Kiota.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. When strippers arrive at work, they don't know how much money they're taking home at the end of the shift.
Their employer might.
Decide to take a higher percentage.
Of their wages that week, or they could have been fined for something inconsequential. With no way of rebutting, they can't unionize, negotiate better contract terms, or complain to the likes of Work Safe or the Commerce Commission. Fired Up Stilettos is an organization and social movement working to improve the lives of strippers and sex workers in Altieroa. Today on the Front Page, one of the group's organizers, Margo Embargo, joins us to discuss the deception.
Discrimination and stigma these.
Workers face daily.
So, Margo, can you tell me about Fired Up Stilettos.
How did the group form?
Well, I do remember how we started. It was the end of twenty twenty to Calendar Girls. The company had decided that they were putting up the prices of the services that strippers sell as part of their job. That decision was made without the input of the dancers. When they released the new prices, it was clear to the workers that they'd also increased the percentage of how much
of our profits that they would take per booking. So it had gone from you work, you do a lap dance, you keep sixty percent of what the customer pays and the club takes forty. That's what it was initially, and then they'd redone the pricing and it was fifty to fifty was the highest amount that a dancer could make from a booking, and then some of the other ones were more like forty percent of what the customer were paying, and that's really not how contracting should work or how
stripping should work. So there was a letter written by a couple of the dancers at Calendar Girls Wellington and it was signed by thirty seven of us who also in support of renegotiating that decision. And there were some other issues around not receiving accurate records of payment that was also addressed in that letter. We gave that to the manager at the end of twenty twenty two. Nothing happened.
I think she responded and said, you know, it was a very long message basically being like, don't ask for this and then we never had any change or movement on that. So it got sent to the owner of Calendar Girls on the thirtieth of January last year, and then I think no less than twelve hours later, half of the people that signed the letter were fired in a Facebook post in the Wellington Calendar Girls group page.
And that was that really, and then the nineteen of us that were fired got together after that and we were outraged and a lot of people really upset as well, obviously like suddenly losing new job. Then we started a movement and we're still doing it. Really, that's the story.
So that forty to fifty sometimes sixty percent of your wages is that just for the privilege of being able to work there.
Yeah.
Basically, the general idea of how our industry works is that the club operates the venue. They own the business that you would work under as a stripper. If you're in that venue, but they don't own you, you're not working for the interests of their business. They own the club, and they operate the bar, and they have responsible for security, and they have a stage and you know, all the things that you need as a stripper, and so really it should be like the stripper is contracting the club.
You know, I need this, like we need to work together in order for either of our businesses to succeed. So that's where that like tracting deal comes in. But how the clubs view it is really that they have a club and everyone who works in that club is theirs basically to boss around as they please. But really what that cut should represent is the strippers money that they're paying towards the club for working there, for having security, for having a good bar, for having a nice venue
that customers want to go to. That's what that cut should be paying for. It shouldn't just be like for no reason.
So you've presented a petition to Parliament.
What are you calling for?
We are calling for the outlaw of fines and bonds, a nationwide maximum that have been you can take from a contractor's profits, and for adult entertainment workers to be legally allowed to collectively bargain.
We need to continue this conversation, hopefully right across the sex industry in this example, and with the support of quite a few unions who are backing them in this, to work out what is the legislative solution. And I really want the Minister to recognize that this is urgent and really important. It's about safety as well as fairness. People are just trying to pay their bills and they shouldn't be made unsafe and have their wages driven down because of that imbalance amount.
Yeah.
So when you say fines, what could entertainers be actually fined for? Because this is quite unique to the industry. A.
Yeah, we haven't come across any other workplaces that deal with fines. It really depends on the club you work for. They've all got different fines lists, and there are a couple that don't have them, but that's not the normal. The most egregious ones that we have on file are from the Calendar Girls twenty twenty three contract. When you find it the worst one on that list, I think the one that we tend to your attention to the most is the five hundred dollars for rudeness to management
plus four feitzure of fifty percent of your tips. And there's no criteria of what rudeness is or it looks like, or when it's reasonable versus unreasonable. But the other big problem with the finding system is that there's no recourse. You know, you can't go and be like, no, that didn't happen, or this is my side of the story.
How it happens is instead of picking up your full pay on Thursday or whatever day, you pick up your pay and will be missing a few hundred dollars and when you ask why, you'll be told that you've got to find for something. And there are plenty of testimonies of people who have been fined and then like they're just the reason is not really there at all, but there's no way to address it.
It seems wild to me that this has been going on for so long, especially the fines. I mean, I can't imagine it'd be ignored if it were a bunch of trade's or something, or contractors on a work site. Hey, if they're five minutes late, they'll fined one hundred and fifty dollars.
Yeah, you wouldn't imagine. So I don't know. I've never worked as a tradee on a work site, but I know that.
But I'm just assuming that nothing, that it'd be fixed tomorrow. I mean, why can't this change? What if the government officials said.
They've pretty much all said that they don't have capacity to take on the things that we've reported so far, and there's not really been any recommendations as to what we actually could do without any kind of legislation change.
The most positive feedback from any of these Select Committee hearings that we've had about our petition has been the Commerce Commission suggesting that if individual contractors were able to challenge a contract term as being unfair, then that would relieve pressure on the Commerce Commission and be better for individuals.
That wouldn't solve our problem at all. I mean, it would mean that individuals could challenge fair contract terms, but then we still have all the other barriers to accessing support in the first place that we would still be dealing with. So it's more like that would get us an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff where we don't have one, but it wouldn't be protecting anyone from
experiencing harm. And other than that, there's been there's actually been no suggestions, So that's I don't know what they're thinking because they haven't said like anything that sounds positive or like we would solve a problem.
Yeah, because it's interesting how the whole contracting and not being able to unionize as a contractor, that's something called cartel bargaining.
Yes, what is that used for?
It's like an anti competition thing between I guess between any business. Is what it's supposed to be used for, to stop like all the plumbers from price fixing, so that no one in one location can afford a plumber anymore.
I think like it's kind of the idea of it, but that doesn't apply to us at all, because we already have such a huge power imbalance between us as a workforce of strippers in a club versus the owner of the club, that we we need to be able to collectively bargain because there's no way to individually do anything.
I remember in October representatives from the Commerce Commission front of the Education and Workforce Committee, and this stuck out to me. They said, we were concerned we would put considerable time and effort into this matter without necessarily having a good and widespread impact across the sector. Now, to me, that translates to something like reluctance to do anything because it's a bit hard and it doesn't affect as many.
People as they lie. You're probably used to responses like this one.
Hey, is it frustrating, Yeah, it's really frustrating, But I was just reading the response from the Commerce Commission saying saying that it's just like, what more do we have to do in order to get any kind of help from people who make laws on this, you know, like or people who are supposed to enforce safe workplaces or supposed to protect people who work anywhere. You know, so many of our problems come from experiencing stigma and from being women as well in female dominated workplaces that are
often owned by men. And these are all issues that we did not create. We did not create stigma or ourselves.
Yeah.
Fired up Stilettos also speaks of the stigma surrounding the industry, which I think is really important, and it impedes workers' access to justice as well. You've written adult entertainment workers suffer prejudice and discrimination within institutions including work Safe, the Criminal Court, Commerce Commission, the Employment Relations Authority, and the Disputes Tribunal basically everyone.
Stigma has like a profound impact not just on the way society views you and you know, the kind of barriers you're going to run into if people are viewing through a stigmatized lens, but also on the way that you view yourself, Like for example, when I started stripping and I did actually tell my parents about it, and then I had I got into this mindset of having to defend the job and defend the club. So then when I was at work and I was like thinking,
we don't have enough rights. Maybe this isn't how a workplace should be, YadA, YadA. It's much harder to have those thoughts and then do anything about them because you've already backed yourself into a corner in a way.
Yeah, yeah, and I told you so treatment yeah.
Exactly, or even recognizing that you deserve rights because so many of us are told you know, what, did you expect? Get a different job if you don't like it.
Let's use work Safe as an example.
So what reasons were given by them when it declined to intervene or even assign an inspector following a complaint about uneven floor surfaces, black mold, unsanitary toilets and showers, and a lack of security.
They said it is unlikely to meet the threshold to trigger an investigation. This is because work safe has finite investigation resources which we deploy towards investigating fatal and serious harm. I think there is a real idea among the institutions that what we're experiencing isn't serious harm, and that is
quite hard to combat. Like there are a lot of people who leave the industry and just immediately get on like an ACC benefit for trauma, and that is also having impacts on the state obviously if they're being paid by ACC. So I like, it's in everyone's best interests to help us address the harm that we're experiencing.
And it's not many workplaces where you go in and have a real fear of being sexually assaulted as well.
No, And I mean, and that's the other thing is they put a lot of emphasis on that, and of course it is a risk. It's a risk anywhere, and it can be more of a resk depending on the mindset of the patrons that come in, and you don't know who that's going to be, just like you don't need any other business. But that risk should be it should be more mitigated than in real life because of the presence of security and staff who are attentive and
know what to do. Like, all of those things should be happening, and I'm not saying that they do happen, but there is opportunity for that to be actually a really safe space. But the spaces are being made unsafe predominantly by the people who run them, not by the customers.
We have laws in this country that supposedly protect against trafficking, but what about our own citizens who are working off manipulated depth and venues because there is no effective way
to challenge it. The current profit share has some workers in our industry leaving in depth mentally unwill, physically exhausted, and results in benefit dependency if this committee does not commit to an effective change now, like so many of our club managers have told us, every day and your girl turns out, and this is what they will be walking into.
In terms of So we've spoken about collective baggining and outlawing fines, Yeah, what about setting a maximum that venues can take.
This is an interesting one because I think people generally hear it as within the contractor space, as being like, how could you possibly you know? Like that doesn't interest of all parties, blah blah blah, And that's all well and good, but people need to remember that we do
not work for the interests of these businesses. We work with them, but we are our own business, our own contractors deciding how we work when we work, ideally, deciding how we work when we work, what services we're willing to offer, how we want to present ourselves, and we can make all of those adjustments with our own business interests in mind. But the venues are making at the moment,
and let's use Calendiles as an example. At Calendile's, at the moment, the venues are making fifty percent of every thing every working dancer earns in their venue. They're also making money from the bar. They're also making money from the door fee that they're able to charge because they have strippers working in their venue, and the strippers don't see any of the profits from the bar, or the profits from the door sales or any of that stuff.
The idea that the club should be taking fifty percent of a stripper's income is just absurd.
So you guys are saying twenty percent should be the absolute maximum. And that's for things like you said before, security, the bar, the venue, the promotion, et cetera.
Working in a well maintained venue.
Yes, so strippers are contractors.
People suggest to get around the whole collective bargaining thing to become employees instead of contractors, Can you explain to me why that probably isn't the best option.
Yeah, So there's a few reasons. The most important one, I suppose, or the one at the forefront, is that for our job to be safe, because it is like, it's not always sexual job, but it definitely can be like a sexually natured job. In order for that to be safe, you need to be able to withdraw your concenter anytime and change your mind. And so any idea that the club could be controlling or managing or dictating what workers are doing is really unsafe. And that's already
the problem that we're dealing with. So we kind of feel that to make us employees would be to put us in a closer relationship with the venues. We would be, in that case directly working for the interests of that business, not for ourselves, And we don't want that. We don't want to be close with them. We just want them to not be able to control us into behaving like employees when we're actually independent contractors.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And then being an employee would then mean that you have to book holidays off and etc.
And put that trust in your employer.
More So, how has the industry responded to your petition really positively.
We've had a lot of support from dancers all across the country and.
Even overseas as well.
Hey yeah, yeah, overseas as well. So it's really interesting because there's a lot of stripper based I don't know, activism, labor rights movements happening across the world, and it's hard. We don't exactly work together on our plans because we all work in different labor rights context everyone has different laws,
et cetera. But it's really amazing to interact with them and realize that all the things that you're like that you've realized everything is so harmful, and all of the systems that are upholding each other in certain ways and all it starts to feel a bit like your conspiracy theory when you first like get fired and sit down and be like damn, like this is actually really bad and really harmful, and you feel a bit crazy, especially because the clubs has been telling you you're crazy for
however long. And then you talk to people overseas and they are coming to the same conclusions about the same problems, and you're like, oh, damn, okay, cool, this is this is happening everywhere this is not We're not insane.
And so the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Andrew Bailey, has indicated he's open to a review of the Fair Trading Act. Offer told me the Minister intends to review the Fair Trading Act next year.
Do you reckon that's a positive sign?
I suppose if the Communist Commission's concern is that they don't have the capacity to take on all cases for unfair contract terms, it is only reasonable that individuals are able to do that for themselves. But it will not solve our widest strip club problem. That one change will. It will offer another avenue to us, which is cool because we don't have very many. But at the same time, the ones that we do have don't usually deliver results. So I can't say whether or not that's positive.
And what are you hoping for when the Fair Trading Act is reviewed next year? Obviously the end of fines, but also collective bargaining and of course the twenty percent maximum take right.
Yes, yes, I would hope that all the things that we have put in our possession would be delivered on because those are the things that we've assessed are necessary our industry to be safe.
Thanks for joining us, Margo.
No worries, thanks for having me.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdhrald dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.