Over the decade since Cleo (not her real name) began working as a stripper, she has performed at clubs around the country. Most have been nightmarish – rife with bullying, exploitation and violence, she says. She quickly learnt to be careful: in the first club she worked in, she turned a corridor to see the manager abusing another worker while holding them against a wall by their throat.
Technically, the adult entertainment industry is bound by the same rules as any other business. Its venues must be clean and safe, its workers are entitled to protection, and its managers must abide by labour laws. But in an industry largely run by men and with a workforce that is mostly young women on contracts, those protections are often more imagined than real.
For Cleo, that is infuriating. “The work itself I actually enjoy,” she says. “I enjoy the confidence in myself, learning how to perform and feeling more empowered. It isn’t actually that hard to make something like sex work or a strip club safe, healthy and fun.”
Yet, to do the work, she has been forced to navigate a world of abuse and exploitation.
It was partly to escape that pattern that Cleo moved to Wellington in 2022 and began working at Calendar Girls. Because it is part of the country’s most prominent chain of strip clubs, she hoped it would be an exception to the rule.
Like elsewhere, she found managers taking large percentages of tips, imposing dramatic fines for things like “rudeness” and “misuse of cellphone”, and bullying workers who complained, she says.
Then, in early 2023, the club announced it was reducing the share of money its dancers earned from each guest. Cleo and 34 co-workers complained to the club manager. The next day, 19 of them were told to clear their lockers: their services were no longer required.
The intimidation galvanised them. Together, they formed a group called “Fired Up Stilettos”, organised mass protests on the steps of Parliament, and pushed legislators to ban punitive fines and include strippers in laws prohibiting wage theft.
In the process, Cleo and her co-workers have turned Fired Up Stilettos into a sort of strippers’ union. It’s a significant moment for sex workers throughout the developed world: we were the first country to decriminalise prostitution, and sex work reforms here often ripple outwards.
But after a news-grabbing start, Fired Up Stilettos has yet to achieve any tangible results. Now, it is grappling with achieving change under a new government that seems unsympathetic. One year on, is their initial dream of making stripping safe realistic? And what will it take to get there?
‘Get up, get out’
In January 2023, Cleo was resting in the dressing room of Calendar Girls when a young woman burst in from the stage. She said a customer had hurt her: she was so distraught that Cleo couldn’t figure out what exactly he had done. Moments later, their manager stormed into the room. Cleo recalls the manager shouting, “You’ve made those customers leave! Get up, get out.”
The crying young woman gathered up her clothes and asked for her tips ‒ cash to get home. Cleo remembers the manager refusing, telling her to “get out of my sight”. Cleo grabbed her own tips and gave her the cash, then followed her out and watched her stumble away into the night.
James Samson, director of Calendar Girls, which has strip clubs in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, challenges Cleo’s account. He described the manager involved as “one of the nicest and most caring managers in the industry”, and he would “be very surprised if this story has any truth to it whatsoever”.
True tales or tall ones, frustration was building. Cleo says managers bullied her, punished her for kicking out abusive guests, and wrote into work contracts that they had the power to issue fines of hundreds of dollars for minor lateness or for perceived disrespect. Contracts made public in a 2018 court case brought by another stripper support Cleo’s claims about fines: the performers at Calendar Girls were forbidden from discussing their incomes, prohibited from working at other clubs and banned from speaking to the media.
The amount that the company’s strippers earn can vary wildly from $1000 a night to nothing at all, says Skylar, a dancer who worked with Cleo at Calendar Girls. “Other clubs I’ve found to be more steady. In [the small town where I now work] my big nights are more like $700, but a quiet night would be $150.”
Not long after the dressing-room incident, things got worse. Cleo and Skylar’s boss announced that Calendar Girls was changing its booking system: it would charge higher prices to customers, but pay each dancer a smaller cut.
“It added insult to injury,” says Skylar. “We were getting paid less to work harder.” The moment convinced Cleo to finally make a stand. “I was just so sick of vulnerable workers coming through and seeing them have no autonomy to stick up for themselves.”
Cleo, Skylar and 33 other dancers put together a letter expressing their frustration. “This was the first time there’s been a situation like this where we’re all deciding to band together,” says Cleo. “Surely, this is the one time we can change something.”
That led to the management’s edict to 19 of the signatories to clear out.
Later that day, the 19 gathered at a private home. Aged 19 to 30-plus, one was a mother in the middle of a university degree, two were a couple supporting three children, others were younger and more transient members of the industry. Together, they began to plan.
The group posted social media memes mocking strip club owners for punishing them and advertised protests at Parliament and Te Aro Park, outside Calendar Girls. At their rallies, they marched in high heels and fishnet stockings, set up pole-dancing stands to draw attention, whooping out war cries of, “No bad whores, just bad laws.”
‘Making up stories’
“Those girls make up the most incredible stories in the world,” says Samson. “They’ve just got a personal grudge.” He denies that Fired Up Stilettos’ founders were sacked because of their letter, alleges some of them had never worked at Calendar Girls and dismisses the allegations of abuse or exploitation they made. He told the Listener that under the new pay system, the dancers would have earned more than they did previously.
“We’ve been going nearly 30 years and pride ourselves on giving the girls a good place to work,” says Samson. He declined to comment further.
Fired Up Stilettos began contacting political parties, asking for a new law allowing strippers to bargain collectively while remaining independent contractors, banning fines by strip club owners and prohibiting owners from taking more than 20% of a stripper’s earnings.
The Green Party was an early supporter (then-Green MP Jan Logie tried out pole dancing during one protest). But the group’s best advocate was Ibrahim Omer, an Eritrean refugee who worked as a cleaner and union advocate before becoming a Labour MP.
Omer had already proposed a Crimes (Theft by Employer) Amendment Bill that would criminalise theft of wages by business owners. Although it didn’t include protections for contractors, after meeting Fired Up Stilettos Omer signalled openness to amending the bill. Suddenly, the organisation was on the verge of achieving a legislative shift.
Then it all fell apart. In the 2023 election, Omer lost the race for the Wellington Central electorate to the Green Party’s Tamatha Paul, sending him out of Parliament, and Labour lost the election in a landslide to the National-Act-NZ First coalition. National and Act had opposed Omer’s bill when it was first introduced and have pledged to do so again when Parliament next votes on it.
National and NZ First have a history of opposing legislation supporting sex workers: in 2003, most of their then-MPs voted against the Prostitution Reform Bill.
It’s a familiar story for Dame Catherine Healy, who helped found the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective in 1987, when sex work could still lead to criminal charges. It took Healy and her supporters 16 years to convince Parliament to decriminalise prostitution. Advocacy takes time, she notes. “You have to take the long view and not give up hope.”
Healy believes New Zealand’s prostitutes are now better off than its strippers. The former, at least, “can choose where they work”, whether that’s brothels, prostitute-owned collectives, independent contracting, or individual appointments.
“For strippers, they’re corralled into the clubs, because that’s where the clients are.” As a result, “the strippers don’t have options”, she says.
That disparity drove the collective, now called the New Zealand Sex Workers’ Collective, to offer support to Fired Up Stilettos, who have used its office as a meeting space and discussed strategy with its leaders. But, Healy notes, Fired Up Stilettos has taken a far different approach to its advocacy than she did to hers.
“We were very conservative,” says Healy. There were no protest marches. “We polished up our pearls and went to see the politicians.”
With the change of government, it seems likely neither approach will succeed.
The collective’s current leader, Cherida Fraser, says: “I think the wise thing is to spend the next two years building relationships and looking at things behind the scenes.”
March on parliament
Fired Up Stilettos members haven’t given up on changing the law. On February 1, they marched on Parliament demanding reform and submitting a petition with more than 7000 signatures. But as the prospect of legislative change seems unlikely, another path seems more and more appealing to members: unionisation on their own terms.
Technically, there are already mechanisms for strippers to seek support. WorkSafe is supposed to monitor the working conditions in strip clubs. The Fair Trading Act gives contractors the right to challenge unfair contracts with the Commerce Commission. Strippers who have been taken advantage of can take their claims to the Disputes Tribunal or Employment Court.
But these protections largely failed in recent times. In 2018, two dancers complained to the Employment Relations Authority after Samson fired them from Calendar Girls’ Christchurch branch for missing a night’s work when they went to the local police station after an attempted break-in at their flat. The authority said it couldn’t intervene because the dancers were contractors, not employees.
Skylar recalls submitting a complaint, while working at a different Wellington strip club to Calendar Girls, to WorkSafe about uneven floors, a particular hazard for dancers in high heels, as well as broken toilets that overflowed with waste. WorkSafe told her she needed to take it up with the business’s management. “I cried when I got that reply,” she says.
These dancers were unusual in raising an issue: complaining takes time and causes friction with management, so dancers often just put up with it. And when things really go wrong, stigma can block justice.
In 2019, a lawyer representing Kyren Marx, a man accused of sexually assaulting a stripper, argued, “There’s a degree of consent to touching in that environment.” The stripper later told stuff.co.nz she was urged to allow Marx to plead guilty to a lesser charge because a jury would dismiss her case.
By bringing strippers together and raising issues on their behalf, Fired Up Stilettos hopes to break down these barriers. It has already had some success. Through donations, it has built a fund with which it can provide small amounts of financial support to dancers. It is building relationships with lawyers willing to fight on behalf of the dancers. Last year, one lawyer helped a dancer take her Auckland club to the Disputes Tribunal and force it to hand over bond money it had refused to return.
The group, now numbering 18 active members, hopes more dancers will be able to take similar action. In the meantime, it routinely reports cases of abuse and mistreatment to the media and to law enforcement, providing some consequences for strip club owners where previously there were none.
It’s not a transformation of the industry. But for dancers like Cleo, who has moved into a different industry, it’s a start. “With all those experiences I had in stripping, where you saw the repeated pattern of abuse and wage theft and bullying, I just felt so hopeless,” she says. “This movement makes me feel like I can do something.”
