Symbolic Safety in Precarious Work: Strippers and the Ideological Power of Independent Contracting

• In Event: Precarious Work and Workers

Abstract

Employers increasingly rely on “flexible” staffing arrangements to respond to globalized market pressures, including classifying workers as independent contractors (ICs) rather than employees. Although IC classification excludes workers from minimum wage guarantees, overtime pay, benefits, and labor protections, ICs often report preferring these arrangements. This paper examines the tension between objective legal precarity and workers’ subjective experiences of autonomy, security, and opportunity. Drawing on 14 months of participant observation and 34 in-depth interviews with strippers in San Francisco, I analyze how workers interpret and respond to shifting legal classifications under California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) and its partial reversal through Proposition 22.
I argue that dancers’ preferences for IC status are shaped not only by material conditions but by the symbolic meanings attached to legal categories of employment. Strippers perform legal yet highly stigmatized labor and navigate a liminal regulatory space in which clubs exercise significant managerial control while maintaining legally dubious IC arrangements. When AB5 temporarily reclassified dancers as employees, workers experienced contradictory effects, including intensified exploitation, reduced flexibility, and new forms of managerial surveillance. In response, dancers discursively reframed employee status as constraining and IC status as enabling, associating entrepreneurship with ownership of one’s body, labor, and earnings.
The paper shows how workers invert scholarly understandings of precarity by framing instability as opportunity and legal protections as sources of vulnerability. Guaranteed wages are experienced as limiting potential earnings, while IC status is perceived as offering protection from arbitrary discipline and termination. Entrepreneurial discourses thus function simultaneously as strategies of self-determination for workers and managerial tools that obscure ongoing misclassification and labor extraction. By examining how firms translate fluctuating labor law into organizational practice, this study highlights the power of ideological scripts to transform precarity into autonomy and reveals how legal categories accrue meanings that exceed their protective intent.

Author

• Isabel Iturrios-Fourzan, Stanford University