Seeing is Believing: Where Do California Strippers Land? (Part 2/2) – Knock LA

Strippers across Los Angeles are taking notes from the Washington Strippers Bill of Rights (Photo: Antonia Crane)

Read Part 1 here.

28 years ago, on August 14, 1996, San Francisco Chronicle’s headline read, “Unhappy with their paychecks and working conditions, most of the 60 exotic dancers at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady strip club have signed up to join the Service Employees International Union, Local 790.” A dancer was quoted as saying, “We’re just fighting for the basic protections most working people take for granted.” 

The basic protections we Lusty Ladies sought included anti-discriminatory hiring and scheduling procedures, regular raises, and guaranteed sick pay. But we also wanted to be part of changing things for the next generation of live nude dancers. For a list of what we fought for and won, The Global Nonviolent Action Database has recorded our campaign in its entirety. 

By the time I left San Francisco in 2003, my coworkers at the Lusty Lady had decided to become a worker-owned collective in order to change the predatory dynamics so prevalent in our workforce and pave the way for the next generation of organizing strippers. However, since my time working there, the strip club industry has responded to our movement with punishing attacks on dancers, like charging strippers increasingly higher fees to work, firing them for asking to read their employment contract, and creating an environment that operates on racial discrimination, blackmail, and extortion. 

15 years after the Lusty Lady won our contract, we lost our lease. Our landlord was strip club mogul Roger Forbes, co-founder of Deja Vu, the largest strip club company in the world, who relished closing the doors of the only unionized strip club in the United States. According to legal filings, Forbes and his business partner Harry Mahoney own more than 60% of licensed adult industry stores and clubs in California, implementing craven, abusive business practices that have directly harmed dancers. 

Lilith, who strips in Hollywood, claimed that California is the worst state in which to work as a stripper. 

“There is no category where the conditions set by club management are favorable for strippers. Whether it’s compensation or safety, we lose at every turn. To take half of our lap dance sales while not doing the bare minimum as an employer to make sure we’re not being harmed during that lap dance is inexcusable and needs to change,” she said. 

In May 2023, Lilith and her coworkers at the Star Garden Dive Bar in North Hollywood  joined Actor’s Equity, becoming the only unionized strippers in California—the first dancers to successfully unionize in over 25 years. The Equity Strippers turned the picket line into a raucous party on the sidewalk, using their visibility to raise awareness around the troubling issues dancers face. They built friendships with pro-labor institutions and agencies including UC Berkeley, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), Unite Here Local 11, UCLA, The Writers Guild, The West Hollywood Social Justice Coalition, Street Watch LA, United Steelworkers of America, and others. They cleverly used legal tactics to battle their anti-union bosses, receiving support and guidance from an array of local labor lawyers who invested time and resources into their campaign. And, of course, they had a dedicated cheering squad in the former Lusty Ladies. 

I spoke to several organizers from the Star Garden campaign about their progress with contract negotiations. 

“We are currently waiting for a ruling from the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board). In the meantime, we are on an indefinite strike. It’s a feeling of being in limbo, and it is very uncomfortable and depressing,” said Reagan, a Star Garden stripper and organizer. The NLRB ruling, according to her coworkers and co-organizers Velveeta and Lilith, is “a decision on noncompliance with the settlement agreement.” 

Delay tactics, threats of bankruptcy, and bad-faith negotiations are efforts to starve workers and hope they lose interest, which is nothing new. Forming a union takes a tremendous amount of patience and grit. 

“The fight isn’t over,” said Jordan Palmer. Head of the legal department for Strippers United and a Unite Here Local 11 lawyer, she worked extensively with the Star Garden strippers in the first year of the campaign. “The boss does not want to give them a collective bargaining agreement and they have been union busting hard ever since the dancers left the club.” 

The Equity Strippers strike has been supported by a number of pro-labor institutions, providing a pathway for workers at other Los Angeles clubs. (Photo: Antonia Crane)

With the Equity Strippers on strike, and a contract in limbo, where does this leave California dancers? A survey I conducted provides a clear window.

When asked about their most pressing concerns in the clubs for the last five years, they answered:

1. Discrimination (of any kind)

2. Hostile work environment/generally exploitative conditions

3. Abusive club managers and club owners

4. Outrageous fees and fines to work

5. Lack of solidarity with other dancers

6. Lack of security at work

7. Tip Stealing

8. Retaliation from management when an issue arises 

9. No oversight and zero accountability when clubs fail to comply with existing labor laws

When asked if California strippers should pass their own Stripper Bill of Rights following in the steps of Washington strippers, 100% of respondents answered yes. 

It appears that reaching a consensus among California strippers may be possible. California strippers are direct about workplace issues, and what they want is cohesive and clear.

“Organizing is difficult in California, due to mistrust in bills and legislation,” said Jozey, a dancer with organizing experience . “But strippers would be more open to a bill written by strippers.”

Change happens when workers decide to overcome their fears, join together, and stand up to improve their circumstances. This requires trust, solidarity, courage, resources, and time. Sometimes it’s ugly and lasts for years. Sometimes it shuts down Hollywood for 148 days.

Workers will continue to protest as long as they are devalued, mistreated, or robbed.  

Some of the greatest examples of unionizing happened here in California. Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta protested against poor pay and discriminatory working conditions by staging a walkout in the great Delano grape strike in Kern County in 1965. She created community, fought for class liberation for marginalized workers, and won, forming and co-founding United Farm Workers. The only unionized car wash in the country was won in Los Angeles in 2011, when Bonus Car Wash joined United Steelworkers, securing regular water breaks, job security, and respect for workers. My tenacious coworkers at The Lusty Lady nudged me to walk off stage and perform a “No-Pink Day” alongside them when our bosses locked us out of the building for talking back and for forming a union. 

Strippers have never been limited to the outcome of securing a union contract in order to build worker power. Many have succeeded in holding strip clubs accountable for violating labor laws years  before AB 5 passed. California Strippers employed at Spearmint Rhino Club were awarded $3.65 million in a misclassification settlement that was filed in 2017 and paid out in 2020. Strip clubs are not the only employers whose business model violates AB 5 and The Fair Standards Labor Act, but they have been resistant to change, even when facing significant economic losses while court ordered to pay workers their stolen wages. These payouts will likely continue to happen with or without AB 5.

If strippers are frequently able to recover their lost wages from massive corporate clubs, I wondered why media stories about this are so hidden from sight in law journals and academic briefs.  

I spoke with Meagan Lord, a Labor Research and Policy PhD candidate at Cornell University, who was a campaign leader with the Equity Strippers in North Hollywood, California. She suspects many people are unaware that strippers’ fight for wage recovery is rooted in  quiet settlements, forced arbitration, and a “grit our teeth, put in our years, and move on to the next thing attitude.” Lord described her organizing work with the Star Garden campaign as a way to “show dancers they can stand up for themselves, file complaints, and be able to shine a spotlight on workplace inequities.”

If California strippers decide to take a cue from colleagues in Washington and create our own Stripper Bill of Rights, we will gain the power to improve our working conditions instead of continuing to smart from the blows of unenforced labor laws. Every action dancers take to build worker power is a sea change that creates solidarity and, right now, California strippers could really use some.

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