But These Strippers Are Fighting Back
After a decade of working as a stripper, Brandi Campbell had finally had enough of being groped by customers and management alike.
In that time, she’d worked at 57 different clubs across six different states and says she experienced sexual harassment in most of them. But earlier this year, while working for Larry Flint’s Hustler Club in Las Vegas, she got fed up. Many people — including clients — may think that touching exotic dancers comes with the territory, but the job doesn’t entail or permit unwanted sexual contact, just as in any other occupation.
Yet she alleges that customers at Hustler frequently grabbed her and slapped her butt. Her supervisors didn’t just ignore it; she says they also engaged in the harassment, touching her, hugging her, and kissing her. The manager even hounded her to go on dates with him even though she never picked up his calls. She decided to take action and sue the club.
Brandi Campbell
CREDIT: Brandi Campbell
That’s when she found out that she can’t sue for sexual harassment. She’s also not entitled to be paid at least minimum wage, to get overtime when she works more than 40 hours a week, or to draw unemployment insurance if she’s fired. If she hurts herself on the job, she won’t see a dime of workers’ compensation. The club gets away with all of it by labeling its dancers independent contractors rather than regular employees.
“All the clubs had varying levels of exploitation, but one thing they all have in common is they don’t classify us as employees,” she said.
She’s pushed forward with her lawsuit anyway, seeking now not just to prove her claims of sexual harassment but also of being improperly treated like a contractor. Hustler Club didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Campbell’s lawsuit isn’t an isolated incident of one exotic dancer deciding to take action against her boss. Dancers across the country are fighting back against abusive working conditions. The last several years have seen a proliferation of class action lawsuits similar to hers, all claiming that clubs are illegally misclassifying their dancers as independent contractors and therefore ducking a range of labor laws. Other dancers have banded together with lawmakers to pass legislation to improve conditions. There has even been some talk of unionizing like the successful efforts at one club in the 1990s.
But it’s far from clear whether any of this will transform the industry or merely make a few small dents while the overall behavior continues.
The Rules
Campbell can rattle off a long list of the experiences she’s had in various clubs that she believes proves she’s a traditional employee instead of an independent contractor simply using the club’s space as a vehicle for her performances.
One of the things that frustrates her most are the pricing rules. Most clubs Campbell has worked at put caps on lap dances at just $20. Another club only allowed her to collect $10 for each song. “That really bothers me because I know I’m capable of charging more and know people would pay it,” she explained. “It’s hard to be financially stable sometimes when we’re not allowed to charge what we want to charge for services.”
Some dancers flock to the industry in part because of perceived scheduling flexibility, but they often end up just as binding as many other jobs. Most clubs require a dancer to come in a minimum number of days a week and assign them to either a day or night shift. Some also tell dancers what time to show up — even charging them a fine if they’re late — and many charge a penalty for leaving before a certain time or pay a supposed “bonus” for sticking around. “You’re getting punished for leaving early and setting your own hours,” Campbell noted.
CREDIT: Andrew Breiner/ThinkProgress
Time within the club is also structured. Dancers usually have to get on stage whenever called by the DJ and stay for a set number of songs. “It cuts into my time when I have to go onto the stage…and not be spending that time making money…with clients,” she explained. Others will play a certain song that indicates that the dancers have to drop what they’re doing and try to sell club-branded merchandise for a set period of time.
Then there’s the question of what to wear. Some clubs have strict rules about costumes. Campbell worked in one that went so far as to mandate that the dancers wear a one-piece, ankle-length, opaque gown without any animal print plus one necklace and one bracelet every night. They had to check in with the manager every night to prove that they were abiding by all of the dress code rules.
“Every time I talk to a lawyer, they go through 20 questions of things that make someone an employee,” she said. “Most of the questions I answer are things that make me an employee.”
Antonia Crane, who works as a dancer as well as a professor and writer, has had similar experiences. For nearly a quarter century she’s been classified as an independent contractor. “We are like a transient, ever-rotating temporary workforce, and they don’t want to take any responsibility for us,” she noted.
Who’s The Boss
Labor law stipulates that independent contractors are meant to operate relatively free from any given employer. The Department of Labor released a report recently clarifying its guidelines and emphasizing that an employee is “a worker who is economically dependent on an employer.” The independent contractor designation, on the other hand, is really meant to apply to those who have their own businesses.
“The overall question we should be asking, especially in regards to dancers, is are they really running their own independent stripping operation and just every now and then using the premises of these various clubs?” explained Sarah Leberstein, senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project (NELP).
In most cases, that’s not the way the relationship works. “They’re really beholden to the strip club for so much about the way that their work takes place.” Clubs decide which customers come in, how much they can be charged, when dancers come to the club, and when they get up on stage — even details down to what songs they dance to or what accessories they have to wear.
But by designating their workers independent contractors, employers, including clubs, make out with a pretty good deal. They don’t have to carry a workers’ compensation policy to cover their employees, nor do they have to pay into unemployment insurance funds. Dancers don’t have to be paid an hourly minimum wage or overtime for putting in more than 40 hours a week — most clubs don’t pay them at all, instead charging the dancers to come in and leaving them to rely on tips. And clubs don’t have to sweat sexual harassment or discrimination claims, because to be covered dancers would have to be classified as employees.
CREDIT: Andrew Breiner/ThinkProgress
There are some rare examples of actual independent contractors in strip clubs. Hima B., who worked as a dancer for about seven years in the 1990s and is currently making a documentary about conditions in strip clubs, recalled working at clubs that would bring in “featured” dancers for a week or so at a time, who were not bound to the club rules or to pay the club’s stage fees. “But the strippers who work every day, coming in week after week, month after month, year after year — those are employees, not independent contractors,” she argued.
There are other practices that are questionable whether or not dancers are independent contractors. Most clubs charge dancers a fee just to get in the doors, which can range anywhere from $10 in small towns to as much as hundreds of dollars at the big city clubs. Hima recalled being made to pay as much a $500 a night. “Clubs basically charge women to work,” she said. If a dancer can’t make enough to cover the night’s fee, she may end up going into debt, owing even more the following shift.
Clubs also often dip into the dancers’ tips, a violation of laws governing tipped workers. Other employees try to horn in on their tips too, from DJs to bouncers to designated “house moms” who sit in the dressing rooms. Campbell often protested paying them out but ran into the fossilized power structures within clubs. “One DJ played me Nickelback every time I went on stage because he knew I hated Nickelback,” an effort to coerce her into paying him out, she explained. “It’s like getting bullied for your lunch money.”
Certainly these experiences vary from club to club, and some may be following labor laws to a tee. In other cases, dancers say they enjoy and prefer the flexibility of being classified as an independent contractor.
As part of her research as a professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Maryland, Judith Hanna has interviewed dancers and found their opinions to be mixed. “The dancers have opposing views,” she said. “Sometimes the dancers were unaware of the implications of their positions. Some of the cases had to do with being an employee or independent contractor… [But] most of them feel empowered.”
Angelina Spencer, a spokeswoman for the strip club industry group ACE National and a former dancer herself, says many dancers want to be contractors. In an email, she described how she was also classified that way when she was in the industry and that she preferred it, although had some owners force her to clean the club after hours, pressure her to share her tips with the manager, or have to sell a certain number of drinks per shift or be forced to pay for the missed drinks out of her tips. But, she said, “I always had the option to quit and often would under this type of treatment, working in those establishments where I felt valued.”
“If given the choice, most dancers prefer the independent contractor model,” she said. She warned that she thinks dancers don’t realize that by becoming full employees, “the club can now consider your private dance ‘work product’ and it no longer belongs to you,” which could mean clubs exerting more control or firing dancers if they don’t find the work satisfactory. “A lot of ladies do not like the employee model — and many ladies do,” she said.
She does think, though, that the industry will eventually phase out the use of independent contractors. “As time progresses, I see the independent contractor model becoming an ever growing uphill battle on many levels,” she said. “It’s not a matter of ‘if’ as much as it is a matter of ‘when.’”
Fighting Back
In the meantime, conditions at strip clubs have sparked a veritable wave of litigation. The sea change began with a lawsuit against the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco in 1994, one of the first class action suits. The owners had changed the dancers’ status from employees paid the minimum wage to independent contractors who had to pay stage fees. The club eventually settled with the class of more than 500 dancers by agreeing to pay them $2.85 million and switch them back to employees.
“News about that lawsuit spread like wildfire to all the other clubs,” said Hima, who worked in San Francisco’s exotic dancing industry at the time. “Other women in other clubs found out about it and then I think they started realizing, maybe I was unfairly fired or I dealt with exploitative situations.”
One of the highest-profile cases was more recent, brought against Las Vegas’s Sapphire Gentleman’s Club in 2009. The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the club’s dancers are employees and entitled to minimum wage. “Given that Sapphire bills itself as the ‘World’s Largest Strip Club,’ and not, say, a sports bar or nightclub, we are confident that the women strip-dancing there are useful and indeed necessary to its operation,” the decision read. And it applied to clubs throughout the entire state.
Ryan Anderson, a lawyer with Bighorn Law who was involved in the Sapphire suit and is now representing dancers in lawsuits against Hustler Club, Club Paradise, Crazy Horse III, Olympic Gardens, Treasures, and Spearmint, thinks the outcome of that case has the potential for a ripple effect in Sin City. “Sapphire’s the biggest club in Las Vegas by far,” he said. “What they do sets the standard for other clubs.”
The quest for rights, he says, is the impetus for the suits. “Every single one [of the dancers] that I’ve talked to is motivated by the fact that they want to see things change,” he said. “They see how they get treated, see how their fellow dancers get treated, that’s their motivation.”



Brandi Campbell
CREDIT: Andrew Breiner/ThinkProgress
CREDIT: Andrew Breiner/ThinkProgress
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