In clubs throughout LA, strippers are seeking to improve working conditions (Photo: Antonia Crane)
At 10:30 PM on Tuesday, February 27, the first-ever Strippers’ Bill of Rights passed in Washington State. The cluster of bills refers to SB 6106 and HB 2036, two adult entertainment industry bills which share common goals: most notably, to respond to the specific workplace needs of Washington strippers. The bills add protections, autonomy, and security to their job, challenging constraints that tenuous gig workers often face while attempting to organize their workplaces.
Stripping happens in darkness — not only in the dim red light of the club but in a space that is considered to exist outside of societal formalities, in a lawless, sexy world where strippers appear to float in a glittering sea of cash regardless of the economy, going home with all of that money in hand. Not so.
Strippers experience wage theft at an alarming rate, often paying club owners up to 70% of their nightly earnings, which doesn’t include the excessive charges invented by club owners, often referred to as: “rent,” “stage fees,” or “leasing fees.” In the corporate chain clubs, I’ve heard of bosses holding a performer’s earnings for weeks, only releasing a portion of it after they’ve skimmed it with mysterious fees and fines. Some strippers even end their shift owing the club money, commonly referred to as “back rent,” creating economic hardship for dancers who show up for work already indebted to their employer.
As a stripper who has worked in four states over three decades, I’ve seen these loathsome business practices go from bad to worse, especially during economic downturns, like the recent global pandemic, when people abruptly stop spending time and cash on live entertainment, leaving strippers in the lurch. Club owners have brazenly evaded labor laws by charging dancers to pay their own wages while ignoring their workplace concerns.
It is clear to me that club owners will continue to steal more and more from workers with zero consequences as long as they keep getting away with it. And they will only stop when we, the workers, stop them. History has shown this.
For instance, I’ve experienced the result of standing strong with my former Lusty Lady colleagues to thwart uneven power dynamics in the stripping industry when we decided to unionize in 1996, which resulted in securing a contract. Hard-won gains have been made by sex workers before, and will be made again, as long as workers decide together that wherever they find themselves, they are going to make it better.
Recently, strippers in Washington have made life better for strippers.
The Strippers’ Bill of Rights that Washington strippers passed creates new rules like ending the excessive “back rent.” The bill also adds language to existing statutes, including anti-discrimination protections, and security minimums, such as training for security guards. Some other wins include partial decriminalization of dancer conduct on the shop floor and an end to archaic “lewd” conduct restrictions for all venues (notably queer venues). The rules also allow strip clubs to apply for liquor licenses, which create an income stream for strip clubs other than extracting cash from strippers.
Passing the Strippers’ Bill of Rights was no happy accident. It was the result of deep, consistent, long-term strategizing by members of Strippers Are Workers (SAW), a strippers’ advocacy organization. SAW began organizing themselves in 2016 and found a fruitful partner in the organization Working Washington in 2018.
According to Madison Zack-Wu, the current campaign manager for SAW, formally partnering with Working Washington was a promising alliance that created a successful campaign because, among other things, “Working Washington had a philosophy of organizing workforces that might not be able to unionize, so there was an alignment of values there.”
That partnership culminated in the success of passing HB 1756, a bill that required clubs to install panic buttons in secluded areas like VIP rooms, as well as the ability for dancers to distribute a “block list,” or a list of problematic clients that would be banned from entering clubs for three years if they engaged in unacceptable or abusive behavior. HB 1756 also created an “Adult Entertainment Advisory Committee,” a group composed of at least 50% dancers poised to give their experiential input and updates about the health and safety concerns specific to the stripping industry, a notoriously unregulated business that attracts vulnerable, marginalized workers with few worker protections. The passing of HB 1756 in May 2019 was not only a collective win for all sex workers fighting for human rights, but it also created momentum for the Stripper Bill of Rights.
Through SAW’s efforts to build relationships with local progressive organizations and legislators, Washington politicians are now listening to the most vital stakeholders — the strippers themselves. After the bill passed, the next hurdle was to establish the rules and language around how the new standards would be implemented and enforced. So far, two meetings have been held with the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries, the primary entity for rulemaking and labor standards in the state. The meetings were over two and a half hours long, in the middle of the day,on Zoom.
Club owners’ reactions have been all too familiar. They complained a lot, evaded responsibility, and blamed strippers for their own failures to create a sustainable, safe business where workers can thrive. They grumbled about having to trust the words and experiences of dancers regarding safety, and they spent a lot of time defending customers who made the “block list,” as if falsely accusing a paying client is typical or desirable for dancers. The idea of a dancer who experiences abuse or harassment at work choosing to lose paying customers by banning them under false pretenses is ludicrous.
Strip club bosses have become accustomed to disempowering dancers and getting away with it, but they best snap out of it, because a new dawn of sex worker rights is upon us. The SAW dancers are making waves, sending ripples we can feel in California.
Zack-Wu is eloquent, with a sharp, clear gaze and eerily erect posture. When we spoke, I kept thinking there must be 25 years between us, and that I was likely close to her age when I decided to unionize with my coworkers at the Lusty Lady Peepshow. Before that, I was a nude lap dancer in the Tenderloin, so high on powders and pills that I didn’t feel anything but numbness — nothing close to being empowered. But by the time I clocked in at The Lusty Lady, I was sober, and I’m lucky and grateful that the dancers there taught me to prioritize our collective wellbeing, to work to improve things for ourselves, and to, hopefully, leave the club in better shape for future dancers.
Zack-Wu began stripping at age 18. She was a high school dropout who decided to return to school to complete her studies, but even as she worked minimum wage jobs, they didn’t pay well. Like thousands of other strippers all over the world, Zack-Wu turned to the stripping industry in order to make her life possible, because the cumulative tips one earns in a few nights can coverrent, buy textbooks, and generally keep the lights on. As a teenager, Zack-Wu had already been actively involved in racial justice advocacy and academic access work so, after stripping for a few years, she was poised to join SAW.
By December 2021, one year after joining SAW, Zack-Wu became their campaign manager. Although Working Washington was already a meaningful partner, she added, “By 2021, we were pretty self-sufficient.”
Without hesitation, Zack-Wu said “genuine community consensus” was the first big step for dancers pushing for laws that respond to our specific workplace issues.
“One of the problems is that often managers are pretending to be security and not really acting as security, or the security that is there is just checking IDs at the door. What are ways that we imagine this being fixed? How do we imagine minimum security could look like? How would we even measure that?”
Another example of consensus building she mentioned was fee caps.
“People would talk about how fees are really, really high. Okay. What are ways that you envision that we would be able to fix this?”
Zack-Wu stressed the importance of partnering with like-minded organizations who aren’t afraid to center sex workers. She told me that California strippers would do well to find a sponsor who is “incredibly supportive and who understands that strippers in the clubs are the most important stakeholders, because this is the person that will end up introducing your legislation.”
She described the legwork SAW did in order to find legislators and sex worker-literate organizations that are both supportive and effective. These relationships have helped SAW grow and sustain their membership.
One of the many strip clubs in Los Angeles (Photo: Antonia Crane)
When I think of where California labor is right now for strippers and other workers pushing for labor rights, negotiating union contracts, and advocating for job safety and equitable pay, I feel conflicted.
On one hand, I think strippers should critically assess how things have gotten to this point and move towards potential solutions that are not about mythologizing the past, because conditions were always bad, regardless of any laws or regulations. I think we need to accept that the employee classification dye has been cast, and that we would do well to attempt lower lifts, like SAW did, by focusing on building community consensus, finding legislators who make sense for us to approach, and working with them to pen legislation like the Stripper Bill of Rights.
On the other hand, the legislation we are working within (AB 5), did not capture the needs of dancers, and within that framework, strippers are experiencing more wage theft than ever before. As a result, many California strippers jumped ship to find work in other states, but running from one bad club to another is not sustainable, and the lesser of evils is still evil.
Consensus building is difficult in California. I’ve noticed dancers have had trouble assigning blame where it should be directed — to the bosses and the blows they have long dealt to dancers. This has been a distraction from having deep conversations about what labor laws for strippers in California should look like.
I explained this to Zack-Wu. She seemed energized to talk strategy.
“If dancers are classified as employees in California,” Zack-Wu said, “then, in theory, a lot of employment standards that are already happening in California are supposed to apply to them, like every single different type of worker. So how do you create a unique, specific policy for employees of a certain industry?”
“I think that’s right,” I said. “It’s also in the state’s interest to try to fix this for strippers, because our workforce is wildly unregulated and the laws are not enforced. I know that laws will not rescue us, and lawmakers avoid us, but this may be something we could collectively work on together in order to gain footing.”
Zack-Wu sat forward. “And so now we need added protections around labor standards and fair wage compensation because of that,” she said. “That narrative is really strong for a couple of reasons: one, it villainizes politicians who actively marginalize sex workers. Two, it tells a story and organizing is about building a strong, true narrative and putting some urgency on it.”
When I asked what a strong strategy might be for getting politicians (and their aides) on our side, she said, “More important than changing a person’s mind who may disagree with you or who is not ready to take your side of an issue, is getting them to empathize with your story and to understand.”
Having the patience and compassion to communicate a deeply personal story of the sex work industry that legislators are not used to hearing, in order to push the needle forward, speaks to Zack-Wu’s pragmatic optimism.
I asked her about the future of SAW in terms of goals and sustainability. She said they are focused on “organizational development and structure for more grant writing to happen.” This, she believes will help grow and sustain membership, which speaks to the issue of volunteer burnout, especially those who juggle many other responsibilities. “It is hard to carve out your capacity for something when it is volunteer based, especially if we’re talking about super high level commitment work like passing legislation.”
She encouraged California strippers to find as much funding as possible so that volunteers can be paid, “even just a little bit,” she said, then added, “Ultimately, we’re the only ones watching out for ourselves.”
