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The Nevada Supreme Court decision was not an isolated incident. Strippers across the country have been taking their clubs to court, protesting their tips-only income and the stage fees they are often required to pay just for the right to perform. Since 2012, judges in California, Georgia, New York, and South Carolina have ruled in dancers' favor, granting them millions of dollars in back wages, and cases are pending in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These rulings have already had a dramatic impact on the $2.5 billion industry and the more than 350,000 dancers whom it employs, but the win in Nevada seemed to be the biggest yet.
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The battle over workers' rights in the strip club industry is set against a backdrop of a broad upheaval of labor law. With the rise of the gig economy, more and more people now find themselves in conditions similar to those strippers have been working in for decades. They, too, are fighting back—and winning. Just a day after the passage of SB224, the California Labor Commissioner ruled that certain Uber drivers qualified as employees rather than independent contractors after the plaintiffs cited Terry v. Sapphire as a precedent. Uber immediately claimed that the decision applied to only one person, but the company's argument was soon weakened by the Department of Labor, which proposed new rules that would guarantee minimum wage to about 4.6 million currently exempt workers, some Uber drivers among them. The next month, the DOL issued a new interpretation of the FLSA, stressing that the federal economic realities test was vital to the economy, and that it trumped whatever might be defined in a preexisting contract between worker and employer.But in Nevada, the passage of SB224 still threatens the gains strippers made from the Terry v. Sapphire ruling. After the six plaintiffs in the case filed motions following the Supreme Court's decision, Sapphire raised the statute as a defense, claiming that it invalidated the ruling. This October, the plaintiffs were forced to settle out of court for $6 million. "If SB224 had not been passed, we would have been awarded the $80 million," Rusing said. "The club probably would have had to file for bankruptcy."