A common complaint by those wishing to make a difference, after a strip club gets sued, is that not much changed. It is still in the club’s best economic interest to continue misclassifying, financially exploiting, and violating the labor rights of dancers. Even with all of the nice large settlements that clubs have to pay, even when they sometimes go to trial and lose, they’ll still save more money in the long run if they continue business as usual. Employer taxes, title VII concerns, and paying a living wage to all employees are just some of the expenses they want to avoid. All of those things are much more expensive than dealing with the lawsuits. The lawsuits and NLRB claims are basically a slap on the wrist, economically speaking, for clubs.

This problem reaches far beyond strip clubs, of course. It’s why so many businesses continue to misclassify even though they know they’re liable. Even with all of the press articles and media attention, they still choose the misclassifying option. From a purely business perspective where short-term financial gain is the bottom line, rather than valuing people’s lives, this makes mathematical sense.

Gavin Newsom and Lorena Gonzalez of California understood the financial incentives businesses have to misclassify when they signed Assembly Bill 1003 into law this past September. AB 1003 criminalizes wage theft as Grand Theft, rather than just addressing it as a civil manner. That means instead of just having to pay a sum of money to make the problems go away when clubs or other misclassifying businesses get sued, the employer may face criminal charges and go to prison for misclassifying their employees, stealing large amounts of money from them. They’ll also still have to pay a large sum of money to the exploited workers. The hope is that this bill will motivate more employers to treat their employees properly. Methinks this bill distills a more accurate description of what wage theft actually is. Well done.