Dancers win $4.3M class-action suit against three Manhattan strip clubs

8 comments

• steve229

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  10 years ago

  "Are the owners too dumb to understand the law?"
  
  That was a rhetorical question, right?
• grand1511

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  10 years ago

  I like this sentence in the final paragraph: An attorney for the owners of the jiggle joints did not respond to a request for comment.
• Estafador

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  10 years ago

  nobody even goes there. I have been there on a Friday night and that shit is a ghost town. What's there to bitch about, seriously?
• JohnSmith69

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  10 years ago

  If that's the standard for determining what an independent contractor is, then strippers at most clubs are employees.
• Tiredtraveler

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  10 years ago

  Owners need to have the dancers sign a contract with specific terms for both parties stating the dances will pay $$ fee to the club, agree to disclose all income to the IRS, be at the club at xyz hours ...
  
  the only reason the government is ruling against the club owners is because they want the clubs to "employ" the dancers and collect taxes. It is always about the Benjamins.
  
  What difference between the federal government and a stripper? A stripper takes your money and fucks you, the government fucks you out of the your money.
• Cheo_D

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  10 years ago

  Well, yes, JS69, that has been the dancers' argument in a lot of places around the land for years now. Management often gets the "Hey, what are the bitches gonna do about it?" attitude and gets complacent, and then this happens. And it's not exclusive to the clubs, "independent contractor" status is often used by other businesses so as to not have to comply with a whole bunch of labor laws that apply to payroll employees. So the labor regulators have been drawing the lines tighter -- and so have Social Security and the state and federal tax agencies, not insignificantly in order to crack down on off-the-books cash transactions.
• SuperDude

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  10 years ago

  The case is Melody Flynn and Martina Antoinette de Truff v. New York Dolls Gentleman's Club, et al., U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, filed September 17, 2013 and assigned case number 13-CIV-6530. The clubs settled the dancers' class action.
• Cheo_D

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  10 years ago

  ...and by having it be a *settlement* (not a judgment for the plaintiffs, which the headline misleads) the clubs avoid what must have looked like a high likelihood of having a court *actually*rule* that the dancers *were* actual employees (AND of having to pay the full $10 million suit). They can now redraw their contracts forms to avoid running into the same issues while retaining the contractor status for now.