MikeDunnAuthor<p>Today in Labor History April 10, 1997: Exotic dancers at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady, ratified their first-ever union contract. Thus they became the first successfully unionized sex business. (Pacers, in San Diego, had unionized a few years earlier. However, they had an open shop, allowing management to recruit new, non-union employees. Consequently, they were able to decertify the union.) Lusty Lady later became a worker-owned cooperative and a member of NoBAWC (the network of Bay Area Workers Collectives), a program initiated by the Bay Area IWW.</p><p>For a great book on the struggle to organize Lusty Lady, please see Jenny Worley’s “Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power.”</p><p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/workingclass" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>workingclass</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/LaborHistory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LaborHistory</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/WorkerCollective" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WorkerCollective</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/union" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>union</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/NOBAWC" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NOBAWC</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/LustyLady" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LustyLady</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>books</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/author" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>author</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/writer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>writer</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/IWW" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>IWW</span></a> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://a.gup.pe/u/bookstadon" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>bookstadon</span></a></span></p>