are dancers employees or independent contractors?

Legal cases on this issue are working their way through state courts.

And dancers will keep filing these because they're winning all the suits (just one example below)

ajc.com

It was a nice scam for club owners, but the writing appears to be on the wall.

Clubs that face large judgements to dancers, plus back taxes to IRS, state, etc. may not survive.

Interesting how this plays out long term. As we know, the law is a slow-moving process: Let's say a suit started in 2012 and gets resolved in 2015 and the strippers win the suit. So you have to had been a dancer during the time in question until some point in the past. Some dancers do not file taxes on their "tips" and others get government assistance for various things under the pretense that they are "poor".

So does the IRS/state govt come get girls on the backend for false claims??

The problem isn't that dancers are treated as one way or the other, the problem is that club owners want to cherry pick which way they treat them based on the situation. To be fair, the dancers often want to do the same cherry picking, if often in the opposite manner as the club owners.

Likely neither of them is going to be pleased with the way it all turns out, and us mongers are gonna be the ones paying the piper.