Stormy Daniels, an adult film star and director, spoke out against the gig economy legislation in a Los Angeles Times op-ed last year on behalf of Déjà Vu, a company that owns clubs and has monopolies or near-monopolies in areas in California and across the country. They were counterprotesting strippers with the Independent Entertainer Coalition, a trade group that advocates “worker’s choice of deciding her employment status.” Soldiers of Pole lobbied California Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, the lead author of the legislation, to include exotic dancers under the bill and even held a demonstration in support of it in April. Before the passage of AB 5, Vox Media had faced lawsuits for allegedly using illegal employment practices. The sports blog SB Nation, owned by Vox Media, for example, blamed the law when it laid off about 200 freelance writers and editors last month. Workers in other industries have also faced retaliation and layoffs due to AB 5. We’ve just been dancing and making so much money that we’re not even questioning what our rights are because we were happy with making so much money, it didn’t matter. Because even for me, I was a stripper for 18 years, and I wasn’t aware until a year ago what my rights actually are, or were, so it’s an education process. “And we have to educate the dancers on what their actual rights are. “So it’s become more abusive which is why it makes it look like, to the dancers, that being an employee is worse - because the clubs are implementing even more illegal practices and continuing to go unchecked,” she said. The Library didn’t respond to a request for comment. AM Davies, a board member of the group, said club owners have been “making dancers sign very illegal contracts under duress” and charging exorbitant house fees, which “in and of itself is a union busting tactic.” Davies cited a strip club in Orange County, the Library Gentleman’s Club, that tripled the amount they charge dancers to work, increasing the fee from $65 to $200 practically overnight. As employees, strippers will have the ability to bargain collectively, which they didn’t have as independent contractors.īut it’s also led to pushback from strip club owners. Soldiers of Pole, a Los Angeles-based group of dancers who are working to unionize their colleagues statewide, told The Intercept that the reclassification of dancers as employees marks a positive shift in the industry. Superior Court of Los Angeles, the landmark 2018 California Supreme Court decision that made it harder for companies to get away with circumventing basic labor protections. The gig economy law, known as AB 5, was designed to expand basic legal protections to more than a million workers who had long been considered independent contractors, including the right to health care and the right to earn a minimum wage, and perhaps most notably, the ability to join unions for the first time. AB 5 codified Dynamex Operations West, Inc. It’s even advancing the effort of at least one group of strip club employees trying to unionize dancers in the state. While much of the focus has been on its effect on drivers for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and on freelance journalists, the law is having wide-ranging ramifications in many industries. The law, which went into effect January 1, is experiencing heavy industry pushback for its broad classifications, prompting lawsuits from across the tech industry and promises from lawmakers to tweak the legislation. A sweeping and controversial new labor law in California is fighting worker misclassification, and forcing what are known as gig economy workers - independent contractors who work on a flexible basis, often for tech companies - to be recognized as employees and afforded the same rights.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |