I got a tweet from a dancer regarding my last post. She pointed out an issue that I had forgotten about: tip outs. Dancers have to pay (tip out) the bouncers, the DJs and sometimes the bar staff depending on the club they work at every night. There is a minimum amount (usually $10 but it varies widely) but there is an expectation that the dance will pay more if she has a good night.
Required tip outs is a method the clubs use to defer the payroll costs from themselves to the dancers. They simply pay the club employee’s minimum wage and tell them to go get the money from the dancers. They’ll make the “real” money from tips. This is all to the clubs advantage. They minimize payroll costs and put the responsibility of getting paid on the employee. If a dancer doesn’t tip out enough she might find herself on her own with a jerk customer or find herself getting skipped for stage sets. Both of these directly affect her personal safety and her money.
If I compare this to the hair stylist model, it doesn’t have a direct comparison. The stylist doesn’t have to tip out the janitor or the cashier. Yet there are expenses a stylist has a dancer doesn’t. Most stylists are required to carry insurance or even a bond to work at a salon. So who should carry the insurance the salon or the stylists? Without the stylist the salon cannot make any money and in theory since they can bring multiple people to the policy they should get a better rate but its still money out of the salon’s pocket, not the stylist.
The major factor here is supply and demand. If there are more stylists than chairs the salons can make the rules. If a particular stylist doesn’t like paying her own insurance the salon can simply lease her chair to somebody else who is willing to carry insurance. At what point do you need to intervene with legislation? Do salons have such a grip on the industry that they can extort the insurance cost out of the stylist? I really don’t know. One thing that prevents any real change to the dancer industry is the seemly inexhaustible supply of girls who will dance.
This is not like a company store at a coal mine where it was they only employer in town. In those days you worked at the mine or you starved. If the cost is too high to be a dancer is it time to get another job? It’s a hard question, is the current tip out business model completely unfair? From a dancers point of view who is watching 30% or more of her nightly income disappear in tips its probably yes. For somebody flipping burgers at McDonalds who’s take after eight hours is still less than a dancer who works six hours it's probably no.
In my opinion instituting a minimum wage for dancers would alter the industry completely and probably not for the better. The cost to a club to pay dancers minimum wage would force a lot of clubs out of business. I was able to figure out the number of employee man hours a club would have to pay in wages. I went to the Sassy’s web site since they both post the number of dancers working a shift for a week and the length of each shift. Dancers work 502 hours a week. At the Oregon minimum wage a club would have to pay an additional $4216.80 every week. There is 52 weeks in a year so that would be a additional cost of $219,273.60 year in payroll expense. I don’t think clubs operate at that level of profit that they could absorb that much expense. If a minimum wage was implemented the major result would be a bunch of unemployed dancers. To control expenses clubs would vastly restrict the number of dancers per shift. They simply couldn’t afford to pay shifts with large number of dancers. They would become much more militant about attendance since the pool of dancers (who would basically have to be employees) would be reduced.
Using the Sassy’s schedule as a typical model there are 12 dancers working daily on weekdays and 15 dancers working on weekends. Assuming the minimum tip out of $20 per dancer that’s $1800 a week in tip outs the DJ and Bouncers get. That’s $93,000 additional payroll cost yearly for a club if they were to wave the tip out fees and pay the DJ and bouncers an equivalent amount.
The biggest difference is that the tip out cost is distributed over many dancers over a single entity (the club). Should the club have to shoulder 100% of all the operating costs if a major percentage of the revenue that walks in the front door goes to the dancers? One thing the club owner has assumed that the dancer has not is risk. If nobody comes in the owner is stuck with a bunch of liquor and furniture he can sell at a loss. While he may have a bunch of booze to drown his sorrows in he is faced with a failed business. Financially the dancer risks a nights work, if the club fails she can move on to another location. While this isn’t a trivial thing it’s not like closing down a business.
The stripping industry is built around the concept that dancers will make enough in tips to support the rest of the workers in tip out. Once the tip money falls away the compensation structure fails. From a libertarian point of view, if a girl doesn’t can't enough money dancing, she shouldn't dance. Its harsh point of view but most industries face these same questions. I used to be a design engineer, but all those jobs were getting sent off shore. About ten years ago I was faced with either becoming unemployed or switching careers. At age 40 I went into sales and marketing. That was a seriously scary point in my life.
I think what needs to be prevented is dancers getting gouged because they don’t know any better. I think a standardized pay scale for fees should be set. Another thing I think would be fair is a tip out vs number of dancers per shift adjustment. If the club allows thirty girls on a shift then the amount they tip out should be less. The club doesn’t bring in more bouncers and DJs if there are more dancers, they just collect more tip fees. This isn’t fair. If their are more girls to defer the cost of the staff, they should have to pay less. The clubs operating cost does not go up with the number of dancers. More dancers means more competition for the dollar that are available. Girls get less time on stage and have to compete with more dancers for specialty dances. I don’t know how to enforce this but this is definitely on area dancers get taken advantage of.
I think the dancers can do is to setup a system where they can compare costs, earnings, and treatment. If the top dancers start switching to clubs where they get treated better it might force a change. Dancers are simply not making as much as what they used to, the smart clubs will acknowlege this and work with the dancer to help them out. After re-reading this post all I can really conclude is this is a complex problem I don't have any good answers to.
No comments:
Post a Comment