From a lawyer:
This all seems like some employer-encouraged hysteria.
If BOLI is investigating Stars (or other clubs) for wage and hour violations, I do not believe that they have the power to “force” the club to make dancers employees. They can sue the clubs to assess penalties and recover back wages for individuals (kind of like what you are doing with Casa Diablo), which might encourage the clubs to change the way that they do business. But, many clubs will take it to litigation (like Casa Diablo is doing) because it threatens the way that they want to do business.
Don’t forget that exotic dancing is never going to be like working at McDonalds. Clubs are not going to be able to get very many women to dance for what they could make working at minimum wage jobs. They need you all as much as you all need them. They are just trying to scare you all into advocating for their financial interests, not your own. There might be changes to the industry. But, at the end of the day, many women will stop showing up to work if they aren’t getting paid what they are used to and don’t have some of the flexibility that the industry is known for. Besides, many of the tip issues that this writer fears would likely put them at risk for litigation. It is not settled law whether payments for lap dances are tips or not. And, the tips issue is not settled under Oregon law, either.
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Basic google could have told Elle or any of her followers that.
The situation Da Corsi (a member of the Association of Club Executives, I would like to remind you, the very organization that mentioned what bad press the stripper legislation was and how they need to get on top of it in their newsletter) outlined, that Elle shared in hysterical tones, is not legal, not something BoLI supports (as Paloma pointed out) and is something that BoLI could in fact be encouraged to do something about.Do none of you know about bartenders? Employees who keep their tips?! And get benefits and overtime if they work enough? And paid sick leave in Portland?
And I already know none of you know how to use google, so let me tell you:
Corinna is a lawyer and they are guarded types, but the sapphire decision happened in federal court, which means that a federal precedent has been set saying strippers keep our lap dance money.Whatever Da Corsi is saying, it isn’t coming from labour law. It is coming from da Corsi, Johnny, and that asshole at Dolphin, as a part of a specific tactic to scare dancers into backing away from their rights as employees and maintaining their independent contractor status so that club owners don’t lose their meal ticket.
I don’t UNDERSTAND why Elle is so invested in this and so opposed to using some of her apparently abundant free time to do some basic googling, but that is no reason that the rest of you have to be in the dark and afraid.
None of this is legal.
It is not something you need to be afraid of.
If anyone tries to pull that shit, you have the right to stop it. BOLI will be on your side. I will be on your side. There is no reason for dancers to give away any portion of their money, stage tips or lap dance money, to anyone. There is no reason for dancers not to be able to pick our own music. Dancers being fired for weight gain or skin colour is an independent CONTRACTOR risk, not an employee risk: people literally, truly, DIED so that employees would be protected.
Please, don’t throw that away because one woman can’t do basic research.WE HAVE RIGHTS.
use them.
everyone needs to know this. the reason that Elle and people like her can get away with intimidating their colleagues (I will speculate on the reasons in a different post, but I promise you the words “special snowflake hipster” will be used), is because there is so much semantic noise obscuring the truth.
it’s really important that information like this gets around, and becomes the new “norm” in terms of what people think working in the sex industry should be – the intimidation thrives on “you don’t understand that legal shit, that’s why you’re here.” even if not everyone can sue, everyone should know that their bosses are not in the right, ethically or legally, in treating them this way.
Exactly!
Like, I’m not even arguing that we should all agree with me (even tho I am v obviously right! :D) there are drawbacks to both employee status and independent contracting, but none of the things above or the thing a she’s using to terrify people are inherently tied to employee status or tbh LEGAL.
don’t throw it all away until you know exactly what you’re giving up. You can’t fight for what you don’t know you have. If you don’t know that what she’s talking about is illegal and absolutely NOT inherently tied to employee status, of course it’s going to look unappealing. That’s how déjà vu gets away with everything they do.
But if you know that it’s illegal, and you know that there are services created to prevent exploitation like that, then you can actually do something about it. And right now, in the state of transition, is the perfect time.
!!!
as with dungeons (and if i recall correctly, you and i discussed this ages ago) – the only people benefitted by sex workers’ being ignorant of this stuff is management, who can cherry pick from employee treatment and contractor treatment and sex workers are supposed to be grateful that, after their shameless skimming, we still wind up, over a year, doing better than minimum wage. and if we don’t know that that’s not *right* (and not legal), then we don’t have any impetus to look elsewhere for better treatment – sex workers stay a captive market.
But dungeons couldn’t skim as effectively as strip clubs, or stop workers from freelancing as effectively as strip clubs, and now the market is legitimately different here. The proportion of house staff to freelancers has completely shifted in favor of the latter (and prices have gone up!) and dungeon after dungeon has folded up (or completely changed its business model) because they didn’t have the tools that strip clubs have to keep their workers afraid. Workers make more money (that’s presumption on my part) and keep more money (that is not presumption on my part) because they pay rent instead of house fees or cuts.
so, managers benefit, because they can take your money and you’re too scared to do anything about it.
and dilettante hobbyist workers benefit because it means that all the work they did kissing up to management doesn’t go to waste, and the narrative that they’re happy with their work because they’re inherently special (as opposed to say, having the safety net of not needing to earn a whole living this way) doesn’t get tarnished.
spread the fucking word, folks.
I don’t want to detract from the discussion of labor rights here, but I want to mention that I don’t think this is what led to the decline of dungeons vs. indy dommes in New York City. I don’t think that’s at all comparable to what’s going on in strip clubs across the country right now.
That shift happened rather suddenly in 2008 when then Governor Eliot Spitzer (…) chose to reinterpret the prostitution statute to include a large amount of what pro dommes do, effectively making that job illegal. Criminalization effectively made the entire business model that made both running and working at a dungeon so lucrative obsolete. That and the fact that this shift in legal status coincided almost exactly with the crash in the securities markets, which of course was directly linked to the ridiculous amount of expendable income in this city last decade.
I think much of the draw of dungeons prior to the raids was that they all slightly undercut the lowest indy rates while offering the same services. In turn, their advertising brought in such a volume of clients that if you were the one of top dommes at any given dungeon you could potentially earn 2k in one week, which is more than almost any indy dommes are making now. So at that point it was much rarer to see successful career dommes working indy if they were below a certain age and experience level.
After the raids, when many of the most popular domme services became illegal, the lower rate was then assumed to not include those services since they couldn’t be advertised. So if you consider things like anal play, golden showers, etc. to be extras that likely require a tip then the dungeon rate suddenly reaches parity with that of the average indy rate charged by the most experienced providers. And what do clients get for paying the same rate at a dungeon as with an experienced indy domme? The risk of being present when another NYPD raid occurs and being perp walked in front of the New York Post. So I would argue there really wasn’t a rise in rates. By my memory, indy dommes have charged about the same for the past decade. What changed was the ability of dungeons to effectively undercut them.
And what really overshadowed all of that was simply the element of FEAR that came with such sudden criminalization. After the string of raids and accompanying NY Post articles, most clients wouldn’t step foot in a dungeon for about a year and the most successful dungeons just chose to immediately close. The majority of the dommes left as well when they realized the actually quite serious risk they faced (as an aside, I was dating someone at the time who worked at the first dungeon to be raided and after her coworkers had their legal names published in the Post she was too traumatized to even step foot in the place and asked someone else to retrieve her belongings). The top dommes from those places all went indy and in not much time started to do rather well for themselves. Not nearly as well as in 2007 mind you (that’s what you would call an economic bubble), but well enough to create an entire culture of indy domming in New York that has changed the landscape of fetish work to this day.
So after that, many of the dungeons that either chose to reopen or didn’t get raided in the first place folded due to financial reasons. And the remaining ones are all doing very poorly. They’re a revolving door of dommes, either hobbyists or serious workers just starting out, both of which generally leave in a year or so either to quit or go indy. And as far as clients, it seems the ones who spend enough to keep some places afloat still go to dungeons because they see the revolving door of workers as an upside. Either they’re these types who want to play with as large a number of women possible like they’re collecting pokemon, or they view youth and inexperience as a plus…which is fucking creepy and predatory because it either comes from a place of almost borderline pedophilia or thinking they can push boundaries because the women haven’t learned to enforce them yet and management (besides never having given a fuck about worker safety in the first place) now purposefully takes an even more hands off approach due to the new legal status.
Anyway, like I said I don’t want to derail the discussion about employee vs. independent contractor status, I just don’t think it’s such an issue when it comes to dungeons. And also I’m pretty sure leighalanna has lived through everything I’ve described here so don’t want to seem like I’m talking down to her.
Although, after typing all this out I AM now interested in this as a case study in how sudden changes in criminal status of sex work can drastically alter working conditions. I’m really living in a bubble here in NYC and would love to hear if anyone can draw any parallels to this situation in other jurisdictions or other forms of sex work. /2cents
This is really interesting, thank you!
This shit is part of the reason I stopped working in new york
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 