PHoenix – About 120 exotic dancers are suing a Phoenix-area strip club for what the performers claim are unfair labor practices, in what has become a growing and lucrative area of legal practice around the country.
Days before the most recent hearing in the Christie’s Cabaret case this month, about 4,000 dancers in Florida won a $6 million settlement in an almost identical case.
Houston-based law firm Kennedy Hodges brought both cases. The company also won a similar case in Dallas, has ongoing cases in North Carolina and Texas, and its attorneys have sued the Alaska Bush Co. and Bliss Show Club in Phoenix, said Beatriz Sosa-Morris, the attorney representing the Christie’s dancers.
Other firms have filed similar cases around the country in recent months.
Christie’s dancers have banded together in a class-action labor-rights lawsuit in federal court, claiming that since 2011, clubs in Phoenix and Tempe and their corporate owners have illegally classified them as independent contractors, rather than employees. The suit, filed in May 2014, seeks to recover overtime pay and unpaid hourly minimum-wage earnings.
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Lawyers for Christie’s countered in U.S. District Court filings that the clubs have no record of some of the women ever working there. Lawyers also argued that the women mistakenly sued some wrong corporate entities and that they entered agreements to dance, knowing they were not employees.
Records filed in court show that dancers are required to sign an “Independent Contractor Agreement,” which states, “Company and contractor intend to create an independent relationship,” and were not entering a relationship as employer and employee. In essence, the dancers were paying fees to lease the stage, DJ, lighting and venue in exchange for being allowed to keep their tips.
The dancers and their attorney Sosa-Morris describe a workplace where the dancers are routinely exploited and strict rules govern almost every aspect of their work shifts.
“These clubs will just take, take, take from the dancers,” Sosa-Morris said. “These dancers are a lot of times abused by the system and just tossed into the sex industry.”
La’Shaunta Cooper, in a written statement in court, said she worked at the Tempe club for two years and that “the ultimate factors which control how much money we can make at Christie’s Cabaret are largely out of our control.”
Cooper said in addition to required tips to the DJ, “house mom,” bouncers and managers, she had to pay a set house fee as well as any fines for arriving late, leaving early or violating rules.
Those rules are set forth in a seven-page document filed in court. Examples include: “no gum,” “no negativity” and, “Don’t talk about your personal problems to a customer. They are there to forget theirs.”
Christie’s lawyers declined to comment for this story, but the club maintains in court records that it has no control over the dancers, whom it says simply lease space.
The case is still in its early stages. Rulings are expected near the end of the year with the case, if there is no settlement.