Industrial Workers of the World - Sex Trade Workers Industrial Union 690

Sex workers of Rhode Island, unite!

x344543 — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 00:15:09 +0000

By Andrew Stewart - RIFuture.org, November 3, 2015

It is called the oldest line of work in the world and yet it is consistently denied legitimacy. But here in Rhode Island, where prostitution was legal from 1980 until 2009, some local sex workers are re-asserting their agency by organizing a labor union.

“You see women get raped, you see women get murdered,” said Madeira Darling, an organizer, whose name has been changed in this story to protect her identity. “Criminalization itself is violence. It means women can’t seek protection either from the law or from one another. Occasionally you will get guys who think they are in love with you stalking you. And police will often blame sex workers for violence even if they aren’t in criminalized industries.”

Madeira began work as an exotic dancer at age 19 in New York before becoming a dominatrix and relocating to Rhode Island, labor she continues to perform here. She and several of her colleagues are working towards something radically inclusive: the creation of a statewide sex worker labor union.

Interested in creating a truly industrial union, the group is open to allowing all sex workers join her in the effort, reaching out to strippers, escorts, camera/phone workers, porn stars, strip club bouncers, bar workers, masseurs/masseuses, actors, directors, and crew in adult films, and any other laborer in the industry, including the internet workers. As of this point she has contacted four other workers, but hopes that publicizing this effort my grow the ranks.

Porn, Sex Positivity, and Working Class Solidarity

x344543 — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 20:09:47 +0000

By Kasparkonsequent - Red and Black Leeds, September 18, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The UK’s gradually expanding porn law restrictions have been going on for years and eventually came to a climax the end of 2014, when previously existing restrictions were applied to all pornographic material made in the UK. Though I still see the occasional protest against this, and a few campaigners are still trying to overturn it, the flurry of outrage has largely died down. My aim here is not to defend the ban, but to critique the way this has been discussed, so we might be able to distinguish in future between what some members of the public want the sex industry to be, and an expression of working class solidarity towards those of us who work in it.

It’s obvious to most people that the list of banned acts represents pure moralising, and that the people who made this list seem to have a particular idea of what normal sex is and should be (part of which, as a number of people have noted, seems to be based on the idea that sex is something that women do for men). The legislation is clearly not about what should or shouldn’t happen on a porn set, but is entirely about what should be depicted and how. This is no mistake, the changes are part of the Obscene Publications Act, designed to outlaw any material that “tends to deprave and corrupt”. The fact that some of the banned acts are also things that many workers will want to avoid at work is coincidental and not the purpose of the ban. This becomes apparent when we see that vomiting, for example from facefucking, is something that is acceptable “if it is not performed as part of the sexual act, and is not visibly enjoyed by the participants”. The important phrase is “visibly enjoyed”, as the issue is not whether or not the worker is actually enjoying having the back of their throat hit until they vomit, but whether or not they have the inclination or acting ability to portray someone who does enjoy it. And according to the OPA they should not appear to enjoy it as it might give people watching the idea that this could be fun. However if your work involves occasional uncontrolled vomiting and you look suitably unimpressed by it when it happens, then as far as this legislation is concerned that’s fine and nothing to worry about.

Whether consciously or not, a lot of the responses to this have mirrored the same attitude in the sense that they’ve not been about what the work is like for those people having sex on camera, but about what consumers think should or shouldn’t be depicted, and how it should be represented, and what porn should look like to portray sex in a certain way to society. Progressives all over the UK have complained that they want female pleasure to be depicted and so are against the ban on female ejaculation, that they want women to be shown as empowered in sex and so are against the ban on face-sitting, that they want a variety of sexual acts to be represented so we aren’t conditioned to masturbate only to the same tired misogynistic porn formula. This is fair enough. It’s not only films and high art that influence our society and how we think, but all the media we consume. Even if all the porn actors on set were to be bored out of their minds, hate each other, and feel disgusted by the thought of having to get it on for the camera, if they produce a work of fiction that depicts the healthy negotiating of consent, where the people having sex are smiling at each other while on camera, where women are portrayed as having their own sexual desires, that could have a positive affect on people watching it.

Houston IWW wins first campaign; a multi-worker fight against a remodeling contractor

x344543 — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 02:22:27 +0000

Press Release - Houston IWW, August 11, 2015

We won!!

The fight against Felipe Serna has concluded. Serna wrote a check to Hector, Pancho, and Mauricio which was promptly cashed this morning.

After our letter delivery, folks will recall that we organized a phone blast of The Growing Tree daycare and Felipe’s cell. It was very effective; his phone didn’t stop ringing and he was in tears begging for mercy. But when the calls ceased, his verbal commitment to settling turned into indignation as he failed to follow through and after a few days texted us an image of his “lawyer’s” business card, the second attorney he had threatened us with.

So we got indignant too and last night covered the surrounding neighborhood of The Growing Tree with “Wanted for Wage Theft” posters with his image prominently on the front. We made sure to leave one on the front door of the daycare. The next morning he wrote a check.

This is an important first victory for the Houston IWW and we couldn’t have done it without your support. Thanks to the folks who showed up at the ass crack of dawn for the demand delivery and thanks to the many people who participated in the phone blast.

While we can’t know if Serna will steal wages again, he will certainly consider the costs. And that is what we want every employer in Houston to do; consider that there are forces that they will have to contend with when they steal from labor-power.

We also know that to seriously challenge wage theft and to build workers power, we need an active and fighting working class, something we cannot create by sheer will. Instead, we do what we can with the resources we have until that becomes a general condition. In addition to fighting on the job, we need to fight against Adrian Garcia, the police, and ICE, we need to organize with detainees against incarceration, we need to defend our homes and neighborhoods from landlords and banks, we need to fight the grassroots Right and the fascists among them, we need to fight against racist school boards and curriculum, etc.

The IWW is committed to fighting against all of these forces. An injury to one is an injury all!!

It Took Direct Action to Make This Boss Pay Seattle’s New Minimum Wage

x344543 — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 01:07:23 +0000

By Chelsea Harris - Labor Notes, July 23, 2015

“I don’t know who you people are!” barked Joe Walker, the owner of Pandora’s Adult Cabaret, a Seattle-area strip club, to the workers gathered in his office. “Why don’t you all go flip burgers!”

But despite this confrontational language—typical of how he often spoke to employees—within hours Walker would give in to their demand for the back pay he owed them.

As a boss, Walker is abhorrent, showing no respect for or concern for the safety of his club’s servers or dancers. Employees had horror stories of working around bodily fluids and other filth with no safety procedures, frequent illness with no health benefits or sick leave, and dancers being stalked and sexually assaulted at the club.

Add to this abusive language and shady bookkeeping. Managers had told bartenders and servers not to report tips. Instead, managers were reporting employee tips as $5 a week.

On April 1 the Seattle minimum wage went up to $11 per hour (the first step in a process towards a $15 per hour minimum wage, which won’t go into effect for two to six years).

But two weeks later, Walker was still paying his servers the old minimum wage of $9.47. When Alyssa, a server at the club, asked when they could expect a wage increase, she was fired.

Lindsay, another server fed up with Walker’s hostility whenever she asked about wages, put in her two weeks’ notice—but was promptly fired too. “You’re beneath this job,” he told her.

Unfortunately for him, Lindsay is in a union: the Seattle branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”), which anyone can join, except people with the power to hire and fire. After meeting with the union’s Seattle general organizing committee, Lindsay and Alyssa began an escalation plan.

The Lusty Lady loses its innocence - Male workers are making waves at the feminist icon and trouble is brewing.

x344543 — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:41:00 +0000

Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.

It is relevant to the IWW on two counts: First of all, the IWW helped launch the original unionization drive at the Lusty Lady ten years ago. Secondly, it demonstrates some of the limitations of workers cooperatives and collectives without unions.

By Sarah Phelan - San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 27, 2006

If you've taken a women's studies course in the past decade or if you're a patron or follower of the sex industry, you've heard of San Francisco's Lusty Lady. Depicted as a bastion of feminist values and workers' rights, the 24-hour peep show floats amid the sea of macho-style strip clubs that dominate North Beach's central strip.

Sure, the Lusty features live nude girls wiggling and jiggling while male customers masturbate in small enclosed booths, but dancers are protected from unwanted splashes of semen and sexual advances thanks to the panel of glass that separates them from the customers. Equally important, at least in the eyes of feminist voyeurs and dancers, is the theater's reputation for having a broader vision of female beauty than prevailing cultural norms and for being a venue where discrimination simply isn't tolerated. These credentials date back to the ’90s, when the club's dancers traded boas for picket signs in what became a successful bid to organize the only unionized strip joint in the nation.

Back then, the drive to unionize was triggered by poor working conditions, including one-way mirrors that allowed customers, newly empowered with the affordable digital technology that emerged in the mid-’90s, to clandestinely film performers. Worried their images would end up as Internet porn or in bootleg videos or used against them in custody battles, the dancers and the male support staff joined forces and won representation with SEIU Local 790.

Less publicized is the fact that three years ago the club's former management sold the business to the Lusty's workforce. Since then, the theater has been run as an employee-owned cooperative, with an elected board of directors that signs the union's collective bargaining agreement every year. Given the harsh fiscal climate that followed the dot-com bomb and the workers' general lack of business experience prior to their involvement in the Looking Glass Collective (as the Lusty's co-op is called), it's no big surprise that the theater is currently facing some fiscal and management challenges.

But the next chapter in the Lusty Lady saga is the strangely twisted tale of how a small faction of male workers is trying to decertify the union against a backdrop of inflammatory e-mails, emotional outbursts, suspensions, and firings, along with competing allegations from dancers of sexual harassment and unfair labor practices.

It all started when one of the men began to argue that the place was losing money because the dancers were too fat.

Now some male co-op members (who work the front desk and the door and have the unpleasant job of cleaning the little rooms) say the union contract isn't valid anymore because the co-op makes no distinction between management and labor. They are also spinning events to make it appear as if the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) agrees.

DANCERS OF SIZE

The tale goes back to July, when a support staffer named Davide Cerri sent the co-op board an e-mail complaining that the peep show's revenues were falling off. Since everybody's pay at the Lusty is based on monthly revenues, any decline in cash flow would hit every worker's wallet.

Cerri claimed that the Lusty's madams were hiring "unwatchable girls" — women who were too big and not quite sexy enough — and that as a result, the club lost money.

"People comes [sic] asking for refunds, because they do not want to see girls that they would not want to have sex with even if they were completely drunk," Cerri wrote. "This is reality, not question of options. We sell fantasies, not nightmares."

Cerri's missive so outraged dancer Emma Peep that she posted a copy on a message board where all the dancers could read it.

As Peep explained to the Guardian, "Davide's e-mail was against everything we stand for, and it's against the law to hire and fire based on size discrimination."

But by making the missive public, Peep set off a firestorm.

"Everyone flipped out, people were crying in the dressing room, and the male staffer got ostracized," one Lusty board member, who asked not to be identified by name, told us. "It's great what we at the Lusty think the standards of beauty are, but the reality is that we're in the adult entertainment business."

Peep claims Cerri's missive "led to others calling for the termination of women based on their size" — and in the end, to her own July 30 termination. In a supreme twist of irony, given that she filed a grievance with the union and wanted Cerri fired for his e-mail, Peep instead found herself fired "for creating a disruptive, hostile work environment" — via an unsigned letter shoved under her door.

Documents filed with the NLRB show that shortly after Peep filed her grievance, Cerri filed one of his own: he charged SEIU Local 790 with failing to represent his grievances and with treating and representing male and female employees differently.

Last week the NLRB's regional office dismissed Cerri's charges — on the grounds that the Lusty is a completely member-owned and member-operated cooperative and that as a shareholding member with the ability to affect the formulation and determination of the Lusty's policy, Cerri is a managerial employee.

"Accordingly, the Union's duty of fair representation does not extend to you," ruled NLRB acting regional director Tim Peck in a letter.

In the meantime, the union has continued to press Peep's grievances. On Aug. 4, SEIU Local 790 staff manager Dale Butler wrote Lusty Lady board members Miles Thompson, Monique Painton, and Chelsea Eis, informing them that Peep's termination was "without just cause" and "inappropriate."

Butler told the board members that the Lusty Lady's union contract provides for mediation and that the theater could be subject to $2,000 in arbitration fees plus attorneys' fees plus Peep's back wages (a triple whammy that could bankrupt the already fiscally struggling club). When the union threatened legal action, the board finally agreed to mediation.

WHO'S THE BOSS?

Meanwhile, there's a dispute about whether the union actually has a valid contract. Union representatives say they sent a final version of this year's agreement to the board, which never returned it. Butler told the Guardian that on Sept. 25, male support staffer Tony Graf called the union to say that the board had no objections to the contract — except for an antiharassment clause that shop steward Sandy Wong had proposed.

Male support staffers Cerri and Brian Falls still maintain that the union has no business at the Lusty.

"The union has been fraudulently in the Lusty Lady's business, because we're a co-op and everyone is a manager," Falls said.

As for e-mail writer Cerri, he told the Guardian that "the union is automatically out and their contract is not valid, which is great news. We were mobilizing to deunionize by collecting signatures but now won't have to go forward with that." Falls also acknowledged being involved in a decertification drive.

"Before the formation of the co-op there was a common enemy, the management, who treated the dancers and the support staff badly. But once we became a co-op, there was no reason for the union to be there," he explained.

Falls also claims that Cerri's e-mail wasn't triggered by larger dancers per se, but because there were four to five large women on the stage at the same time.

"We were losing customers and saw decreased revenues," Falls said. "The business isn't doing that great. We're on a revenue-based pay scale, so it hits everybody's paycheck. We never said, 'Don't hire big women, fat women.' There are people who enjoy large women. But a block of the same kind of women — that was losing revenues."

Financial records obtained by the Guardian, however, show that the Lusty Lady made an average of $28,000 a week in January, $27,000 in February, $28,000 in April, $26,000 in June, and $27,000 in July. That hardly looks like a dramatic collapse of income.

The last word goes to a female dancer who refused to use her stage name for fear of retaliation.

"The union can be polarizing, but it's scary to leave because it protects our rights," she said. "The problem is that people will vote against their best interests. It's like working people voting for Bush. I think I can understand that phenomenon since working at the Lusty Lady."

America's Least Trusted - How a Clermont stripper ended up under FBI surveillance

x344543 — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:32:00 +0000

By Coley Ward - creativeloafing.com, December 28, 2005

Tabby Chase works nights as a dancer at the Clermont Lounge, so she was asleep the morning of Thurs., March 17, when she says FBI Special Agent Dante Jones called her.

Chase says she didn't know what the FBI wanted. When she awoke, it was late afternoon, and she had five messages from three numbers. She says each was from Jones, telling her the FBI needed to ask some questions.

Chase is tall and thin, with hair buzzed to about a quarter-inch, except for long blond bangs that routinely fall in her face. She describes herself as a flaky anarchist, somebody who has an inherent distrust of government and big business but who is "terrible at outreach" and "not involved in any organizing."