Montreal F1 stripper strike part of fight to legitimize and decriminalize sex work

On a mon nighttime in oct 1967, deuce-ace topless dancers donned slacks and overcoats to pale outside their workplace in downtown Vancouver.

Pearl Johnson, 18, spokesperson for the trio, said they were “seeking an increase in their $100-a-week salary, a staff rate on meals and a heater in their dressing room,” according to a local paper’s two-sentence news brief.

Decades later, the vast majority of Canadian strippers are no longer salaried, and their list of grievances has only grown longer.

That's why Montreal sex worker Adore Goldman is organizing another strike, this time in the midst of F1 weekend — one of the busiest times of the year for the city's clubs — to demand greater labour protections and push for the decriminalization of sex work. 

She says strippers' employment status as independent contractors, which is now an industry-wide norm, has for too long shielded club owners from ensuring safe working conditions.

"Being recognized as an employee, your employers have to guarantee your safety and ... Your mental health at work," she said. "Like sexual violence that happened in the clubs in the past, if we were employees, the person could get compensated if it was a work accident because it is a work accident."

On Saturday, she and members of the advocacy group she co-founded, the Sex Work Autonomous Committee (SWAC), will be zeroing in on the "bar fee" that clubs charge dancers to work.

Bar fees can range between $15 to $100 and are sometimes raised during F1 — even though working on those days isn’t especially lucrative for dancers, according to Goldman.

“There might be more clients, but there’s no more clients per stripper. So it’s not that profitable for us, but it is for the employers,” she said, referring to club owners’ tendencies to overload the schedule on those days.

Other times, the fee is raised suddenly and permanently, according to SWAC. 

Some in the industry say the fees help offset costs like music rights, locker room maintenance and electricity, among others.

A student and filmmaker who strips in Montreal says she ends up paying around $60 in bar fees on regular shifts, and that’s not including tipping the bouncers and DJs, which is customary at some clubs. Once she tips, the filmmaker’s name gets checked off a list and is shared with the manager.

“Usually $100 [total] to work on weekends at my club and then also transportation there and back," said the filmmaker. “I have left in the negative and it’s always in the winter.”

Since the filmmaker is an independent contractor, “losing her job” essentially looks like not hearing back from a manager after sharing her availability like she does at the start of every week. Sometimes she’ll think she’s been fired, only to get a reply a week later. 

“You’re walking on eggshells as the worker because you never know when … they’re going to actually fire you,” said the filmmaker, noting that firings often appear to be arbitrary.

One time, a manager told her he wouldn’t call her back unless she worked over the holidays. She says she had to show him her plane tickets to prove she physically could not.

With no claim to unemployment insurance, when a “firing” does happen, it’s just: onto the next club.

In her experience, Goldman has found she gets treated as an employee despite the self-employed label.

She’s had employers tell her what time she can come in, what time she can leave and penalize her for being late, among other penalties. 

“On the stage, usually you have to get fully nude and if you don’t, sometimes you have to pay a penalty,” she said, adding that clubs don't compensate her for those performances.

Strippers like Goldman and the filmmaker make their money by selling dances or if patrons tip them while they’re onstage. They can’t negotiate the prices of the dances, which are fixed by the venue, and are not allowed to receive tips for those performances.

Strippers participating in Saturday’s protest have marked themselves as unavailable to their managers. After a march in the city’s downtown, they plan to split up and distribute flyers outside different venues to share their demands with patrons, passersby, and other strippers going into work.

The strike also includes erotic massage parlour workers, who Goldman says face similar challenges.

One of her and SWAC’s ultimate goals is to create a union grouping all kinds of sex workers in a bid to strengthen their fight to decriminalize sex work.

Goldman, who also works as an escort, says she’s always been painfully aware that sex workers are not awarded the same labour protections as other workers in Canada, given that parts of the industry are criminalized.

But, she says, she was surprised to feel just as exposed — where her labour rights are concerned — when she started working in a more traditional job setting as a stripper three years ago. 

“In my other jobs that I had previously, I could see that there were policies to prevent violence at work or prevent work accidents, and in strip clubs, it was absent,” she said. 

Goldman says she’s more often than not left with the unenviable task of explaining and enforcing the club’s rules while half-naked and is “completely alone” when things go wrong. 

Sure, she says the bouncers are a scream away, but “they’re not really useful.”

Goldman says she’s under the impression the bouncers are there, more than anything, to surveil the strippers, who have to dance around the club’s rules, federal sex work laws and clients’ expectations.

Notably, buying lap dances “simulating sexual intercourse” is illegal in Canada because they’re considered “sexual services,” according to Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. 

“So I have clients trying to touch me in inappropriate places … even take their penis out,” said Goldman. “Sometimes you have to get into an argument; I had a customer who bit my boob.

“I’d say every shift there’s something that happens that I don’t consent to.”

Goldman says if she were recognized as an employee, the clubs she has worked with would take the responsibility of maintaining a safe workplace more seriously because they would become liable as her employer.

The filmmaker says she never received training on how to handle unruly clients and takes on the role of trainer herself when new strippers join the scene. 

She’s perfected her spiel to clients over the years: “You can touch me here, here and not here in between my legs, not on my face, don't touch my hair and not on the neck.”

She says the people she relies on the most for protection are the other strippers.

“Sometimes telling a manager about a bad client is more trouble than it’s worth because it takes so long to actually see the repercussions, the consequence of their actions come to life.” 

It was a story of sexual assault last summer involving a stripper in Montreal that catapulted her into activism with SWAC.

“This really, really hurt the community … and we also need a protocol for this if this happens again,” she said.

While police come around often, according to the filmmaker and Goldman, both say their presence just ends up feeling more like surveillance than a layer of safety.

“How it's viewed in the criminal law in Canada is we can only be victims,” said Goldman. 

“We're not saying we don't have bad working conditions and we don't experience violence at work, but we think we are best placed to fight that violence in unionizing and not with police coming all the time to our workplaces.”

According to the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), their presence in nightlife venues is focused on public safety, crime prevention, “monitoring for signs of exploitation or trafficking, and ensuring the environment is safe for workers and the public.” They add they’ve received positive feedback from some workers.

In addition to poor working conditions, the sex industry is home to a strange co-existence of legal and illegal activities in a single transaction: anyone can sell their sexual services but purchasers are exposed to prosecution. 

All strippers are part of the sex industry but they don’t all sell what the government considers “sexual services” — or even identify as sex workers.

Concordia professor emeritus of sociology, Frances Shaver, says the stigma that surrounds sex work, however, ends up affecting all workers, regardless of what it is they actually do.

“That’s why… the process of legitimizing sex work becomes really important,” she said. 

For many workers and advocacy groups, decriminalizing sex work is top of mind. But not all agree on how to get there. 

According to Goldman and the SWAC, unionizing would legitimize sex workers who are not currently protected by labour laws and create a legal tension that could push the government toward decriminalization. And shifting part of the workforce’s status from independent contractors to employees would make the unionization process easier. 

A glance at the SWAC’s comment section on Instagram, however, reveals divides about issues of pay and flexibility, with some saying it could risk driving migrant workers in the industry even further underground.

Goldman says those are issues that can be addressed through collective bargaining once a union is formed. She points to a time when strippers were paid an hourly wage as proof that it’s possible.

According to Jennifer Worley, author of Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power, the switch from strippers as employees to contractors happened in 1988 at the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, shortly after the owners introduced lap dancing. 

“I can speculate that it’s certainly cheaper for the club if they don’t have to pay the workers,” said Shaver, the retired professor. “Back in the days when [strippers] were employees, they often had far less dancers coming in.”

Some strippers, though, prefer the status of independent contractor over an hourly wage.

It’s also important to note that not all strippers have the luxury to go on strike. And finding a new stripping job is not as straightforward as leaving, for instance, one Montreal café job for another.

It is impossible to open an erotic establishment in most boroughs in this city.

The boroughs that do allow these kinds of businesses mostly sideline them to specific zones which can be difficult for workers to get to. And there are multiple hurdles to opening a strip club, including obtaining special alcohol permits and undergoing public consultations.

“This makes it that there’s even more competition between each other [the dancers] and the clubs have like a monopoly,” said Goldman.

Goldman estimates that at least 50 strippers, massage parlour workers, and others in the sex industry will participate in Saturday’s day of action.

It’s a long way from the strike staged by Pearl Johnson and her two colleagues in 1967 — who reached a deal with their employer a couple days after their demonstration.

Strippers have already successfully unionized in two U.S. Cities and other countries have taken steps to decriminalize sex work, such as in Australia, New Zealand and Belgium.

Meanwhile, if you Google “Canadian strippers' union,” the only result you’ll get is the Canadian rock band Stripper’s Union.

Goldman says she’s hopeful that will change and that Saturday’s strike will eventually lead to the formation of a legitimate collective bargaining group.

“I’ve always been a militant at heart and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but in the end, I still believe in organizing and that when you come together, things can get better.”

Journalist

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