Another Big Labor Failure: America’s Only Unionized Strip Club Likely to Close?

One can only imagine the emotional travails of being a devoted liberal; of
being completely seduced by the philosophical purity of your ideals, only to so
regularly see them falsified by practical experience.

One area where this regularly plays out is with labor unions, where the dream
of worker empowerment often yields to the reality that the high costs imposed by
big labor weaken businesses and frequently undermine the jobs of the very
workers the union is supposed to be defending (see “Automobile Industry,
American”).

Most strip club dancers are “independent contractors” who earn money dancing
for tips. Often they have to pay the clubs for stage time, a system that can
make the dancers vulnerable to exploitative business practices.

When the Lusty Lady’s dancers voted to unionize in 1997, they wanted to
protect themselves from such practices. In 2003, the workers bought the business
and turned it into a cooperative, making it perhaps the most San Francisco strip
club in San Francisco. The club’s employees receive hourly salaries and those
who are part of the co-op also share in its revenue (when there is revenue.)

… Tempest, another Lusty Lady dancer, told the pro-labor newsmagazine “In
These Times,” that she has had second thoughts about unionizing, a move she
once supported. She questioned whether unionization “is conducive to strip club
profits.”