Empowered Workers Are Making Unionizing ‘Cool & Sexy’

Workers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in N. Hollywood, California are unionizing with Actors’ Equity. Photo courtesy of Actors’ Equity

By Joe ManiscalcoTop Story

With no shortage of expert analysis aimed at understanding the resurgence of union organizing across the country, the dancers at the only unionized strip club in the United States probably have the best: union organizing is on the rise because it has once again become “cool” and “sexy.”

“It’s just become cool again to organize your workplace,” Reagan, a dancer and union organizer at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, California told Work-Bites. “There’s just really great energy around it — and there’s something that’s kind of sexy about it all.”

Reagan and her Star Garden co-workers began picketing outside the Lankershim Boulevard club six months ago, after owners Yevgenya and Stepan Kazaryan started locking out dancers, including Reagan, who challenged dangerous working conditions inside the popular venue — everything from exposed nails to illegal video taping.

“They are fighting for the same things that any number of employees in other industries, and certainly other workers in the entertainment industry, have been struggling with for many years,” Actors’ Equity President Kate Shindle told Work-Bites. “Things like misclassification and wage theft and physical safety in the [work] space. It’s incredibly energizing — I can only imagine folks in all parts of the labor movement are watching this and seeing similar things.”

The Teamsters, IATSE and Unite HERE Local 11 have all joined Star Garden dancers on the late night picket line. Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls walked the line and carried signs, too. Placards and buttons urging patrons to “Support Your Local Strippers Union” came from Game Workers Unite.

"Our union is proud to stand in solidarity with Star Garden workers' efforts in advocating for a more just workplace,” Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson Maria Hernandez told Work-Bites. “We believe that all workers, from hotels and food service to dancers deserve to work with dignity and respect. We will continue to stand alongside them as they fight for what is fair.”

Organizers with Strippers United — the advocacy group that helped Star Garden dancers petition the bosses in March and file safety complaints with OSHA and the National Labor Relations Board — point out that, indeed, all forms of “feminized labor” in this country are subject to the same kind of harassment and abuse that finally forced Star Garden dancers onto the picket line.

“You have a lot of issues of harassment and abuse around domestic workers and with hotel housekeepers,” Stoney, a former dancer, UCLA Labor Studies graduate and Strippers United organizer, told Work-Bites. “When you’re alone in a room with a customer there are going to be problems. We’re not unique in what our needs are, but our needs are extreme.”

Star Garden workers officially aligned with Actors’ Equity in August, and are now anticipating an upcoming NLRB election making it all official and clearing the way for crucial contract talks to begin.

Star Garden co-owner “Jenny” Kazaryan was reportedly so freaked out when OSHA inspectors initially came to the door following up on dancers’ complaints that she attempted pose as a cleaner and refused them entry. The owners have remained tightlipped since the lockout, maintaining Reagan and her axed co-workers quit instead of being fired.

“I am so invigorated by what I’m seeing and being a part of it,” Reagan says. “Especially with Amazon and Starbucks [workers] — when I think about those labor efforts and the people leading them, I think maybe it was because of the pandemic — but I feel like labor organizing has had a total makeover.”

“Not Making History…Joining History”

The Star Garden unionization drive has roots going back some thirty years when dancers at another club called the Lusty Lady in San Francisco unionized as SEIU Local 790 in the 1990s. The unionized dancers ultimately took over the Lusty Lady and successfully ran it as a worker coop all the way through 2013.

Jennifer Worley is a tenured Professor of English at City College of San Francisco and past president of the faculty union. She, along with Strippers United founder Antonia Crane, was a central figure in the Lusty Lady unionization drive. Worley wrote an excellent book about the Lusty Lady Unionization drive called "Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power."

“Strippers were really one of the first wave of workers that got made into gig workers,” she told Work-Bites. “We call it the ‘gig worker economy’ now, but that’s been happening to strippers for a really long time — for thirty years now. People aren’t treated as employees anymore. Strippers were just sort of the first wave because we were easy to exploit and we were shamed.”

Before the lockout, Reagan and her fellow Star Garden workers typically worked punishing 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shifts that were hard on dancers’ bodies. Time off was essential, but the performers often felt compelled to work more than their “set days” whenever the bosses called.

“Management would typically coerce us into working more shifts,” she says. “They might call or text and say, ‘We really need you.’ You might feel pressured because you might feel you would be punished if you say no. Oftentimes, we were working more than we wanted to because we were trying to appease the bosses.”

While management would like to classify them as “independent contractors,” Reagan says Star Garden dancers were treated like employees “in all the ways that count.”

In researching “Neon Girls,” Worley discovered despite being continuously marginalized, sex industry workers actually have a rich history of collective action and taking on the bosses. Before the Lusty Lady, for instance, another group of California performers at the Brass Pole in San Jose also successfully unionized. Strippers and other burlesque performers — including blacklisted “communist” Gypsy Rose Lee — were actually unionized as far back as the 1930s and 1940s.

“They [the bosses] find ways to get around that and make us forget,” Worley says, “but there is a long history of organizing in the sex industry. I think it’s really important to remember that.”

Like their Star Garden successors, trade unionists at the Lusty Lady immediately swung into action after management started firing workers determined to stand up for their rights.

“We did a work slow down,” Worley remembers. “But we didn’t know that you’re supposed to have a meeting and decide what to do and escalate gradually. We were just like, ‘F—k that! We’re going on the street!’ And we just went out that day — that hour — and we picketed the theater for three days until it closed down.”

That action, Worley says was “super-powerful.”

“That’s when our bosses came to the table,” she says. “We were out front, we shut them down and they couldn’t make any money. And that was because we didn’t know you [were supposed to] call your union rep, and you have a meeting. We didn’t care — we were like, ‘F—k no! You’re not firing her! If she’s out — we’re out!’”

What’s Really “Cool And Sexy”

Fishnet stockings and doo rags may be outward manifestations of this #HotLaborSummer, but the trade unionists at the Star Garden strip club know these things are merely outward expressions and that what’s really making union organizing so alluring to an increasing number of people across diverse industries — is power.

“It’s workers taking control,” Reagan says. “And after the couple of years that we have had with the pandemic and just feeling so powerless and helpless in the world — I think it is such a powerful feeling to feel like you have a voice and you have power when you stand with your fellow workers and demand change in a collective way.”

Workers, Reagan adds, are starting to realize “change can happen that way.”

“That is such a relief in this current state of the world where it feels like nothing changes and nothing can be done,” she says. “But it feels so good to be able to change something for yourself.”

The Star Garden unionization drive may have caught Yevgenya and Stepan Kazaryan flat-footed, but Worley suspected something was stirring in SoCal —it just wasn’t clear “what club was gonna take up the banner” she and her co-workers held up 25 years ago. Now, she says, unionization just might spread to a lot of clubs across Southern California.

“[Dancers] have set their sights and they’re really looking to shake up the industry as a whole,” she says.

American workers, Stoney adds, in the face of crushing isolation that benefits nobody but the bosses, “long for community.”

“So many of us just go home at the end of the day just burned out and tired and really don’t want to do anything besides eat dinner and relax for awhile before we get up and do it all again,” she says. “You’re physically and mentally very tired. One of the joys that comes with organizing is building community and doing something not just for yourself, but for your co-workers and the people who become your friends.”

Just as trailblazing trade unionists at Starbucks and Amazon are inspiring other workers across the country to stand up to the boss — Stoney believes the Star Garden unionization drive in North Hollywood has the potential to invigorate many hard-pressed workers outside the sex industry who are, nonetheless, subjected to similar abuse.

“I hope us coming forward with our stories and our working conditions and people feeling outraged about that  inspires other workers who may have experienced harm or violence in their workplaces and think to themselves, ‘If dancers can do it then I can do it, too.’”