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VELVEETA: You're crossing a picket line. This is a labor action. This is a picket line.

SUMMERS: For the past six months, dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in Los Angeles have been striking almost every weekend. Outside the club, they've put on costumed runway shows with themes like medieval times and Moulin Rouge. They're trying to keep customers from going inside.

VELVEETA: So if you choose to support management in this, you are turning your back on 20-some strippers that...

SUMMERS: The strippers say they faced unsafe working conditions, including assault and harassment from customers. The club managers and the lawyer representing the club have not responded to multiple calls from NPR reporters about those allegations.

VELVEETA: Customers were touching us on stage. Security would look on and allow it. Customers were picking us up, slapping us on the ass in the lap dance area, being very aggressive and rough.

SUMMERS: Velveeta has been a stripper for five years. We are only using the stage names of dancers from Star Garden to protect their privacy. This past March, 15 of the club's 23 strippers at the time tried to deliver a petition to Star Garden's bosses. Among their demands - basic safety measures in the club, security protecting the workers and no filming inside the club by customers. But they say managers weren't there that night. And when they tried to meet with their bosses at the club the next day, the dancers said they were locked out. That sparked a push to form a union.

LILITH: I think all of us, at that point, began to fear for our own jobs.

SUMMERS: That's Lilith, another locked-out dancer. She says when she was first hired, management told her if a customer acted up, just smile. Walk away. Avoid confrontation.

LILITH: Any time a dancer stood up for herself or even went to get security, it would be considered creating drama. They believed that that would be putting the customer in an uncomfortable situation.

SUMMERS: As the dancers are trying to unionize, they are also confronting longstanding racial discrimination in the industry. And there's another dimension here, too. Most of the strippers and the organizers at the Star Garden are white, and they've faced criticism for not involving strippers of color from the beginning of their movement. Kat Hollis is a sex worker and organizer in Portland, Ore. They've been watching the strippers' efforts to form a union at Star Garden.

KAT HOLLIS: Strippers in NoHo are saying things like, oh, they didn't hire any Black strippers at this club, and that's why we don't have any Black strippers. And that's the sort of complicit nature that white folks have that they're totally ready to take over a system that was built on white supremacy without dismantling the white supremacy itself.

SUMMERS: Lilith, one of the former dancers from Star Garden, says organizers want to include dancers of color in their efforts.

LILITH: It's really important to us that we get the input of outside dancers and dancers of color for our contract negotiations and making sure that our language is something that is inclusive.

SUMMERS: But Kat Hollis says unionizing is not the answer for every stripper. And while a union might fix some problems for some dancers, it won't fix the structural problems that affect sex work.

HOLLIS: Without abolition, nothing gets solved.

SUMMERS: By abolition, Hollis means decriminalizing sex work along with demolishing the prison system, systemic issues that affect sex work at large. Siobhan Brooks agrees. She's a former dancer and now a professor at Cal State Fullerton.

SIOBHAN BROOKS: It's beyond, like, we just need a union. We just need this one thing, and it would fix everything. We need, like, a whole revolution.

SUMMERS: CONSIDER THIS - the effort to form a union at Star Garden is part of a long history of strippers trying to fix unsafe working conditions and address racial discrimination. Coming up, we'll hear from a former stripper who tackled these same issues more than a quarter century ago and helped to bring about the nation's first unionized strip club. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Friday, September 16.

It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. The locked-out dancers at Star Garden say they love their jobs and they just want to be protected while doing them.

VELVEETA: We really want to fight for better working conditions.

SUMMERS: That's Velveeta, a dancer we heard from earlier. In August, she and other dancers filed for a union election through the Actors Equity Association. Actors Equity lawyers will have to convince the National Labor Relations Board that the locked-out strippers were employees who were wrongfully fired rather than independent contractors. That's because under the National Labor Relations Act, independent contractors are not considered employees and would not have the same privileges and protections as a regular union bargaining unit. The issues Star Garden dancers say they faced are not isolated to their club.

AM Davies worked as a stripper for 18 years. Now she's the secretary for the labor organization Strippers United. She says strippers face exploitation, like having to pay stage fees when dancing or tip out management or bartenders. There's also discrimination of many kinds.

AM DAVIES: Racism, fatphobia, transphobia, ageism.

SUMMERS: Cat Hollis says there are differences in the way strippers of color are treated in comparison to white strippers.

CAT HOLLIS: I take off my heels. I still am in my skin. These other folks who are in NoHo, they're doing great work. But also, they have a privilege the second they take their heels off, and they can immediately be centered as - and protected as white women.

SUMMERS: Cat Hollis founded the Haymarket Pole Collective, which focuses on advocating for Black and Indigenous workers in the adult entertainment industry. And Hollis points to the ways in which Black-led movements by sex workers have had their perspective silenced.

HOLLIS: A lot of the white strippers in Portland did not understand our movement, told us that their clubs were not racist and told us to basically sit down and be quiet. And in reality, once we started saying, OK, what if also we were protecting you against getting assaulted in the club and getting fired for reporting an assault? Once they realized that these issues face them as well, then they're ready to stand with us - but not a moment before.

SUMMERS: A union would allow strippers to be recognized and treated as employees. But Hollis says that for folks of color, trans people or immigrants who do sex work, people have to consider how these groups might be negatively affected by unionizing.

HOLLIS: When they're classified as employees, they have to bring a birth certificate that doesn't match their gender. Undocumented immigrants have to have paperwork.

SUMMERS: Velveeta, one of the locked-out Star Garden strippers, says she hopes that a union could provide protection to certain groups.

VELVEETA: Through unionizing, you can put in protections and disincentives for firings and layoffs.

SUMMERS: Over the years, there have been other sex worker-led movements in other cities - Philadelphia, New York and, perhaps most famously, San Francisco. That's where dancers at the Lusty Lady successfully unionized in 1996 - to this day, the only U.S. strip club to do so. I asked Siobhan Brooks about the impact of the Lusty Ladies unionization, what it fixed and what it didn't.

BROOKS: It was successful largely because we were already employees. And I think that is the main takeaway when we look at strip clubs unionizing. Part of the structural problem is that often they're not eligible based on independent contractor status. So with us, we didn't have that. So we were very privileged in that we were able to unionize with SEIU Local 790. And the main issues were racism in terms of the club not hiring Black women. And then if they did hire Black women, we were segregated within the clubs and, as a result, made less money than other dancers.

And then the other issue was one of one-way windows, which is similar to what we see at Star Garden, where customers were videotaping dancers without their consent. At the Lusty Lady, you could be fired for very vague reasons. If you were late too many times, you were fired. But then that rule wasn't extended equally to everyone, so there was favoritism. And so those were the main issues that launched the unionization for us.

SUMMERS: And can you talk a bit about the reception? Were there groups of people who disagreed with dancers there unionizing?

BROOKS: Yes. And I'll be clear because I don't want to romanticize this period. The opposition came from both within the union, actually, and outside of the union. So there were people who felt we weren't real workers, that if anything, we were making the labor movement look bad. And then - so that was outside the union. And then in the union, even though we did have support, I remember in the very beginning attending union meetings, and people would make fun of us, mainly the men, and they would snicker when we would speak. And so it was very difficult to get people to see that exotic dancers were not these - were not, like, a freak show but actual workers.

And again, it was also very different culturally. I mean, now, even though it's still problematic the way most strippers show up in mainstream culture, but there's more representation of dancers. I mean, back then in the '90s, being a sex worker in general and specifically an exotic dancer felt very much like the early gay and lesbian movement where people were frightened to come out. There were severe consequences. You could lose your children. You could lose your apartment. Whereas I think that there's been a little bit more of a cultural shift now.

SUMMERS: You mentioned earlier that at the time, back in 1996, there were not a lot of Black women at the Lusty Lady. Did the unionization push changed things for the Black women who worked there, or even help bring more Black women into the club?

BROOKS: It did. We had a total of 70 dancers. Most were white. There were a couple of Asian mixed-race dancers, and then in terms of Black dancers, there were three. Two were fair-skinned and one was dark-skinned, and that was it for years. That was all they allowed. And so when the union happened, what we saw was an increase in Black women working in what was called the private pleasures booth. These are parts of the club where men pay more money to have a more intimate experience with the dancer.

You know, all of the encounters with customers were separated by glass, but you could pay, you know, like, $5 for 3 minutes, so men would put a lot of money to try to at least get, like, an hour or so with their favorite dancer. And Black dancers were told that we could not work there. And when I asked why, our show director, who was actually a Black woman, said that Black women made the club lose money, and so we were not allowed to work there, and that men would rather pay a quarter, which is what it took to operate the peep show, versus the $5 for 3 minutes that they felt white men wouldn't pay.

And so I thought that was ludicrous. I felt that there was no evidence of this. And so after the union, there were more Black women who were rotated now in the private pleasures booth. And then there were also more Black women who were hired of different skin tones and body sizes. I started wearing my dreadlocks. When I had dreadlocks on stage, that was very radical, because most Black women wore wigs. So then when Black women came after me and the other two women, they were hired with natural hair. They didn't have to have a perm. They didn't have to have a weave. That was pretty radical for that time period.

SUMMERS: As you think about this, as someone who has worked in this industry and focused on it as a researcher, is there one thing you think that clubs in this country could do to do better by their workers?

BROOKS: Workers need protection. I think that there needs to be livable wages, insurance, you know, laws that protect them from discrimination. And again, I think in the sex industry, again, even with the union, that can be fuzzy. We know unions don't necessarily get rid of racial discrimination completely, but it's at least a legal tool that dancers of color can use. I know that with the Lusty, that's something we dealt with even after we unionized, and it was an issue of how do we maintain the dancers, the Black dancers, that we were able to get from the union efforts, because the work environment wasn't always friendly to them.

I know that there are some Black dancers who are critical of the switch to independent contractor status - to employee status, because they feel like now they're going to make less money, or now they're going to be more marginalized because the clubs won't hire as many women of color if now they have to pay insurance and, you know, figure out, OK, well, who are we going to hire? So it's - you know, so in all transparency, I think this is a complicated issue. But definitely I think unionization is very promising, particularly for the club in North Hollywood.

SUMMERS: We talked earlier about what clubs can do to do better by their workers, but I want to ask the question in a different way. What can dancers who aren't able to unionize - what can they do to make situation better for themselves?

BROOKS: I think that dancers can protect themselves as much as possible, look out for each other, which we definitely know dancers do, in terms of letting each other know, like, what different customers are like, or if they need a shift covered or childcare, providing that. I think there are a lot of sort of, like, care work and resource sharing that dancers prior to unionization, particularly dancers of color, have always done, and I think that that continues. And I appreciate that question, because as much as I am for unionization, obviously, I think it's important to also look at women who can't or don't want to, and what kind of resources do they have and they share with one another in lieu of having things like a union?

SUMMERS: That was professor Siobhan Brooks. Thank you so much for being here.

BROOKS: Thank you for having me.

SUMMERS: And at the top of this episode, you heard reporting from NPR's Brianna Scott and KCRW's Robin Estrin. It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

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