Fired Up Stilettos stripper collective celebrates move to allow collective bargaining for contractors
Friday, 26 June 2026
The National-led Government is introducing a collective bargaining right for contractors after a successful lobbying campaign from the Fired Up Stilettos group.
The stripper-led, grass-roots labour rights movement has been lobbying politicians since 2023 for protections against abusive behaviour by club owners.
But throughout the campaign, which has seen them win support from every major party in Parliament, they have insisted that “strippers’ rights are workers’ rights”.
The Government has been criticised for being anti-worker by opposition parties and unions for a series of law changes they say are bad for workers, including repealing pay equity laws, extending 90-day work trials, as well its ongoing moves to exempt small businesses from some workplace safety law.
But Fired Up Stilettos is celebrating the Government’s decision to include a law change allowing independent contractors who do not pose a threat of cartel behaviour to collectively bargain in the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.
They sought the law change in a bid to reduce the asymmetry of power between dancers and club owners, who they say often surveil, control, and punish dancers far beyond what could ever be appropriate for an employee, never mind a supposedly independent contractor.
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However, the planned law change would be available to contractors in any industry.
Fired Up Stilettos’ spokesperson Bianca Beebe, said: “We’ve been really pleased by how open the Government has been to taking our concerns seriously. We're very appreciative of how far it's come.”
However, she said: “One criticism we still have of it, which is the criticism opposition parties also gave, is that it does not explicitly include contractors in protections against retaliatory behaviour.”
Dancers fear without an explicit ban on retaliatory behaviour, those who seek to negotiate collectively could find themselves blackballed from clubs.
When meeting MPs, Fired Up Stilettos has argued that a blanket prohibition on contractors collectively bargaining was enabling anti-competitive behaviour from club owners, and eroding dancers’ freedom of contract.
“Our concern is that we will win the right to collectively bargain, but if the clubs can still immediately fire us for notifying the commission, then it’s pretty difficult to say you really have that right,” Beebe said.
“The Government has worked very hard with,us and they have made something that will benefit us, and that we have been fighting for for years, and that should be celebrated,.
But, she said: “We don't want the Government's hard work to go to waste. They did all of this work, and if we end up almost in the same place as where we started, then that's not really good for them either.”
Fired Up Stilettos says a reasonable compromise might be to include protections for contractors like sex workers or courier drivers who are highly dependent on a single business, like a club.
With the bill not having passed its second reading in Parliament yet, there was still time for such a protection to be written into it, she said.
In 2023, Fired Up Stilettos petitioned Parliament for a law change, and sought to make MPs aware of the treatment dancers were suffering from some club owners, including arbitrary fines, and unsafe working conditions.
They also revealed their failed attempts to get the Commerce Commission to investigate their allegations of cartel-like behaviour from some club owners, and to get Worksafe to investigate safety concerns.
In October 2024, the two regulators told MPs the reason they did not act was not because the complaints lacked merit. Instead, it was because they did not see strip clubs as being a big enough sector to justify even launching an investigation.
At a select committee hearing in 2024, Laura Phillips and Vixen Temple impressed MPs with their arguments, with MPs from both sides of the political divide responding positively.
Beebe, who trained in public health at Johns Hopkins University in the US, is standing as the Southland candidate for The Opportunity Party in the general election in November.