This day in the history of the labor movement: August 30, 1996

On August 30, 1996, workers at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco became the first sex workers in U.S. history to form a federally recognized union, joining Service Employees International Union Local 790.

First of all, sex work is work like any other job. This is where we need to start this conversation. The feminist critique of sex work as nothing more than complete exploitation by women without an agency is completely and utterly outdated. Also outdated is the counterargument that often comes from clients of sex workers and sometimes the workers themselves that in fact most sex work is liberating. The truth is that it depends entirely on the individual. Some sex workers go into sex work because they were in foster care as a child, were sexually abused, became addicted to drugs and do this as part of a desperate life. Other sex workers had perfectly normal, healthy childhoods and just really love sex work and find it liberating and freeing. If we can’t have a nuanced conversation about this form of work, then we can’t create policy around it or even understand what’s going on here.

The truth about most sex workers though is that it is a shit job. That doesn’t mean it’s worse than other shit jobs. Again, it depends on the individual and the choices they have to enter this industry. But it is an industry. As I discussed in the previous post on sex work in this series, where I discussed the early twentieth century, the choices for many women were sex work or factory work and there wasn’t much reason to think that factory work was safer than sex work and it certainly wasn’t more lucrative. It was a perfectly 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. Until moralists decided to make sex work completely illegal, closing down the red light districts and forcing women onto the streets, where they could easily be murdered.

Shockingly for the moral critics, sex work has not disappeared. And it never will. The moral critics still want it to disappear, but it never will. The fact that many women now watch pornography only complicates this. More rational 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 your own body means a lot if you need reproductive care or want birth control, but means much less to sex workers who want to enter that field. Some sex workers have responded to this hypocrisy by asserting their power in the workplace.

The Lusty Lady was a peep show club with locations in Seattle and San Francisco. When future feminist scholar Siobhan Brooks was a 22-year-old college student, friends told her about the money they could make dancing at The Lusty Lady. A big part of the problem at The Lusty Lady was racism. Simply put, black women weren’t hired very often, and when they were, they weren’t treated as well as white women. Additionally, the club had recently installed one-way glass, which meant that patrons could film the employees without their permission. Being black, Brooks immediately noticed how racist the place was. She later reported that most of the management was actually pretty nice, and the male support staff was pretty helpful.

Many customers, however, did not want colored dancers, or so management thought, so they were rarely scheduled for the well-paid peep shows. Brooks spoke to white men in the club who said they were interested, especially younger men. The white dancers were not exactly sympathetic either. Like many white liberal politicians, they understood the problem and said they supported the women. But then the white dancers petitioned to let the dancers keep more of the money they earned, which without addressing the racism would only lead to a greater racial income gap in the club, and even when they heard about this, the white dancers just decided they wanted more money.

What did bring the dancers together, regardless of race, was the covert filming. That really got the ball rolling. Brooks found this somewhat frustrating, because even here the white dancers were not willing to do much about the racial inequality. But the workers joined SEIU Local 790 and won an election for that union to represent them on August 30, 1996.

The victory led to a number of tangible changes. Employees were given four paid sick days per year, contractual provisions against sexual harassment and racial discrimination, pay raises, a grievance procedure, and the ability to switch shifts. The male employees, who were part of the bargaining unit, were generally supportive of the union, even though most of the issues did not apply to them, since the dancers were their friends. Unfortunately, a similar effort to unionize at the club’s Seattle location failed. Much of the post-union struggle, Brooks said, had to do with the apparent discomfort of many white women with the growing number of women of color working at the club.

In 2003, the owners of the Lusty Lady decided to close the club. The workers themselves tried to run it as a cooperative, but that never worked, and it didn’t work here either. Still, despite restrictions and racial disagreements, this union did, for the first time, place sex work under the National Labor Relations Act, which was hugely significant. Subsequent attempts, however, have largely failed. One club in San Diego did unionize, but the club owners won a decertification campaign a few years later. Other clubs, particularly in the West, have successfully organized but never won their first contract, as employers have largely taken over 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 Anti-Racism: International Struggle for Justicepublished by NYU Press in 2001, to write this post.

This is the 533rd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.