Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

In 1993, Dawn Passar and Johanna Breyer called a meeting of their fellow workers at the Market Street Cinema, a notoriously seedy strip club that was a favorite target of anti-porn crusader turned senator Dianne Feinstein, to discuss unsafe working conditions and the exploitative “stage fees” their bosses had implemented. The Exotic Dancers Alliance (EDA) was born. The group initially tried writing letters to the club’s owners asking that they reduce the stage fees and improve scheduling, but upon receiving no response, they decided to escalate their campaign. But California’s labor commissioner immediately put up another roadblock. “When we told the people that we were strippers, they hung up on us,” Passar, who was born in Thailand and spent ten years working in the U.S. sex industry, recalled in an interview with Dr. Siobhan Brooks. “This was one of the main reasons EDA was started, so that when we were asked by people at the Labor Commissar if we are part of an organization, we could say that we’re part of the Exotic Dancers Alliance organization. That way these people will listen to us.”