This Day in Labor History: August 30, 1996
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On August 30, 1996, workers at the Lusty Lady theater in San Francisco became the first sex workers in American history to form a federally recognized union when they joined Service Employees International Union Local 790.
First, sex work is work like any other job. This is where we have to start this conversation. The feminist critique of sex work as nothing but complete exploitation by women without agency is utterly and completely stale. Equally stale is the counterargument that often comes from customers of sex workers and sometimes the workers themselves that in fact, most sex work is liberating. The truth is that it completely depends on the individual. Some sex workers do enter that line of work because they went through the foster system as a child, were sexually abused, get hooked on drugs, and do this as part of a desperate life. Other sex workers had completely normal healthy childhoods and just really like sex work and do find it empowering and liberating. If we can’t have a nuanced conversation about this line of labor, then we can’t create policies around it or even understand what is happening here.
The truth about most sex work though is that it’s a crappy job. That doesn’t mean it’s a worse job than other crappy jobs. Again, it depends on the individual and what choices they have in entering this trade. But it is a trade. As I’ve discussed in the previous post in sex work in this series, discussing it in the early twentieth century, the choices for a lot of women were sex work or factory work and there wasn’t much reason to think factory work was safer than sex work and it sure as hell wasn’t more lucrative. It was a completely rational economic choice for many young women to make. Moreover, while certainly not safe in the modern context, it wasn’t really any less safe than working in, say, the Triangle factory. That is until moral scolds decided to make sex work completely illegal, closed down the red light districts, and forced women onto the streets, where they could easily get murdered.
Shockingly to the moral scolds, sex work did not go away. Nor will it ever. The moral scolds still want it to go away, but it never does. The fact that a lot of women now watch pornography complicates this all the more. A more rational set of decision making would suggest ways to make the work safer and give these workers more power to control their own bodies, but for too many feminists of a certain era, the power to control one’s own body means a lot if you need reproductive care or want birth control, but means much less for sex workers who want to engage in that field of work. Some sex workers responded to this hypocrisy by expressing power at the workplace.
The Lusty Lady was a peep show club with branches in Seattle and San Francisco. When the future feminist scholar Siobhan Brooks was a 22 year old college student, friends told her about the money should could make dancing at the Lusty Lady. A big part of the issue at the Lusty Lady was racism. Simply put, Black women did not get hired much and when they did, they didn’t get treated as well as white women. Moreover, the club had recently put in one-way glass, which meant that customers could film the workers without their consent. Being Black, Brooks noticed right away just how racist the place was. She later reported that in fact, most of the management was pretty nice and the male support staff was quite helpful.
However, a lot of customers simply didn’t want dancers of color, or at least so management thought, so they were rarely scheduled for the high-paying peep shows. Brooks talked to white men at the club who said they were interested in this and that was especially true of younger men. The white dancers weren’t particularly sympathetic either. Like a lot of white liberal politics, they did understand the issue and said they supported the women. But then the white dancers pushed a petition to allow the dancers to keep more of the money they earned, which without addressing the racism would only lead to a greater income gap by race at the club and even when told this, the white dancers just decided they wanted more money.
What did bring the dancers together regardless of race was the surreptitious videotaping. That really got the ball rolling. Brooks found this somewhat frustrating, because even here the white dancers did not want to do much about the racial disparity gap. But the workers joined SEIU Local 790 and won an election for that union to represent them on August 30, 1996.
The victory did lead to some concrete changes. Workers received four paid sick days a year, contract language about sexual harassment and racial discrimination, wage increases, a grievance procedure, and the ability to switch shifts. The male workers, who were part of the bargaining unit, generally supported the union even though most of the issues didn’t apply to them, since the dancers were their friends. Unfortunately, a similar effort to unionize failed at the Seattle branch of the club. A lot of the post-unionization issues, according to Brooks, had to do with a lot of the white women’s distinct discomfort with the growing number of women of color working at the club.
In 2003, the Lusty Lady’s owners decided to close the club. The workers themselves tried to run it as a cooperative, but that never works and it didn’t here either. Still, despite limitations and disagreements over issues of race, what this union did was place sex work under the National Labor Relations Act for the first time, which was hugely important. However, further attempts have largely failed. A club in San Diego did unionize, but then the club owners managed to win a decertification campaign a few years later. Other clubs, especially in the West, have successfully organized but never won a first contract, as employers have largely captured the NLRB process.
I borrowed from Siobhan Brooks, “Exotic Dancing and Unionizing: The Challenges of Feminist and Antiracist Organizing at the Lusty Lady Theater” in France Twine and Kathleen Blee’s Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice, published by NYU Press in 2001, to write this post.
This is the 533rd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.