a huge corporation that fighting it would most likely result in someone just bankrupting themselves and never getting to work in a strip club in some cities again (since often Deja Vu owns multiple clubs in a city).
Though the Deja Vu in Seattle is now doing that thing where they give dancers a choice to either be employees or contractors. But the employee situation is so shitty that no one takes it. I mean, no one is going to strip for minimum wage and having to split their tips with the staff. Or give up the option to say no to customers they dislike.As for Montana, the last club I worked at there was total shit about the IC vs employee thing. They made us jump through hoops to get IC status (it costs money in Montana to get IC status. You have to advertise and prove you’re running your own business and then send in all these bits of proof, each one getting you a certain number of points) and then completely treated us like employees. You had to pay fees to leave a shift early but even then management wouldn’t always let you. You could stand up there saying ‘here’s my fifty bucks, let me go home’ and they’d tell you no. And if you left anyway they’d suspend you from working.
Ugh that’s illegal too tho, you can’t actually sign away your right to sue a company for it’s illegal business practises!
Only no one wants to out themselves and then never get to work at that chain again.
It’s all so illegal and shitty.
At the risk of outing myself, I work at a Deja Vu, and just renewed my contract, and it is so blatantly illegal and horrible i am THIS close to scanning it and putting it online so you can see what terrible, terrible, illegal things we agree to. The employee option is so shitty everyone choses IC, but then you sign away your right to join a class action lawsuit and so much more… it’s so wrongetty wrong wrong wrong i wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lawyer willing to take a case pro bono (at least at first), like this year’s contract is so egregious and I am close to the end of my time as a dancer I might just blow up my good standing as a DV contractor and do something about it.
UGH I hate when i reblog things to the wrong blog… the bolded was my commentary.
I’m sure you know this and I keep saying this but I just have to repeat, you can’t sign away your legal rights! These clubs don’t have the right to ask that of you: it’s a matter of some confusion here in Portland where everyone is like “you AGREED to it!”
You can agree to be murdered but the person who kills you is still liable.On the one hand tho, I am impressed déjà vu even has contracts for you to sign, I’ve signed MAYBE three contracts in Portland; most of these places are so shoddily run and disorganized and ignorant of the law that they just check your id. I mean, Ian at Sassy’s didn’t know he had to pay employees overtime when he took over, and they grandfathered that second pole in without any safety checks.
Club owners in Portland are just as ignorant as the dancers.But the employee status thing isn’t legal either, the whole point of employee status is that it confers certain rights that no other status has and it is SO SICK that strippers either don’t know this or are too scared to enforce it.
And one last thing—how do strippers who DO know this stuff know it? Like, how do you know what you know about your legal rights? I’m just curious because of the lack of education here, how strippers other places get educated? Are people just lazy here?
This is SO important
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 