| No Images? Click here   The United States is not a great place to be an independent contractor. You have few protections. You don't have to get minimum wage or sick days. If you get injured at work, management can simply fire you. Yet many people in difficult, dangerous, stigmatized or low-paying jobs are treated as contractors, not employees. It's a problem for Uber drivers, janitors, and — believe it or not — strippers. HuffPost's Jenavieve Hatch explored the problem — and the potential solutions — in a story this week.What got you interested in this subject?I’m always interested in who gets left out of mainstream progressive movements, and women in the sex work industry have long been overlooked. My mom was a stripper when I was growing up, and it’s something I felt I should be ashamed of for a long time. But I finally let that go. Writing this piece was pretty personal in that respect. Sex workers are so often dehumanized in popular culture, but I see the women in the industry for who they are: mothers, friends, sisters, performers, artists, professionals, badasses. Shining a light on the labor battles that these women are fighting, as well as humanizing them, was important to me.What's the most surprising thing you learned?I think I was most surprised by how often the courts side with strippers when they sue clubs for missclassifying them as contractors rather than employees. There are so many cases, so many lawsuits against club owners, and the courts almost always side with the women. I wasn’t expecting that and I think it further shows that the industry needs to adapt to what strippers are asking for.What was the hardest part about reporting, writing or editing this piece?Tracking down strippers! Women in the industry have every reason to be skeptical of reporters and mainstream news outlets, so many of whom have left the community overlooked in coverage of feminist movements or women’s rights. I get that. Plus, there are safety concerns for strippers, and the nature of the industry — where women club hop, change time slots at random, and move around a lot — made it tricky to keep track of some of the women. I would have liked to have had follow-up conversations with lots of the people I met.What do you think the future of strippers' rights will look like?That will depend on how the New York City stripper strike ends up being organized and if all of the women being exploited — from strippers to waitresses to bartenders — can come together. Managers and club owners have a knack for turning women against one another and it’s going to be important that the women involved find issues that they can agree on and work together to demand the change they want to see. It’s true that not every woman wants “employee” status; many are happy to be contractors. But many aren’t. I think uniting over some concrete demands is essential.What should readers be taking away from this piece?Strippers deserve as much outrage and support as women in any other field of work, and as the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements continue to inspire women to speak out, strippers and sex workers deserve to be heard as much as anyone else. At the end of the day, strippers are fighting against workplace issues that should outrage any feminist — exploitation of labor, blatant racial discrimination, overt sexism, intentional employment misclassification, etc. They deserve the flood of support that women in other industries are getting, regardless of preexisting assumptions or attitudes about the profession.Love, |
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