SF Strippers Say Lax City Oversight Is Forcing Them Into Prostitution

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SAN FRANCISCO, (AFP) - San Francisco's prostitutes and strippers are calling on the city's newly elected young mayor to help decriminalize the world's oldest profession and crack down on abuses of exotic dancers.

Dancers charge that the city's outgoing mayor, Willie Brown, the former lawyer of a prominent strip club owner, ignored years of labor law and safety violations in San Francisco's strip clubs.

The California Labor Commissioner has held hearings for a decade in which dancers aired grievances and recovered back pay. But dancers say the abuses continued.

Fed up with non-enforcement of labor laws, dancers have filed two class action lawsuits against the city's strip clubs charging that managers seized their tips, failed to pay them wages, and charged them hundreds of dollars per shift for the privilege of working.

They say these illegal fees led to a climate that coerced them into prostitution at increasingly low rates.

"We are not trying to close the clubs, what we want is safe working conditions and we want to have our labor rights respected," said San Francisco dancer activist Daisy Anarchy.

Anarchy and other dancers are particularly angry that police ignored the presence of illegal private booths at the clubs which dancers say led to assaults by customers.

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/12/21/7108525

They say these illegal fees led to a climate that coerced them into prostitution at increasingly low rates.

now who made this decision???