DETROIT, MI -- Nearly 700 exotic dancers are part of a class action lawsuit against the owner of three Detroit strip clubs last week.

The lawsuit claims dancers and other employees should have been paid at least the state minimum wage as employees of the Coliseum, the Penthouse Club and the Flight Club; but the owner and defendant, Alan Markovitz, used a slightly different business model.

He charged the girls.

Plaintiff's explain the philosophy using Markovitz's own words from his biography, "Topless Prophet," which he wrote about being a mogul in the exotic dancing industry.

Markovitz said "in the early days" he had to pay dancers, but then he saw room for a "colossal paradigm shift."

His logic was that the club offered the infrastructure without which the women could not earn their incomes that were much higher than minimum wage, so they should pay for it. He began to hire them as private contractors, rather than employees, which also exempted him from other state-mandated employee costs and insurances.

Markovitz began charging -- in his book he says $20 per dancer per shift, which in one example worked out to revenues of about $36,000 to the clubs per month -- but the filing says it was more. The exotic dancers were expected to pay other fixed-pay staff, like the bouncers, and had to rent use of the VIP rooms for $75 in order private dances.

“The dancers are bringing this action on behalf of themselves and the other members of the proposed class of night club employees who were intentionally mis-classified as independent contractors despite the fact that they were treated as employees," Megan Bonanni of Pitt McGehee Palmer Rivers & Golden law firm in Royal Oak said. "This is an illegal pay scheme designed to increase the nightclub’s profit margins at the expense of basic employee rights.”

The plaintiffs listed in the lawsuit are anonymous due to the fear of retribution, a desire for privacy and the "significant social stigma" attached to their occupations.

According to the filing, a federal judge in New York ruled that exotic dancers should be treated as employees, not contractors.

See the full lawsuit here: Coliseum Civil Complaint.pdf