Picture this:
You work nights in a Portland strip club called Sassy’s. You get scheduled three to five times a week. You dance for hours. You pay the club to work there. You tip out staff so they don’t “make working there miserable.”
You do all that.
But in the club’s paperwork, you’re told you’re not an employee. You’re “independent.” You get none of the protections that word “employee” should unlock. No guaranteed minimum wage. No overtime. No basic wage security. None of that stuff!
That’s the world Zoe Hollis lived in whilst working at Sassy’s.
Hollis danced there from June 2017 to March 2019. She followed club rules. She rotated on and off stage when she was supposed to. She followed a specific strip order song by song. She kept their hair, makeup, and body within management’s standards. When she wore their natural hair instead of a wig, the club reduced their schedule.
The club decided when the dancers worked. The club decided how they looked. The club decided how they all stripped.
Then Hollis did something dangerous to an overly controlling a system like this: she filed a collective action alleging Sassy’s misclassified dancers as contractors to avoid paying minimum wage and overtime. They also alleged the club took “house fees” and skimmed money that should stay with dancers as tips.
Days later, something else happened.
Hollis was supposed to perform at Dante’s, another adult venue in Portland, at a variety show called Sinferno Cabaret. She had danced there before and had secured another performance along with an open invitation to take more slots.
Then an email arrived…. dundunDUN!!!!
The partner who helped run both Sassy’s and Dante’s canceled the performance. He pointed straight at the lawsuit as the reason. He said having Hollis work at Dante’s as a contractor now put that club at risk too.
In plain terms: you speak up about wages in one club. You lose work in another.
That’s the core humane issue of this controversy: a worker rightfully challenged the shitty rules. A business network that closed doors in response.
The Corporate Playbook: How the Harm Was Done
Let’s strip away the legal wording and look at behavior.
Control Without Responsibility
Sassy’s treated dancers like employees in practice.
The club controlled who got in the door. It controlled music. It set minimum prices for dances. It required dancers to rotate between stage and floor. It told them when to tease, when to remove their top, and when to remove their bottoms during each three-song set.
That is some tight ass control.
At the same time, the club insisted dancers were “independent contractors.” The contract said so. The label stripped away wage protections. It shifted costs downward. It let the business claim the dancers were “on their own” while it still dictated the conditions of their work.
Paying to Work
Hollis had to pay “house fees” to work each shift. That meant money flowed upward before they even earned a dollar from customers. They then tipped bartenders, DJs, and bouncers. Workers reported that staff would “make working [there] miserable” if those tips did not flow.
The club did not pay Hollis for poles, utilities, or advertising. The club held the space. The dancers paid for access to the space and the right to hustle inside it.
Image as a Condition of Survival
Sassy’s also policed appearance. Hair. Makeup. Overall look. Hollis saw their schedule cut when they chose their natural hair instead of a wig. That was punishment through income control.
You can call that “branding.”
You can also call it economic coercion.
Retaliation Through the Network
When Hollis filed the lawsuit, the reaction did not stay inside Sassy’s walls.
A partner of Sassy’s who also managed Dante’s canceled Hollis’s upcoming performance. He tied the decision to the lawsuit. He said he wanted to protect Dante’s from similar claims about “independent contractor” status.
This is how power travels through a local nightlife economy.
One decision-maker. Several venues. A worker speaks up in one place. The doors close in another.
A Cascade of Consequences: The Real-World Impact
This case is about more than one canceled show. The behavior described in the opinion reveals a whole pattern of harm.
Public Health and Safety: Stress as a Workplace Hazard
The opinion does not list medical records or diagnoses. It does not talk about hospital visits or trauma in clinical terms. That’s not its job.
But we can see the pressure cooker.
Dancers paid to work. They tipped staff above them. They were subject to arbitrary image rules. They faced schedule cuts for hair choices. They risked losing future gigs if they challenged powerful owners.
That kind of setup encourages constant anxiety.
You do not know if you can pay rent. You do not know if tomorrow’s shift will vanish. You do not know if your activism or organizing will quietly shut you out of other venues.
Stress like that does not stay on the dance floor. It affects sleep. It strains relationships. It wears down the body.
The case shows one more brutal message to workers.
Speak up about your wages and you might lose even more income opportunities. That threat hits mental health as hard as any late-night shift ever could.
Economic Squeeze: How Money Flows Upward
We do not get exact dollar amounts in the opinion. But we can see the structure that drains dancers’ wallets.
Mechanisms that Shift Money Upward
| Mechanism | Who Pays It | Who Benefits Most | Impact on the Dancer |
|---|---|---|---|
| House fees per shift | Dancer | Club ownership | Income starts below zero |
| Mandatory or pressured tip-outs | Dancer | Bartenders, DJs, bouncers | Less take-home cash |
| Misclassification as contractor | Dancer | Club ownership | No guaranteed wage or overtime |
| Canceled Dante’s performance | Dancer (lost gig) | Club partners limiting liability | Lost immediate and future income |
Every one of these mechanisms appears in the factual description. The house fees. The tipping up the chain. The contractor label. The canceled performance that cut Hollis off from another income stream and future gigs.
Put together, they form an economic funnel. Money flows upward toward owners and managers. Risk flows downward onto dancers.
The court even notes that canceling work and refusing future opportunities can be harmful enough to count as retaliation. It cuts a worker off from income they would otherwise earn.
In this world, a lawsuit is not just a legal act.
It is an economic gamble.
Environmental Degradation: What We Don’t See Here
The opinion does not describe pollution. It does not mention toxic waste, water contamination, or air quality. There is no evidence in this document of direct environmental harm.
That absence tells us something too.
Corporate harm often hits multiple fronts. In this case, the documented harm is social and economic rather than environmental. The damage lands on dancers’ paychecks, schedules, and freedom to speak out.
Erosion of Community: Fear in the Nightlife Economy
Strip clubs and cabarets do not just sell performances. They create social spaces. People build communities around them. Dancers share tips. They trade safety strategies. They support one another in a line of work that is heavily stigmatized.
Retaliation tears at that fabric. When one dancer sues and then loses work at a related venue, everyone else watches and gets the message. The lesson is simple. The people who own the stages also own the future of your income. Challenge them and you vanish from the lineup.
That kind of fear isolates workers. It discourages them from sharing information about wage theft. It can kill efforts to organize or demand safer conditions.
You can’t build solidarity very easily when everyone is terrified of being the next one blacklisted.
A System Built for Profit, Deregulation, and Power
Let’s zoom out for a moment pls.
This is unfortunately not just a “bad boss at a singular shitty workplace” story. It’s a late-stage capitalism story.
The business model described here depends on an all too familiar playbook that we’ve all seen countless times.
First, label workers as “independent contractors.” That choice shifts payroll costs away from the company. It dodges minimum wage and overtime obligations. It treats human beings like vendors, even while the business controls their appearance, schedule, and core tasks.
Second, push costs downward. House fees. Tip-outs to staff. Dancers pay to access the workplace. Dancers subsidize the business ecosystem that sits above them.
Third, move across multiple entities. One partner can hold stakes in several clubs. That creates a small local empire. It also creates leverage. If you cross that network, you risk losing work at more than one spot.
Neoliberal capitalism’s deregulatory nature loves this setup.
It prizes “flexibility” and “choice” on paper. Workers are told they are “free” contractors. They supposedly enjoy autonomy. In reality, they face tight rules, little bargaining power, and high risk. The flexibility mostly benefits the owners.
Deregulation and weak enforcement help keep this system humming.
Workers in stigmatized industries like stripping often sit at the edge of formal protections. Many fear outing themselves. Many mistrust authorities. That makes enforcement even weaker. It also makes corporate actors more confident that they can squeeze and retaliate with minimal blowback.
In that context, an anti-retaliation law is not just a technical rule. It is one of the few tools that allows workers to speak at all.
When retaliation comes anyway, it exposes the structural truth. The market is not neutral. It is tilted toward those who already own the buildings, the brands, and the legal teams.
Dodging Accountability: How the Powerful Try to Stay Untouched
The court notes that Hollis’s wage and hour claims were time-barred under the statute of limitations. The misclassification and wage violations themselves could not move forward. But the retaliation claim survived.
That timing gap is important.
An evil company can misclassify workers for years. It can benefit from those lower labor costs. It can take house fees and tip-outs. It can do all this until the legal window closes. Once that window shuts, the wage claims vanish from court, even if the underlying behavior happened exactly as described.
Retaliation is different.
When Hollis filed their lawsuit, the business partner who also ran Dante’s canceled their performance agreement. He told Hollis that the lawsuit made things “complicated.” He pointed to a desire to protect other clubs from similar legal risk.
The lawsuit threatened the business model. So he cut off the person who filed it.
The defense later tried to frame that as a “legitimate business decision” to avoid liability. The court pushed back on that logic. It observed that allowing employers to justify retaliation as a way to “minimize legal exposure” would gut the protection entirely.
This is a pattern we see across corporate life.
Fines become a line item. Legal risk becomes a cost-benefit calculation. Settlements often carry no admission of guilt. Individual executives almost never face personal consequences.
The people who feel the consequences most directly are workers like Hollis. Their income drops. Their opportunities shrink. Their courage is punished.
The system still treats that outcome as normal business strategy.
Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change
We cannot fix that with vibes and branding. We need structural responses.
Some potential paths forward:
- Stronger worker classification rules. When a business controls schedules, appearance, and core tasks, the default should be employee status. That rule should apply even in stigmatized or “informal” industries.
- Real anti-retaliation enforcement. Agencies and courts need the power and resources to punish retaliation quickly and publicly. That includes bans on hiding behind “business risk” as an excuse for cutting off work.
- Collective power for dancers and nightlife workers. Unions, worker centers, and mutual aid groups in adult entertainment can shift the balance. When workers move together, the cost of retaliation rises.
- Transparency around ownership networks. When one partner controls several clubs, workers need to know that. It exposes how power flows. It also makes it clear when punishment at one venue is connected to activism at another.
- Support for people who challenge the system. Legal aid, emergency funds, and community backing can help dancers and other low-wage workers survive the hit that often follows speaking up.
Sassy’s website is https://www.sassysbar.com/ and they previously had an Instagram account that has since been deleted
Also, the primary photo used in this article wasn’t some shitty crop job by my part. Their website literally just has their logo being off center. I briefly considered recropping the picture to make the logo more centered, but if Sassy’s themselves doesn’t care about how their website looks then why should I?
💡 Explore Corporate Misconduct by Category
Corporations harm people every day — from wage theft to pollution. Learn more by exploring key areas of injustice.
- 💀 Product Safety Violations — When companies risk lives for profit.
- 🌿 Environmental Violations — Pollution, ecological collapse, and unchecked greed.
- 💼 Labor Exploitation — Wage theft, worker abuse, and unsafe conditions.
- 🛡️ Data Breaches & Privacy Abuses — Misuse and mishandling of personal information.
- 💵 Financial Fraud & Corruption — Lies, scams, and executive impunity.
NOTE:
This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:
- The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
- Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
- The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
- My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.
All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.
Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)
Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....
