Tip Your Stripper

Salon has an interview with Elle Stanger, a stripper who advocates on behalf of her fellow dancer's rights as workers.

Stanger shares:

"Currently, we exist in a loophole. It leans more towards the independent contractor side. I don’t have all the answers as to how we can reconcile or find what our true status is. I don’t think we’re there yet. Certainly, the vast majority of strippers that I’ve spoken with and club operators and owners, we pretty much only understand that we don’t want to be considered employees and there are several reasons why. First of all, there are so many venues in town. If you enact minimum wage and force these venues to pay us minimum wage, it’s going to put a lot of them out of business. Economically, I don’t want to put people out of work. The second reason is a lot of people working in entertainment or the adult environment, we do have other hobbies, education, and we have other jobs. But due to discriminatory hiring, if Susie Stripper with her PhD in literature wants to go back to school and continue being a college professor — and I’ve met women who are college professors and strip in secret — if she’s subject to a background check and it shows up as entertainer on her work background because she had to list it, since she was considered an employee, she may or may not be hired, whether or not she’s qualified, simply because of discrimination. A lot of entertainers really don’t want to have to be forced to list this work because we know that it could affect our future conventional work choices."

[Salon]