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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: The phrase that, "Sex work is work," has become a mantra in many progressive circles in recent years, a reminder that workers should be treated with dignity, respect, and humanity regardless of their field. Now, a group of strippers in Los Angeles is turning to collective action.

Protest Leader: What do we want?

Protesters: A union.

Protest Leader: When do we want it?

Protesters: Now.

Protest Leader: What do we want?

Protesters: Union.

Protest Leader: When do we want it?

Protesters: Now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For the past few months, the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood has been the site of an effort to form the first union in 25 years for strippers in the United States. Working-class heroes? More like twerking-class heroes. Okay, we borrow that phrase from one of their picket signs.

Reagan: My name is Reagan. I was one of the Star Garden dancers who was fired for bringing up safety concerns. I am now one of the union organizers at Star Garden.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Reagan is this dancer's pseudonym and we're using it to protect her privacy. She alleges that she was fired in March of this year for asking management and club security to do something about a customer who developed an obsession with her and was making her feel unsafe. A second dancer at the bar alleges that she too was fired in March because she intervened when a customer was filming another dancer without her consent while she was performing topless. Both say they were told they couldn't go directly to the bouncers about customers that were making them feel unsafe without first speaking to management.

Reagan: That was not acceptable to us. The dancers who were still employed, they drafted up a petition. They delivered the petition to management. Management did not respond to the petition but said that any dancer that felt unsafe was free to leave that shift and that they could come back to work. No problem. All the dancers on that shift, it was a Friday night, March 18th of 2022. All the dancers walked out of that shift. They expected to be able to come to work the next day and talk about this petition. What they found when they arrived at work was that they were locked out. There was a new rule that you could only work if you had a one-on-one meeting with management.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, we reached out to Star Garden's management for comment about these allegations. They have not yet responded by airtime, but if they do, we will post their response on our website. Now, rather than take the one-on-one meetings, the dancers decided they would have more leverage collectively.

Reagan: All the dancers were locked out on the sidewalk on Saturday night. That was the first day that we started protesting.

Melissa Harris-Perry: They've been protesting ever since, on Thursday through Saturday evenings, the club's big money nights. This isn't your grandma's picket line. The dancers have been living it up with costumes, theme nights, dance parties, even comedy roast to keep the energy up.

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Star Garden Dancer: Welcome to The Roast of Star Garden.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: After all, these are dancers and they do honestly love performing.

Reagan: "Oh well, if you don't like it, don't work there. If you don't like it, go to another club. Work somewhere else. Get a real job." That's what people say to us. We are saying, "No, we love our job. We actually love this club. That's why we're fighting so hard for it." We are determined to make things better for ourselves and hopefully better for strippers that come after us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, they've had the support of Strippers United, a non-profit founded in 2018 to help dancers unionize their clubs. Last week, the dancers formally filed a petition to hold a union election and became affiliated with the Actors' Equity Association.

Reagan: We're demanding an end to retaliatory firing, especially when it comes to safety issues. We feel that dancer safety is our utmost concern. That is what this campaign is built on. We are demanding a reinstatement of the dancers that were fired for bringing up safety concerns. We want anti-discriminatory language in their contracts. We want anti-discriminatory protocol in how they are hiring and auditioning dancers and we want that codified in a contract.

Melissa Harris-Perry: While the Star Garden dancers still have to formally win the upcoming union election, they've seen an outpouring of support and solidarity from workers across industries.

Reagan: Chris Smalls, he's the president of the Amazon Labor Union. We met him at Labor Notes and we became friends. Then he came and visited us and stood with us on our picket line for a few nights. We've been supporting his actions and he's been supporting ours. There's a lot of cross-pollination and excitement in the labor movement that is so fun to be a part of. I feel so, so grateful. To all the unions that have stood with us on the picket line, game workers, the Teamsters, IATSE, there have been so many. It has been so uplifting to have this kind of support from this greater community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The boost that Reagan and her fellow dancers are feeling from the larger labor movement appears to be animating workers across the country. According to a Bloomberg Law analysis of the National Labor Relations Board data, there were more successful union elections in the first half of this year than in the first half of any year since 2005.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Joining me now to discuss all of this is Alex Press, staff writer for Jacobin magazine. Alex, welcome to The Takeaway.

Alex Press: Thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, talk to me about the last time that strippers formed a union. When was that?

Alex Press: That was 1996. The Exotic Dancers Union is what they called it. That was at the Lusty Lady peep show in San Francisco. They organized with the Service Employees International Union, another established union that was willing to take on these dancers. Lusty Lady closed in 2013, so we've had almost a decade where there are no formally unionized strippers in the United States.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What kind of difference did Lusty Ladies make in forming that union? Yes, it was 25 years ago, but, presumably, the union persisted for some period of time. How did it improve conditions for the dancers?

Alex Press: As the dancer earlier in the segment said, they're performers like any other, right? It's a question of safe working conditions and having a real structure in place. When a complaint comes up, you don't have to try to get one-on-one with management to get your issue resolved, but rather you have one another to raise that issue together. That happened at Lusty Lady. They had a voice for dealing with any kind of workplace issue as well as some basic things like better pay, right?

With workers who are putting the shadows in an industry like sex work, often it's harder to get basic minimum wage, things like that. You're seen as not a worker and that gives management more power. With a formalized union, you have that voice and that structure to raise wages as well as working conditions and deal with precisely the problems that the Star Garden dancers are hoping to address as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think for many folks, they may not understand what a management structure looks like in a strip club. When we talk about being, for example, a frontline worker at a McDonald's or another fast food restaurant, I think folks have some sense of what that hierarchy looks like. In a strip club, what does it mean to tell dancers that they have to meet one-on-one with management? Who are the management? What are their interests in this circumstance?

Alex Press: It's really not so different from those other jobs you mentioned. One thing is that dancers are often classified as independent contractors rather than employees. The reality on the ground is that they're doing the similar kind of work, right? A manager is who you're going to talk to when you show up for your shift that day. That's who's going to tell you what you can wear, how long you dance, how much money you need to make, the rules of the club.

When workers are told that they need to meet one-on-one with management as they were at Star Garden, it's precisely like meeting one-on-one with management at Amazon or Starbucks say. The structure of these clubs is really not so different. The real difference is that one that independent contractor status is something that's dangled in front of dancers. They're given better deals if they take that status. They'll get better pay, they'll get less fees. In fact, in every substantial way, they're doing employee work, right? Once they enter the club, it's just like any other job.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the context of independent contractors from the perspective of management, there's obviously these taxation issues. Anybody who's ever earned money on a 1099 knows the ways that you might take home more, but you still owe it back and it becomes your responsibility. I understand those ways that it's similar. What's different here is that there's also very real concern for many of these dancers about being made to feel unsafe in their workplace by their customers. Something I think we've seen, for example, in other hospitality parts of the business. I'm wondering if the independent contractor status makes dancers more vulnerable to those unsafe working conditions.

Alex Press: Yes, I think it absolutely does, right? If you're classified as an independent contractor, often you're taking on all kinds of risks at your workplace. This is true for gig company drivers as well, right? The company is offloading those risks, whatever they may be, onto the workforce itself. While Star Garden dancers can make their case that there's unsafe working conditions, the unsafe patron behavior that was described earlier is, in fact, the club's problem, the club can come back and say, "Well, you're choosing to work here as an independent contractor. You could go elsewhere. It's really all up to you."

They can offload that and sort of wipe their hands off it and say, "It's not our problem. You're not our employee. These issues are on you. You're choosing to be here." It does make you less able to really raise those concerns in a way that other workers could, right? They could go to OSHA or, in California, Cal/OSHA, the state agency that deals with workplace safety. They could say, "Hey, these are unsafe working conditions." It's harder to make that case in clubs where you're classified as an independent contractor. Notably, the Star Garden workers are saying, "We're employees."

They have, in fact, filed several complaints with Cal/OSHA detailing the unsafe working conditions in that club, not just the patron behavior but also basic things like broken glass on the dance floor, faulty equipment, and poles. Really basic workplace hazards that, I think, make it very clear that in every sense of the word, these are workers and they're employees like any other. They're having concerns just like other workers have. I think it's notable that they joined an existing union that sees them as workers with the same issues as other types of workers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In fact, as you're making this point about independent contractors, there's also this 2019 California law, AB5. I want to listen to something Reagan had to say about that.

Reagan: AB5 was a wrecking ball to how the industry was running. What we are trying to do is make a life raft out of that debris. One of the things that we're able to do is we can unionize. That puts the power back into the hands of the dancers, or not really back, it puts power in the hands of the dancers for the first time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: AB5 is what allows them to be seen as employees rather than independent contractors, is that right?

Alex: Yes, it has more strict definitions here. Instead of a club stretching the definition of an independent contractor, AB5 has a test. It says, "Does the employer of this individual determine basic things about their job, what they're wearing, basic rules, their schedules?" It also says things like, "Does the independent contractor do something that's central to the job itself, to the business's profit-making process?" Of course, dancers at a strip club, that's central to the business, right?

By AB5's definition, they're employees and it's very clear. Now, I think it's important to note that people in other states have also brought cases against clubs and they almost always win, right? Strip clubs across the country are generally making use of this kind of ambiguity in the law to misclassify their workers. AB5 makes it clear that they can't do that in California. Reagan is completely right that it also grants them a clear precedent for being able to unionize. They're taking advantage of exercising those rights. Thanks to the law.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, let's pause right here. Stay with us on The Takeaway. We're going to have more of my conversation about union organizing with journalist Alex Press.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway and you're back with Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been talking with Alex Press, a staff writer for Jacobin magazine, about an effort to form the first union in 25 years for strippers in the US. Now, I also want to think a little bit about some of the other industries where labor union organizing is going on. On Thursday, Alex, workers at Chipotle in Michigan won their union election, making them the first Chipotle to unionize. Is this a big deal?

Alex Press: This is a huge deal. Chipotle is a massive employer and one that treats its workers particularly poorly in the state of New York. It's been fined again and again for violating basic workplace safety laws and regulations. Workers going on the offensive here in that store in Michigan at Chipotle is just a massive, massive advance.

Also, they organized with the Teamsters, which, with 1.2 million members, remains one of the strongest unions with a ton of resources to help those workers fight back, right? This is no small union. This has the potential to spread elsewhere. I think what we'll expect is that Chipotle is going to work very hard not to become the next Starbucks. As you might say, it doesn't want this to spread as quickly as workers at Starbucks have spread their union effort. We'll see what happens going forward.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was struck when you said they're going to try not to be the next Starbucks. I think even as little as five years ago, everyone was trying to be the next Starbucks in terms of its footprint in its industry, its footprint in its sector. When you say not the next Starbucks, help us understand. You've said a bit here, but talk to us also about the NLRB. They did determine this week that Starbucks illegally withheld wages and benefits from many of its unionized baristas. How meaningful was that NLRB win?

Alex Press: I think it's fairly meaningful. It's an ongoing fight at Starbucks. The company itself is trying to even question the National Labor Relations Board itself and pause elections say that this process is not being carried out in a fair way. This is a stalling tactic. The NLRB's continued kind of insistence on saying, "No, the facts are clear. Starbucks is union-busting. If anyone's violating the law, it's Starbucks." It's massive.

Also, I think it's notable that that decision you referenced says that not just management has to read out workers' rights to their employees, sort of state what they can and can't do, which is an often used penalty from the NLRB. Well, they'll say, "The boss needs to tell the workers that, actually, they're allowed to exercise their rights." In that case, the NLRB said, "Howard Schultz himself has to read that statement out." The general counsel at the NLRB is saying, she thinks that it is precisely the head of Starbucks himself, Schultz, who is behind this law-breaking, the union-busting campaign. That's pretty significant. Even just symbolically, it's huge to have him read that statement.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well, speaking of big parts of the industry with big footprints and big leaders, what's going on at Amazon?

Alex Press: It's another "he" employer that everyone thought the common sense was you could never organize Amazon workers. They leave very quickly. The turnover is very high. The job is so grueling, right? People have to work immensely long shifts and they're exhausted. How are you going to get them to a union meeting? The Amazon Labor Union has proven that to be incorrect.

Now, those efforts are spreading elsewhere. The ALU has now started getting involved in other warehouse facilities. There's one in Upstate New York in Albany that just filed with the NLRB to hold a union election as well. The ALU is working with them. Chris Smalls, the president of the ALU, has been at other facilities as well. There's one in New Jersey, where a worker died recently on prime day from what Amazon says was personal medical issues. The workers there say it was very hot in the warehouse that day.

They're blaming Amazon for that death. The ALU has been there trying to help workers advance demands and maybe organize. There are also other efforts going on. The workers in Bessemer who were the first to hold an NLRB election at Amazon continue to organize. There's other independent efforts in North Carolina, in Kentucky. All across the country, we're starting to see workers say, "You know what? Everyone told us it was impossible, but we know it's not anymore. We have proof."

I think that boost to confidence is just going to keep paying dividends all down the line. I hear from workers all the time who are trying to organize their facilities at Amazon. It's moving quickly and it's very exciting. That said, there's a long way to go. Amazon, much like Starbucks, is going to fight as hard as it can to stop these workers from getting first contracts or winning union votes in the first place.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are you at all surprised? I'm just thinking about, over the past year and a half, how the narrative around labor went from every-- in the context of the initial parts of the pandemic when so many were out of work, then the move to this notion of a Great Resignation, a labor shortage that seemed to be giving workers power.

Then in recent months, really, the media discourse, the public conversation about the economy has been about the inability to afford basic consumer items, this sense of the inflationary effects. I wondered if that was going to cool this kind of labor organizing, right? Just the idea that it's harder to pay for things. You get more grateful just to have your job, but it doesn't seem like it's particularly cooling off labor union organizing.

Alex Press: The key thing is that it's hard to put that energy back in the bottle once it's been on cork, right? Especially these young workers, they have had the experience of the pandemic, which is this uniquely-collective experience, right? These workers had to take on far higher risks as a product of their workplace environment. They had to rely on one another to stay safe, to communicate about COVID.

Many of these companies, especially Amazon, failed in that respect to communicate with their employees about who had COVID, who didn't. The workers looked to one another. Many of them worked more than ever. There was a lot of mandatory overtime going on during the pandemic. This all led the workers to really get a sense of the stakes of their jobs and also that they really can only rely on one another instead of their boss to stay safe and to care about their basic quality of life.

I think it's very hard to turn that energy back. It is the case that the tight labor market made it easier for people to stay and fight at the job rather than be afraid that they could never find employment elsewhere. Again, once you start this ball rolling, it's really hard to stop it. I think we're seeing young workers, especially across these largely-unorganized industries, say, "We don't care. We started this. We're going to finish it here. We want to inspire others."

They feel the solidarity with each other even across employers, right? Chris Smalls showing up at the Star Garden picket line. There's this real sense that they are working-class people and that's a class of a specific type that had to take on this collective experience together and that they're going to stick together for as long as it takes. It's this real ethos of everybody and nobody out.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Alex Press is a staff writer for Jacobin magazine. Thanks for joining The Takeaway today.

Alex Press: Thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Of course, we also want to thank Reagan, a union organizer with the Star Garden dancers, for sharing her story with us. It's The Takeaway.

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