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NY Times. April 10, 2008

Dancers for Hire at Queens Club Claim Wage Violations

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

 

Every evening into the wee hours, lonely men slip into the dance clubs scattered under the el along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. Inside, these men, most of them Hispanic immigrants, pay $2 for a dance in clubs with alluring names like Casanova and La Romantica.

 

The busiest is the Flamingo Night Club, where, past the hulking bouncer, 50 for-hire dancers gyrate and two-step until 4 each morning, donning different outfits for Miniskirt Night, Pajama Night and Schoolgirl Night. On Bikini Night every Wednesday, the dance floor is jammed, the men pulling the dancers close, the lights dim, the reggaetón music blasting.

 

For the men â?? construction workers, janitors, supermarket stockers â?? the Flamingo may be an antidote to loneliness, an opportunity to press against soft skin, but for many of the dancers, the club is an out-of-kilter world with bizarre rules. Several former Flamingo dancers plan to file a federal lawsuit against the club on Thursday, asserting that it repeatedly violated federal and state wage laws and cheated its dancers of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

In interviews in Spanish, several former dancers said the owners often made them pay a $60 or $70 fine when they missed a day of work. Several complained of having to pay an $11 fee each day just to enter the club and an additional $10 if they arrived a half-hour late.

 

They said that sometimes, after dancing from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., they had to attend meetings that lasted until 6 a.m. in which the owners held forth, calling some dancers â??putaâ? (whore) as well as ugly and fat. The dancersâ?? most serious complaint was that the club never paid them a cent for their 45-hour workweeks.

 

â??I never received anything in wages,â? said Patricia Gonzalez, a long-haired, leggy immigrant from the Dominican Republic who quit dancing at the Flamingo last June. â??In my three years there I must have paid thousands of dollars in fines. And I paid the daily fee of $11 to enter. What kind of job do you have to pay just to go to work?â?Â

 

The lawsuit raises an intriguing question of law: whether the for-hire dancers were employees, who should have been paid wages for every hour they worked, or independent contractors who, as the Flamingoâ??s owners assert, were merely renting space on the dance floor.

 

The owners say they had no obligation to pay wages, asserting that the dancers were entrepreneurs who made a living by keeping the $2 they earned for each dance.

 

â??Theyâ??re paying to rent the space so they can make a living,â? said Peter Rubin, a lawyer for the club. â??They can keep all the money they make dancing. They donâ??t have to split anything with the house.â? The club makes its money by charging the men $5 to enter and $7 a drink.

 

Mr. Rubin said the clubâ??s owners, Edith Dâ??Angelo and Luis Alberto Ruiz, who declined to be interviewed, denied fining dancers for missing days or arriving late. Mr. Rubin suggested that the former dancers, seeing a potential payday in court, had concocted and coordinated their stories with the help of an immigrantsâ?? advocacy group, Make the Road New York, that has embraced their cause.

 

â??The girls have the right to come and go as they please,â? Mr. Rubin said. â??They donâ??t have to rent a space at the club.â?Â

 

If the dancers win their lawsuit, it could have ripple effects at the cityâ??s many for-hire dance clubs, latter-day versions of Depression-era joints where men paid 10 cents for a dance. Many of todayâ??s dancers, like their customers, are illegal immigrants who earn their money off the books. Amy Carroll, a lawyer for Make the Road, said it was ridiculous for the Flamingo to suggest that the dancers were independent contractors.

 

â??It seems that Flamingo is doing the worst of both worlds,â? she said. â??Theyâ??re not paying the workers anything, and theyâ??re controlling every aspect of the dancersâ?? work life. They tell them what days to work, what time to show up, what outfits to wear, what makeup to use. They even make the dancers sign in and out to go to the restroom. That level of control makes them employees, not independent contractors.â?Â

 

The lawyers for the dancers â?? from the Urban Justice Center and the Milbank Tweed law firm as well as Make the Road â?? argue that the $2 dance fees are tips, rather than wages.

 

â??We are alleging that the dancers were never paid minimum wage, never paid overtime, and there were illegal deductions and kickbacks in the form of entry fees, late fees and sick fees,â? said Elizabeth Wagoner, another lawyer for Make the Road.

 

The lawsuit is alleging wage violations on behalf of more than 2,000 dancers, waiters and bartenders who the lawyers say worked at Flamingo over the past three years.

 

The plaintiffs also accuse Mr. Ruiz, the co-owner, of battery, specifically of shoving some dancers toward men so they would dance with them, and occasionally pouring drinks on the dancers.

 

â??Imagine having to dance until 4 a.m. after someone poured tequila down your clothes,â? said Floricelda Alonzo, a tall, dark-haired dancer from the Dominican Republic.

 

Mr. Rubin denied that Mr. Ruiz had hit anyone or thrown liquor on any dancers. He said it made sense to require the dancers to sign in and out when they went to the bathroom and to time them there so they would not use the bathrooms for illicit sex with customers.

 

Diana Trejos, an intense, talkative dancer from Colombia, said she in no way felt like an independent contractor in her several years at the club. Among other complaints, she said the women were prohibited from sitting between dances unless customers bought them a drink. On many nights the management announced â??womenâ??s liberation time,â? requiring the women to do their next four dances free as a way to liven things up, she said.

 

â??Wherever Iâ??ve worked, I see bosses want to take advantage,â? Ms. Trejos said. â??But there they took it to a whole other level.â?Â

 

She said she dreaded when the owners ordered the exhausted dancers to attend meetings that began at 4 a.m. â??Theyâ??d say we were lower-class, that weâ??re idiots, that we came to this country with mops and now we think weâ??re queens,â? she said.

 

Several dancers complained that they, not the club, had to pay for their nurse, schoolgirl and cowgirl outfits.

 

â??If you said anything to complain, you were fired,â? said Berky Lopez, a former dancer who said she quit because of kidney problems.

 

Ms. Trejos said the job was not all bad. She loves to dance and liked chatting with â?? and being admired by â?? the customers, at least those who did not try to grope her. But she said the managers made the job miserable.

 

She said she hated that the dancers were timed when they were in the dressing room and bathroom. In the evening the dancers were generally prohibited from stepping outside to buy their meals; they were instead relegated to buying food from a vendor who set up shop, selling sandwiches and other items, in the womenâ??s bathroom.

 

Ms. Trejos she said she put up with the job for several years because the money was good, notwithstanding the fines. She often earned $150 to $200 a night, but sometimes as little as $50 or as much as $300. (She said she was fired in February when the management accused her of overcharging a customer, which she denied.)

 

â??I have a mother and two daughters that I support back in Colombia,â? she said. â??My goal was to earn whatever I could earn to support my family.â?Â

 

Mr. Rubin, the clubâ??s lawyer, said many dancers quit other clubs and took jobs at the Flamingo because the money was better and because the club, unlike some others, was firm about keeping out prostitution and drugs.

 

â??If theyâ??re complaining about rules, the only rules are ones that protect the integrity of the organization and protect the girls as well,â? he said.

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