Meet the strippers working to unionize a Los Angeles dive bar
Outside a dive bar advertising topless dancers on a recent Friday night in North Hollywood, a dancer who goes by her stage name, Reagan, sees her cue.
Before a car full of patrons can enter the parking lot of Star Garden, she cozies up to the driver's side window. She tells the group of four men why the bar — her former workplace — doesn't deserve their business.
"We do want to dance. We love it in there," Reagan tells the friends. But, turning on the flirt, she encourages them to instead dance with her co-workers on the sidewalk. "We're fighting for safer working conditions."
Reagan is among a group of former Star Garden employees who began striking outside the club six months ago. Since then, the dancers have taken their performances outside — picketing, putting on costumed runway shows and deterring customers from entering a space that they say failed to protect them.
They allege that security fails to intervene when belligerent customers threaten and physically assault dancers, that dancers are filmed without consent and that arbitrary rules and quotas govern their job security. After two dancers asked management to take basic measures to address their safety concerns, the dancers say, they were fired in retaliation. Those firings were the final push that drove the group of Star Garden dancers to take the first leap in an effort to unionize.
On March to Star Garden's owners stating their demands. When they attempted to meet with their bosses at the club the next day to discuss their grievances, the dancers said, they were locked out.
