NYC Stripper Strike
NYC Stripper Strike
The NYC Stripper Strike (sometimes stylized as #NYCStripperStrike) is a labor action involving several strippers and exotic dancers in New York City.
History
Hiring Female Bartenders
Bottle girls swiping money off the stage
Around 2012, strip club owners began hiring attractive women with sizable social media followings to serve as bartenders. These women, known as startenders or bottle girls, have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.
Clubs will also have the startenders dress in matching outfits, which usually reveal a lot of skin.
The clubs would then take photos of the bottle girls together and promote their appearances on social media in an effort to gain more traction, as well.
As the trend became more prominent across New York City, the dancers have increasingly said that the bottle girls are fulfilling the same role as strippers at their expense.
In addition, the strippers pay a house fee to get into the club, while bartenders do not.
The NYC Stripper Strike
Gizelle Marie is the de-facto organizer/leader of the NYC Stripper Strike
A bottle girl recorded swiping a stripper's money off the stage
Panama Pink is one of the participants of the NYC Stripper Strike
In October 2017, New York native and exotic dancer Gizelle Marie traveled to Washington, D.C. to dance at a club during Howard University's homecoming. After making a lot of money, she thought about how a lot of great dancers were no longer dancing at the clubs in New York; they either moved away to other cities or just completely stopped.
In retrospect, Gizelle realized that several startenders in the New York City clubs deliberately do things that financially impact the strippers.
These actions are allegedly in an attempt to make customers give them preferential treatment and hurt strippers' profits.
According to Giselle, the bottle girls tell customers not to tip the strippers, block them from the customers' view while on stage, and sweeping the money they earned off the stage while dancing.
Eventually, she mobilized the NYC Strippers Strike on social media. The idea was circulated to raise awareness about the difficulties women face by trying to make a living as strippers in the Queens and Bronx areas.
It was also created to expose and fight against the practices made by both bartenders and club promoters who have recently changed the way that the money circulates the clubs and the working areas.
Several videos taken from inside different clubs have been posted on Instagram as evidence to support their claims.
Panama Pink, another notable dancer who is part of the NYC Stripper Strike, said the following:
I’ve seen a lot of my customers, my friends, or just people in general, even the promoters, the managers, everybody—I’ve heard everybody complain. The girls are on Snapchat and on their phones all day, they barely listen to the customers. [...] They’re not experienced mixologists; a [low] percentage of them know how to actually make drinks or are licensed, period. They just know how to pour shots from bottles, and they’re pretty much strippers, but don’t wanna be called strippers.
This is also in spite of the idea that dancers receive more negative social stigmas than the bartenders.
Racism
In addition to the motives behind organizing the NYC Stripper Strike, some claim that the rise of startenders have also added a racial element to the dispute.
After a meeting where 30 strippers gathered in the Bronx to discuss the strike, one person brought up the idea that dark-skinned dancers are "at the bottom of the barrel," while the bottle girls are more likely to be light-skinned (particularly Latina or White).
Sean Simmons, promotional director for Aces New York, labeled the strippers' claims as “nonsense.”
He said there is no racism at his and that he employed “all ethnicities” for both dancer and bartender positions before it was shut down.