But rising rent prices and the lure of online pornography made it difficult to keep the lights on, forcing the club to shut down in 2013. Many of the Star Garden dancers say a strip club run as a co-op is the ultimate goal - which is just what the Lusty Lady strippers did when they bought out the venue in 2003. The Star Garden dancers take direct inspiration from a unionization effort 25 years ago led by strippers at the Lusty Lady, a defunct peep show in San Francisco that unionized when the strippers joined the Service Employees International Union. They're not the first group of strippers to take the union path. to be represented by a union, according to Actors' Equity, which represents more than 51,000 workers. If the dancers are successful, the Star Garden workers will become the only strippers in the U.S. To start the unionization process, Actors' Equity lawyers will have to convince the National Labor Relations Board that the locked-out dancers were employees who were wrongfully terminated. In August, after several months of striking, the dancers filed for a union election through the Actors' Equity Association, a union that represents actors and stage managers on Broadway and at prominent theater venues. They say that's why they're willing to fight so hard for better working conditions there. But they describe Star Garden as special in that it's a Lynchian dive bar full of personality and dancer camaraderie. All the dancers said they use the term "stripper" to describe their work and often use the label interchangeably with "dancer."Īll the dancers NPR spoke to said conditions are the same if not worse at other clubs. They spoke to NPR on the condition that they be identified by only their stage names to protect their safety and privacy. NPR spoke to eight dancers for this story, all of whom said that they were contract employees and that they were unfairly terminated for raising safety and privacy concerns with management. ![]() When they attempted to meet with their bosses at the club the next day to discuss their grievances, the dancers said, they were locked out. On March 18, 15 of the club's 23 employees at the time delivered a petition to Star Garden's owners stating their demands. Those firings were the final push that drove the group of Star Garden dancers to take the first leap in an effort to unionize. After two dancers asked management to take basic measures to address their safety concerns, the dancers say, they were fired in retaliation. They allege that security fails to intervene when belligerent customers threaten and physically assault dancers, that dancers are filmed without consent and that arbitrary rules and quotas govern their job security. Since then, the dancers have taken their performances outside - picketing, putting on costumed runway shows and deterring customers from entering a space that they say failed to protect them. Reagan is among a group of former Star Garden employees who began striking outside the club six months ago. For many, it validates stripping as a legitimate form of work and performance. If their union election succeeds, the Star Garden dancers would become the first strippers ever represented by the Actors' Equity Association.
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