![]() Dancers have been suing clubs for decades for misclassifying them as independent contractors when they claimed they should be employees. The strip club industry has its problems. They say they do not want to be regulated like gig workers. Although there are similarities between dancers and gig workers, dancers also believe there are important differences that mean they deserve tailored legislation. But there is a growing consensus that strip clubs’ interpretation of the law has resulted in dancers’ pay being slashed and their jobs becoming more precarious. Dancers are divided about whether they want to become employees. Since AB 5, that trade has experienced some of the most dramatic changes in the state. Yet the unintended impact that AB 5 is having on strip clubs serves as a warning to policymakers who focus too much on misclassification in the gig economy. “AB 5 created a presumption that most workers hired by firms were employees," he says, while the Department of Labor’s new rule effectively creates a test to be used in court to understand if a worker should be considered an employee by considering a series of factors, including how much control they have over their earnings and the way they do their jobs. “The Department of Labor’s proposal does not go nearly as far as AB 5,” says Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon who studies the impact of gig work regulation on offline workers. Instead AB 5 reshaped a raft of other industries, from yoga studios to theater productions and trucking. But a controversial 2020 public vote meant the rules have not yet been applied to companies such as Uber and Lyft. The law’s supporters, such as US Senator Elizabeth Warren, described the law as an answer to exploitation in the gig economy. Under this law, more workers are entitled to benefits such as overtime and minimum wage. Teddy now refers to this period as the “era before AB 5”-a California state law officially called Assembly Bill 5, which aimed to reclassify self-employed workers as employees. ![]() ![]() She says on average she never took home less than California’s minimum wage (currently $15 per hour). But the slow nights balanced out with evenings when the club was crammed full of customers. Yes, there were slow nights when wages slumped, says Teddy, who asks to use a pseudonym because not everyone in her life knows she is a sex worker. at 12, and started school in Butler, before learning a word of English or how to use the school restroom.For six years, Teddy earned what she considers good money as a self-employed dancer working in California’s strip clubs. In his sentencing memo, defense attorney Dean Strang recounted Buzdum's personal history: the son of subsistence farmers in Croatia, he came to the the U.S. RELATED: Silk Exotic strip club cuts ties with co-owner amid sex trafficking investigation They also violently enforced rules without intervention. The pimps profited too, because they could operate with much less chance of their women escaping, or detection by law enforcement. Women under the control of so-called gorilla pimps like Childs were favored by Buzdum and Miller, prosecutors said, because they were more reliable and generated more income since at TNT their pimps could oversee them. In another, he's heard trying to negotiate with a woman at the club he who says he promised $200 for sex but was trying to pay less. He said he made 350 trips from home to the club one year, that TNT made more than $12,000 a week, and described how he advised dancers to tell if prostitution customers were undercover law enforcement. He played recordings of Buzdum talking with other businessmen and his wife describing details of operations. Attorney Richard Frohling challenged the defense portrait of Buzdum as a hands-off owner unaware of exactly what was going on at TNT. Miller pleaded guilty in August to the same prostitution conspiracy count. Timothy Miller, the former manager at TNT, was charged with Buzdum. It also charged that Buzdum skimmed lots of the cash generated by the business and failed to report it as income. ![]() The indictment charged that Buzdum implemented changes at the club to accommodate such practices, like installing "champagne rooms" with locking doors and no security cameras. Federal prosecutors say Buzdum knew what was taking place at club "The online customer reviews quoted in the (pre-sentence report) paint a picture of an 'everything goes' atmosphere where some dancers seldom even took the stage because they were busy engaging in commercial sex acts with a steady stream of regulars," according to the government's sentencing memo.
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