The Lusty Lady Union

In 1996 dancers at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco brought their concerns about the club’s one-way glass windows to their managers. Dancers were being filmed and photographed by amateur pornographers without their knowledge or permission, which was not only exploitative but a violation of privacy. The club had a “no cameras” policy but it was not enforced. When management didn’t respond to dancers’ requests to remove the one-way glass, workers contacted the Exotic Dancers Alliance (EDA) in San Francisco. The EDA brought the workers together with Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and convinced the union’s organizing staff to get involved.

Management removed the one-way windows, but did not address other workplace problems. Dancers complained that management played favorites based on a dancer’s attractiveness, applied unwritten disciplinary policy inconsistently, and fired or suspended workers for ambiguous and questionable reasons. Employees and Local 790 organizers held a National Labor Relations Board union election in the summer of 1996 to put a contract in place. Management ran an anti-union campaign before the vote, but the union was approved 57-15, officially becoming the Exotic Dancers Union of the SEIU.

Following several months of negotiations, a strike, and a lock-out, the EDU ratified a contract with the Lusty Lady Theater in April 1997. Workers secured job security, sick pay, automatic raises, and a prohibition on one-way windows. A second contract was ratified in April 1998. The Lusty Lady was the first and (as of 2009) only successfully unionized sex business in the United States.

When the Lusty Lady’s owners decided to sell the business in 2003, the dancers bought them out and operated the theater as a worker-owned cooperative until it closed in 2013.

Questions

  • How might buttons such as this be used in organizing? 
  • How and why might the dancers use humor as a tool for organizing?

Pink pin that says "BAD girls like GOOD Contracts! SEIU Local 790 - Lusty Lady"

“Bad Girls Like Good Contracts” Button.  Lusty Lady Theater Collection, larc.ms.0365.  Labor Archives & Research Center, San Francisco State University.