<\/p>\n
It\u2019s six o\u2019clock of a Wednesday evening.\u00a0 I\u2019m making my way up O\u2019Farrell Street toward the Great American Music Hall, note pad and tape recorder in hand, to cover what\u2019s been billed as an “interview and photo opportunity, cocktail party\/fund raiser” for a group of dancers from the Mitchell Brothers\u2019 O\u2019Farrell Theatre calling themselves “Save Our Strippers.”\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure whether to expect news or theatre, substance or titillation, insight or babble.\u00a0 I try to drop all expectations and preconceptions and walk in as a zen novice, clear and open.<\/p>\n
“This fund-raiser,” states a press release from Benton and Associates, the Mitchell Brothers\u2019 publicists, “marks the opening thrust by these dancers to politically organize” their opposition to a class action lawsuit against the theatre, filed by Ellen Vickery and Jennifer Bryce in March.\u00a0 You may have seen coverage of that action, as it made the local papers and news.\u00a0 Vickery and Bryce are suing to have dancers at the O\u2019Farrell Theatre classified employees rather than independent contractors, and to claim up to $5 million in back pay for some 300 women who have worked at the O\u2019Farrell since dancers were taken off salary in 1988.<\/p>\n
Now, it seems, some 140 of the 170-200 dancers who currently work at the theatre have banded together with San Francisco attorney Richard Idell in an attempt to retain their independent contractor status.\u00a0 Why would a group of people put serious time, money, and energy into fighting for their right not<\/em> to be paid a salary (in addition to tips), not<\/em> to have social security benefits, not<\/em> to be eligible for disability benefits and for unemployment compensation if they lose their jobs?\u00a0 This is my chance to find out.<\/p>\n Outside the Music Hall, a picket line of some 30 people circles on the sidewalk, chanting loudly with the aid of a bullhorn.\u00a0 “Mitchell Brothers, you\u2019re no good; pay your workers like you should,” they chorus.\u00a0 After a while they switch to “Are you ready to fight?\u00a0 Damn Right!” and then to the more elaborate “Chant #5”:<\/p>\n “You strip us of our paychecks,\u00a0You strip us of our rights,\u00a0But strippers won\u2019t be beaten,\u00a0Be ready for a fight!”<\/p>\n From inside the doors of the Music Hall, several of the SOS dancers — classically gorgeous in evening dresses, heels, and perfect makeup — peer out at the protesters rather bewilderedly.<\/p>\n “Who are these people?” one asks.<\/p>\n “They\u2019re all men,” says another, not quite accurately, though most of the picketers are, in fact, male.<\/p>\n “It\u2019s all the strippers that have been fired,” someone else comments.<\/p>\n “They\u2019re just complaining because they\u2019re too ugly to strip,” another chimes in.<\/p>\n As the media reporters and camera crews (plus a smiling Scarlot Harlot) rush to film the protest, a dancer who gives her name as Rochelle complains that the demonstrators are stealing center stage.\u00a0 “Of course the most radical can get the most attention,” she frowns, “but there\u2019s something to be said inside here.”\u00a0 Inez, another SOS\u2019er, is equally displeased.\u00a0 “It\u2019s a little too crazy for something that\u2019s supposed to be peaceful,” she says.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Of Grown Women and Daddy Jim<\/b><\/p>\n Eventually the medioids enter the hall, set up their rigs, and the press conference begins.\u00a0 Against a visually pleasing semicircular array of 19 dancers, attorney Idell sets a very quiet, impeccably reasonable tone.<\/p>\n “My client group,” Idell explains, “are independent contractors, like<\/em> being independent contractors, do not view themselves as assembly line workers who should be designated as employees.\u00a0 They feel that the status they have is economically more beneficial to them because it gives them greater freedom over their own destiny.”<\/p>\n In response to positively perplexed questions from the press, the SOS spokeswomen follow Idell\u2019s introduction by explicating why they don\u2019t want salaries, don\u2019t want health care benefits for themselves and their children, don\u2019t want disability and workers\u2019 comp.<\/p>\n “If we were to become employees,” says Vienna, “a lot of us would be out of a job.\u00a0 Financially, I don\u2019t believe [the theatre is] going to be able to employ us all and have as work as much as we want.”<\/p>\n “Because of the economic advantages to being an independent contractor,” argues impressively articulate Dana Brown, “I am much better off as an independent contractor who provides her own medical benefits.\u00a0 I like it that way.\u00a0 I prefer that.\u00a0 I come out ahead.”<\/p>\n What emerges from the give and take is that these women feel that, in addition to possibly losing their jobs, they stand to lose a lot of their freedom and independence if they become salaried employees.\u00a0 At present, they claim, they work whatever hours they want, whatever shows they want, five days a week or two days a month, as diligently or lazily as they want when they\u2019re on the job.\u00a0 If they want to stay in the dressing room and talk on the phone to their boyfriends, they say, no one bothers them.<\/p>\n “If I were an employee,” says one dancer, “they\u2019d have every right to say \u2018Go downstairs [to sit with customers].\u2019\u00a0 I do not want this to happen.\u00a0 What if I want to do my homework?\u00a0 What if I have a test?”\u00a0 The other dancers burst out in triumphant applause.<\/p>\n “We request our own schedules,” says Inez, another dancer.\u00a0 “90%, 100%<\/em>, of the time we get what we want.”<\/p>\n “It\u2019s very nice,” adds Cheri, “they\u2019re not mean to us.”<\/p>\n “I\u2019ve been in Mitchell Brothers for so many years,” says Gabrielle.\u00a0 “Nobody ever told me what to do.\u00a0 I own a large clothing store in San Francisco thanks to the Mitchell Brothers.\u00a0 Thank God for Mitchell Brothers once again.\u00a0 If it wouldn\u2019t have been for Jim Mitchell, I\u2019d probably never have finished school and I would never have a business.”<\/p>\n The praise grows so effusive that I start to get a little dizzy.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard people say that Jim Mitchell is a better boss — or contractee — than the people who run other strip theaters, here and elsewhere, but I\u2019ve never gotten any sense that he should be nominated Feminist Employer of the Year.<\/p>\n “So you\u2019re saying that essentially the dancers run the business and management gives you everything you want,” I probe sarcastically.<\/p>\n “That\u2019s right,” Gabrielle answers, dead serious.\u00a0 Tasha, at her side, takes it one step further.<\/p>\n “We really like it,” she says.\u00a0 “We can\u2019t get enough of it.\u00a0 We can\u2019t get enough of our daddy, Jim Mitchell, and I hope you got that part on tape.”<\/p>\n What\u2019s an organizer to do?\u00a0 As Tasha puts it, “This is the 90s; I want freedom.”\u00a0 To hell with retirement benefits and job security.\u00a0 Who cares?\u00a0 Niffer says “it would be really humiliating for any of us to stay as dancers when we\u2019re over 30 years old” anyway.<\/p>\n Is it a restriction of dancers\u2019 freedom and adulthood to be told they can\u2019t go in and out of the theatre during their shifts? someone asks.\u00a0 “Going in and out is a safety issue,” we\u2019re told, a demonstration of management\u2019s concern for dancers\u2019 welfare in a bad neighborhood.<\/p>\n Tasha says, “We can\u2019t get enough of our daddy, Jim Mitchell.”\u00a0 Dana says, “We\u2019re grown women,” angrily rejecting allegations that dancers were pressured or coerced into supporting the SOS event.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Thoughts of a Skeptical Laborite<\/b><\/p>\n While this isn\u2019t exactly union organizing (although the Service Employees International Union is ready to represent the dancers if they are classified employees), the issues and arguments are remarkably familiar to this third generation laborite and red diaper baby.\u00a0 When workers start to get together, the first thing management does is claim they\u2019ll have to close the plant or lay off half the workforce if they have to pay union wages.\u00a0 That\u2019s what John D. Rockefeller said to the United Mine Workers in the 30s (before machine gunning them in Ludlow, Colorado); that\u2019s what the corporate growers said to C\u00e9sar Chavez when he began organizing the United Farm Workers Union in the 60s; that\u2019s what Jim Mitchell is saying to his dancers in 1994.\u00a0 And they seem to believe him.<\/p>\n But would the O\u2019Farrell Theatre employ fewer dancers on salary than it does now?\u00a0 Vienna says the theatre just couldn\u2019t afford the additional cost.\u00a0 Several dancers note that when dancers were salaried employees, they also had to work regular hours and be bound by tighter work schedules.\u00a0 But at that time (before 1988) there were only 30 or 40 dancers employed at the theatre; now there are close to 200.\u00a0 There has been a veritable explosion of women interested in working as lap dancers, and the theaters have the strong motivation to attract customers by offering a continuously changing array of as many different faces and bodies as possible.\u00a0 Cutting down the number of dancers at the theatre would seriously hurt the theatre\u2019s appeal to its customers.\u00a0 It\u2019s no accident that advertising for the O\u2019Farrell Theatre long boasted that they had more dancers than any other place in town.<\/p>\n Thirty dancers per shift at $4.25\/hour minimum wage comes to about $1650 a day in wages.\u00a0 If 500 customers a day pass through the theatre, the wage expense comes to about three bucks a head, more than covered by the recent $5 boost in the ticket price at the door.\u00a0 Of course the $10 per dancer per shift stage fee (SOS calls it a “booking fee”) that first prompted dancers to protest total management control of their work situation would be history, but the theatre claims it doesn\u2019t get any of that fee anyway.\u00a0 (Carly:\u00a0 “It\u2019s always gone directly to the agent.\u00a0 We used to pay at the theatre; now we pay at his office a block away.\u00a0 We pay for this man to set all of our schedules.”)<\/p>\n As for flexibility of schedule, leniency about dancer dressing room time, or creative control of stage performances, it remains unclear to me why any of these benefits are related to dancers being on the books as independent contractors.\u00a0 The theatre knows that the dancers want and need to be flexible about their schedules.\u00a0 They grant them this flexibility to get the best and the most dancers to work there.\u00a0 The same goes for the other working conditions (which, I have often been told by other dancers, are not nearly as idyllic as claimed by SOS).<\/p>\n It was after all, according to Jennifer Bryce, Jim Mitchell\u2019s demand that she do a “hardcore” show that prompted her to file her class action suit in the first place.\u00a0 Management judiciously describes its expectations of dancers as “guidelines,” and Richard Idell asserted to the press that dancers “are not told how to dance.\u00a0 Nobody gets up there and choreographs it for them.”\u00a0 If management has in fact told dancers they are to do a daisy chain with oral sex for the first song of a Green Door show, or dictated that the theme of a show will be “Orgy, Orgy, Orgy” as has been claimed by some dancers, these “guidelines” are more than casual suggestions to dancers on how they should perform their jobs.<\/p>\n Is SOS a grass roots response to the Vickery-Bryce suit, or is it really a management-inspired “company union” — an attempt by management to substitute a company-friendly collective for one that threatens to be more hostile?\u00a0 The dancers who had the admirable courage to out themselves as strippers before Bay Area television audiences are clearly sincere and enthusiastic in their belief that they want to remain independent contractors.\u00a0 The SOS press release states accurately that, in response to the Vickery suit, SOS has retained attorney Idell to file a countersuit.\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t make clear that the idea for this counteraction initially came from Idell (who was referred to the dancers by Mitchell Brothers attorney, Thomas Steele), rather than from the dancers.\u00a0 That SOS has been given use of the O\u2019Farrell Theatre for meetings and allowed to post notices in the dressing rooms also suggests at least close cooperation between SOS and Jim Mitchell.\u00a0 So does SOS\u2019s use of Mitchell Brothers publicist Rita Benton.<\/p>\n One dynamic that seems to be significant in motivating dancer support for SOS is the resentment many of the women expressed that Vickery and Bryce had not consulted with them before filing their suit.\u00a0 As one dancer put it, “none of those women has ever spoken to me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked there a long time, and then I pick up the newspaper and find out that they\u2019re representing me.\u00a0 If they really wanted to change things for the better, why didn\u2019t they collectively get all of the dancers together and say this is a problem, why don\u2019t we try and work together and change this?”<\/p>\n Vickery says the likelihood of her being able to organize the strippers before she filed suit was slim.\u00a0 She says she did talk with other dancers beforehand, and that the dancers she talked to were supportive of her, only to turn on their heels when she took legal action.\u00a0 She sees this change of heart as dancers simply being afraid of losing their jobs if they were to challenge the theatre openly.\u00a0 Some dancers, she says, have directly told her as much.\u00a0 Vickery, who still works at the theatre (Bryce was fired last June), also says that most dancers go out of their way to be accommodating and supportive of her when she\u2019s there.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Blind Justice<\/b><\/p>\n Whether or not most dancers want to remain independent contractors, the issue of their legal status as workers is not up for a vote.\u00a0 Legally — as Vickery points out, and as attorney Idell did his best to ignore — the question is whether the circumstances of employment at the O\u2019Farrell and other lap dancing theaters in San Francisco constitute an employer-employee relationship or a relationship between a customer and a contractor.\u00a0 That issue has to do with how much control the hiring firm has over its workers.\u00a0 Employers generally exercise substantial control over their employees, while contractors control the conditions and circumstances of their jobs.<\/p>\n This is the issue that Dawn Passar has brought before the San Francisco Labor Commission in a similar suit involving dancers at the Market Street Cinema.\u00a0 The Labor Commission has ruled that dancers at Market Street Cinema are employees, not contractors, a ruling that is being appealed in San Francisco Municipal Court by the owners of the theatre.\u00a0 When I asked Idell about the significance of the Labor Commission\u2019s ruling, he was evasive.\u00a0 “I don\u2019t know about the specific case that you\u2019re talking about,” he claimed.\u00a0 “What the Labor Commissioner has done on a set of facts that I\u2019m not aware of, I can\u2019t respond to.”<\/p>\n According to Passar\u2019s Exotic Dancer\u2019s Alliance, workers are considered employees unless an employer can demonstrate that they are instead independent contractors.\u00a0 Information from the Alliance cites 20 “common law factors” used by the Internal Revenue Service to determine workers\u2019 legal status.\u00a0 A number of these factors seem to raise serious questions about classification of dancers as contractors, including these:<\/p>\n — Contractors are not required to follow, nor are they furnished with, instructions to accomplish a job.<\/p>\n — A company\u2019s success or continuation should not depend on the services of contractors.<\/p>\n — Contractors set their own work hours.<\/p>\n — Contractors should be able to perform their services without the hiring company\u2019s facilities.<\/p>\n — Contractors can\u2019t be fired so long as they produce a result which meets the contract specifications.<\/p>\n — Contractors usually have the right to hire others to do the actual work.<\/p>\n — Contractors usually do not have a continuing relationship with the hiring company.<\/p>\n — If contractors work on the premises of the hiring company, it is not under that company\u2019s direction or supervision.<\/p>\n The legal question is both complicated and detailed.\u00a0 Idell claims there are no fewer than 22 separate governmental agencies with conflicting criteria for determining worker status as employees or contractors.\u00a0 The Dancer\u2019s Alliance acknowledges at least six such agencies.\u00a0 Even if Vickery and Bryce win in court, they face the potentially awkward prospect if imposing their legal victory on more than a few co-workers who would like their work situation to remain unchanged.<\/p>\n The issue goes beyond the O\u2019Farrell Theatre and beyond the local lap dancing scene.\u00a0 Strippers and lap dancers in other parts of the country are raising similar issues with regard to their work circumstances.\u00a0 Dancers in San Diego have begun to organize, and SF Weekly<\/em> reports that suits similar to the Vickery action have been won by dancers in Texas, Alaska, and Florida.\u00a0 As the social stigma attached to stripping and lap dancing diminishes, new groups of women are attracted to the work — attracted by its exoticism, its good pay, its rebelliousness, and its freedom.\u00a0 This new generation of strippers and dancers — many of them students, artists, and feminists — is going to change the face of the sex entertainment industry, one way or another.\u00a0 You can be sure that dancers and theatre operators across the country will be watching to see what happens in this case.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n July 22, 1994<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1994 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n It\u2019s six o\u2019clock of a Wednesday evening. 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