In response to a class action suit against a neighboring strip club in Montana, said Bubbles Burbujas, the club where she works started giving dancers paychecks—but management still illegally retained a portion of dancers' tips. Dancers in this club who were earning the same per shift before the lawsuits were also now going home with less. Before the move to the paycheck system, dancers paid a $25 stage fee per shift, as well as tips to bouncers and the DJ, "but we kept the rest of our dance money," she explained. "Now you hand over $70 of the first $100 you make, and you get a minimum wage paycheck, where you get back 30 percent or 40 percent of that."

"These are problems where there is no good legal recourse for dancers," said Burbujas. "You can sue to get wages and health benefits, but look at the way wage employees are already treated in this country—it's not very good. It's not like you're going to be treated any better."

As its currently organized, stripping is service work—and not unlike most service work in the United States, it's a field dominated by women who have to fight to be treated fairly. Even in a strip club where she was getting a pay check, Mariko Passion, a former dancer and current escort and artist, said, "I was still being charged $80 every day to work there, not including my tip-out," additional fees to be paid to DJ's and other club service staff. Dancers' tips can vary widely, depending on factors as unpredictable as customer whims and volume, to banal concerns like rain and football. On a shift where you pull in eight $20 dances (that's $160 before tip-out, for your back of the cocktail napkin math), an $80 "stage fee" per shift means you just gave half your earnings to your bosses. You might feel differently if you get twenty dances or a big tipper, but the stakes are the same every shift, and they're rigged to maximize club profits. "But restaurants can try to do exactly the same thing with your tips," says Passion, who brought her own individual suit over illegal tip sharing and won against three California clubs. "It's not just a strip club thing. It's a capitalist thing."

Lawsuits like these are one of the more powerful tools dancers have to recover stolen earnings, and they represent just one possible step towards the kind of collective organizing that could ensure dancers' rights for the long-term. If you can imagine and appreciate the obstacles workers at megachains face in fighting for fair wages, now imagine what the strip club picket line looks like. The small pool of dancers who will risk their jobs over workplace organizing is further limited by what dancers can risk outing themselves to their friends, family and others as sex workers in the process. The price of speaking out isn't just the "whore stigma" that all sex workers face; it could also mean discrimination at dancers' other jobs or future jobs (thanks, Google), or could provide a bogus rationale for a dancer to lose custody of her children to a former partner or the state. It could even put dancers on the vice unit's radar, depending where they work and how aggressive anti-prostitution policing is in their community.