New Minneapolis Stripper Guild is building solidarity among downtown dancers

The 2025 Stripper Awards Gala is coming up March 3 at the Green Room in Uptown, featuring the city’s top strippers battling for honors in categories including pole tricks, twerking and floor work.

The night brings together dancers from downtown Minneapolis' half-dozen strip clubs in appreciation of each other’s craft and athleticism. It also doubles as the newly formed Stripper Guild’s annual membership drive, underscoring labor rights and harm reduction in sex work.

The gala and the guild reflect growing interest in organizing for respect and better workplace conditions among strippers who have traditionally been more competitive than collaborative, said dancer Kali Banks, of Rick’s Cabaret.

“For a long time, I was so reserved, I didn’t want friends in that industry because it was kind of cut-throat,” she said. “But I’ve opened up a lot more to different women because at the end of the day, we’re all the same, we’re all in the same game.”

The Stripper Guild was created by the Sex Workers Organizing Project (SWOP) of Minneapolis, which received a $258,000 Bush Foundation grant in 2022 to start building a labor organization for strippers.

Post-pandemic, strippers in Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles have voted to form unions.

In Minneapolis, the guild now has nearly 200 members and is aiming to recruit more of Minneapolis' estimated 700 dancers, said SWOP executive director Andi Snow.

Among the Stripper Guild’s top issues:

“It’s this huge industry, and all this money is made,” said Snow. “It’s true of every industry, but it’s so obvious in ours that the people come for the workers, right? Nobody is super loyal to a chain of strip clubs. It really is the dancers themselves that bring people in.”

The guild deviates from the traditional union structure because strippers value their independent contractor status and don’t want to become employees of clubs, Snow said. The freedom that comes with being a contractor allows dancers — many of whom are managing various disabilities — choose their workload.

“We think it’s super important for stripping to stay accessible, because it’s one of the safest forms of sex work,” said Snow. “Anyone who is excluded from being able to work at the clubs, that means they’re just working in more marginalized, less safe spaces.”

But independent contractor status also means that most dancers face challenges getting health coverage, which dancers responding to a needs assessment survey by SWOP identified as their greatest need.

To that end, SWOP has sought advice from the Workers Confluence Fund, a local resource hub for labor organizing that emphasizes workers at the margins of society.

Workers Confluence organizing director Casey Hudek said sex workers face great barriers to collective advocacy in a deeply exploited sector without the protections that come with being formal employees. But “there’s dignity in all work and all workers deserve a seat at the table,” he said.

Even if strippers can’t bargain for employer-provided benefits right now, they can still bring workers together for a form of group purchasing of health insurance, as restaurant workers have modeled, Hudek said.

There is a great need for affordable health insurance among strippers, who experience pain and stress buildup from just walking around for hours in heels, going on stage several times a night and performing athletic stunts, said Lizzy Lavender, who dances at Dream Girls. Currently, many dancers pay out of pocket for chiropractic care, massage and physical therapy.

“But it’s hard on our bodies, and we’re exposed to so many different people, so we can get sick easily,” Lavender said. “We would want the guild to create a fund with a lower membership fee, and that way you’d be able to have the insurance for a very low rate so that people who don’t qualify for Medical Assistance ... we’d have that option.”