Adult entertainers’ abuse claims not a priority for regulators

Thursday, 24 October 2024

Adult entertainers asked regulators to take action to end unfair contracts and protect their safety, but neither the Commerce Commission or Worksafe saw them as a priority, MPs have heard.

Frustrated by the lack of action on their complaints, a group of adult entertainers petitioned Parliament under the name Fired Up Stilettos calling for “meaningful law changes” to protect them from exploitative strip clubs.

National, Green and Labour MPs all sounded notes of support for them after Vixen Temple and Laura Phillips from Fired Up Stilettos called for change at a hearing of the Education and Workforce select committee in July.

Now Worksafe and the Commerce Commission have appeared before the committee, to admit the reason they did not act was not because the complaints lacked merit.

Instead, it was because did not see strip clubs as being a big enough sector to justify even launching an investigation.

“The decision not to prioritise an investigation was not taken lightly by us,” commission deputy chair Anne Callinan told MPs on Wednesday.

Interim Worksafe chief executive Kane Patena, speaking on October 16, told the committee: “We needed to focus our effort in the areas where we could make the biggest and most equitable impact.”

MPs, including Labour’s Camilla Belich, expressed disappointment with the two regulators, with National’s Grant McCallum concerned the regulators were sending the message: “If you are too small, you are insignificant.”

“That’s the bit that worries me,” he said.

Belich said the petition and hearings had revealed some clear gaps in the laws and mechanisms to protect vulnerable workers.

Fired Up Stilettos complained to the Commerce Commission asking it to investigate what they said were unfair contract terms in strip club contracts. Unfair contract terms are banned by the Fair Trading Act.

Those included so-called “inconvenience” fees, which are a form of fine imposed by strip club owners ‒ often arbitrarily, entertainers say ‒ under the contracts adult entertainers are forced to accept if they want to work at the clubs.

The clubs do not hire them as employees, but as ‘independent contractors’.

Only the commission can challenge unfair contract terms in court, but it chose not to investigate Fired Up Stilettos’ complaints.

Callinan told MPs: “We receive well over 10,000 complaints a year through our call centre. Many of those are about Fair Trading Act issues. We screen, we triage, and we prioritise all of those.

“We could understand why the adult entertainers had concerns over whether the inconvenience fees in particular were unfair. We could see that,” she said.

“But what we’ve found as we’ve worked through the unfair contract terms legislation and applied it in practice is that we can have the most impact where we are looking at contracts where there’s many thousands of consumers, highly standardised contracts.

“So that if we put the resource into investigation we can have a real impact with a particular trader, like a telecommunications company, and then we can have influence through that sector, because the terms are largely the same.”

The primary difficulty, she said was that adult entertainment contracts often varied, with slightly different inconvenience fees and patterns of their usage.

“We were concerned that we would put considerable time and effort into this matter without necessarily being able to have a good and widespread impact across the sector.”

She suggested that the Fair Trading Act be changed so people could take their own cases to court, instead of having to rely on the commission.

She did not indicate that the prioritisation considered the power imbalance and vulnerability of female adult entertainers in an industry dominated by male venue operators.

McCallum said he would like to think the nature of the allegations would have increased the prioritisation.

“It’s not a lack of willingness to address this type of vulnerability,” Callinan responded.

Green MP Ricardo Menéndez-March worried the rationale the Commerce Commission gave would provide the adult entertainment industry a free pass to entrench their behaviour.

The complaints taken by Fired Up Stilettos to Worksafe were about the lack of security to protect entertainers in clubs, and unsafe stages and carpeting that had to be navigated in high heels.

Because they are ‘independent contractors’, Worksafe told them they were responsible for their own health and safety, MPs heard.

When Worksafe’s Patena was called to explain why the agency had not done a single investigation despite complaints including a gun at a club, and two sexual assaults, he also indicated the adult entertainment industry was not a priority.

“We needed to focus our effort in the areas where we could make the biggest and most equitable impact,” he said.

Worksafe had 170 inspectors to cover 600,000 businesses, he said.

“So the reality is we have to prioritise where it goes.”

Belich said the committee was preparing a report on the petition, and Parliament’s rules prevented her from speaking about what it might recommend.

Fired Up Stilettos is calling for the right to bargain collectively while maintaining an independent contractor status, outlawing all fines and bonds between employers and contractors, and establishing a nationwide mandatory maximum of 20% that an employer can take from a contractor’s profits.

Menéndez-March said the reason the petition started was the termination of 19 dancers who attempted to negotiate working conditions.

There were really harrowing accounts of sexual violence in the adult entertainment industry, he said, characterising strip clubs as workplaces where workers faced “consequences” for even reporting issues.