‘Strike Back’ on F1 Weekend: Inside the Labour Battle Behind Montreal’s Late‑Night Economy

From a three‑woman picket line to a city‑wide day of action

On a Monday night in October 1967, three topless dancers in downtown Vancouver pulled slacks and overcoats over their costumes and walked out.

Pearl Johnson, then 18, fronted the miniature picket line. The group’s demands were modest but clear: a raise on their $100‑a‑week salary, a staff rate on meals and a heater in their dressing room, set out in a two‑sentence local news brief.

More than half a century on, Canadian strip clubs are embedded in the commercial fabric of major sports events. Yet most dancers are no longer salaried, and the list of workplace grievances has grown far beyond heaters and meal discounts.

This month in Montreal, that long labour history crashes directly into one of global sport’s biggest commercial weekends.

F1 weekend spotlight on a hidden workforce

Montreal sex worker and stripper Adore Goldman is organizing a strike to coincide with the city’s Formula 1 weekend – traditionally one of the most lucrative stretches of the year for bars, restaurants, hotels and late‑night venues.

Goldman, who uses her professional name for safety reasons, is mobilizing dancers and erotic massage workers to walk off the job, demand stronger labour protections and press for the decriminalization of sex work.

At the centre of their campaign is a foundational status issue: most strippers in Canada now work as independent contractors rather than employees. Goldman argues that this classification allows club owners to profit from major sports tourism spikes while avoiding basic obligations widely recognized in other workplaces.

“Being recognized as an employee, your employers have to guarantee your safety and your mental health at work,” she says. When sexual violence happens in clubs, she adds, it should be treated and compensated as a workplace accident.

How F1 weekend changes the economics inside the club

On the Saturday of race weekend, Goldman and members of the Sex Work Autonomous Committee (SWAC) plan to focus on a key pain point: the “bar fee” dancers must pay simply to work a shift.

Those fees, they say, typically range from $15 to $100. During F1, some venues raise them even higher. Goldman notes that while international visitors push up overall footfall, the number of paying clients per dancer does not necessarily rise, especially when clubs increase the number of performers scheduled.

“There might be more clients, but there’s no more clients per stripper. So it’s not that profitable for us, but it is for the employers,” she says.

Industry figures who support the current system argue that bar fees help cover operating costs such as music licensing, locker room maintenance and utilities. But for dancers, those fixed entry costs can turn even a busy sporting weekend into a financial risk.

A Montreal‑based student and filmmaker who strips to support herself says she often pays around $60 in bar fees on regular shifts. On weekends, she estimates her total outlay – fees plus customary tips to bouncers and DJs – at roughly $100 before she has earned a cent from customers, not including transport to and from the club.

“I have left in the negative and it’s always in the winter,” she says. Her name is being withheld because of concerns that her union organizing could cost her work.

Walking on eggshells: independent in name, controlled in practice

For that filmmaker, “losing her job” doesn’t involve a formal dismissal. It can mean simply not hearing back from a manager after sending in her weekly availability – a silence that might last days or weeks.

“You’re walking on eggshells as the worker because you never know when they’re going to actually fire you,” she says, describing scheduling decisions that often feel arbitrary. On one occasion, she says a manager refused to call her back unless she agreed to work through the holidays; she had to present plane tickets to prove she was out of town.

Because she is registered as self‑employed, there is no access to unemployment insurance when the calls stop coming. The only option is to try to secure shifts at another club – not a straightforward prospect in a city that tightly controls where erotic establishments can operate.

Goldman, who has worked as a stripper for three years, says she is formally treated as an independent contractor but, in practice, experiences many of the controls associated with being an employee. She describes being told exactly when to arrive and leave, being penalized for lateness, and being required to perform fully nude stage sets – with penalties if she refuses.

Those performances, she says, are typically unpaid. Her income depends on selling private dances and on tips while on stage. The prices of dances are fixed by the venue, and dancers are not allowed to adjust those rates or accept additional tips for dances themselves.

‘Strike Back’ on the streets

For F1 weekend, many strippers involved in the action have formally marked themselves as unavailable to managers. Instead of working inside, they will assemble at Place de la Paix in downtown Montreal before splitting into groups to distribute flyers, explain their demands and speak with patrons and workers outside several venues.

The strike extends beyond strip clubs. Erotic massage parlour workers are joining the action, with organizers arguing that the issues of safety, income precarity and legal status cut across different corners of the sex industry.

Goldman estimates that at least 50 strippers, massage workers and others in the sector will take part in the day of action. It is a far smaller mobilisation than the tens of thousands who descend on the city’s grand prix circuit, but for an industry with no formal union, it represents a rare coordinated step.

One of SWAC’s long‑term goals is to form a union that brings together strippers, escorts, massage workers and others. The intention is to use collective bargaining both to secure workplace protections and to generate legal pressure that could ultimately bolster arguments for decriminalization.

Rules, risk and the ‘grey zone’ around lap dances

Goldman, who also works as an escort, says she entered stripping with a strong awareness that sex workers in Canada do not enjoy the same protections as other workers, in part because elements of the industry are criminalized.

Yet she was struck by how exposed she still felt in what appears, from the outside, to be a more traditional workplace model.

In her previous jobs, she says, there were policies to prevent violence and manage workplace accidents. In the clubs where she dances, she has seen few such structures. Instead, she often finds herself having to explain rules to clients alone, while partially undressed and under pressure not to lose business.

Bouncers are never far away, but in her view they function more as monitors of the dancers than as proactive protectors. She describes them as “not really useful” when incidents escalate.

Those frontline risks are complicated by a legal framework in which some of what happens in club backrooms sits in a shifting grey area. Under Canada’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, paying for “sexual services” is illegal, and the federal justice department has stated that buying lap dances that simulate sexual intercourse falls under that category. The law does not criminalize the seller of sexual services, but it does criminalize the buyer.

In practice, Goldman and the dancers interviewed describe an inconsistent landscape where some clubs permit lap dances and others do not, and where clients sometimes push for illegal or non‑consensual contact – including touching intimate areas or exposing themselves. Goldman recalls a customer biting her breast, and says “every shift there’s something that happens that I don’t consent to.”

She argues that if dancers were formally recognized as employees, clubs would be more directly liable for maintaining a safe environment and would have a stronger incentive to back staff when they enforce boundaries.

Peer defence in the absence of training

The student‑filmmaker says she never received training on how to handle aggressive or boundary‑crossing clients. Instead, she has taken it upon herself to brief newcomers on what to expect and how to set limits.

Over time, she has developed a standard script: “You can touch me here, here and not here in between my legs, not on my face, don’t touch my hair and not on the neck.”

She says the workers she depends on most for protection are not managers or security staff but fellow dancers, who will intervene if a situation appears to be turning dangerous.

By contrast, raising issues with management can feel slow and uncertain. “Sometimes telling a manager about a bad client is more trouble than it’s worth because it takes so long to actually see the repercussions, the consequence of their actions come to life,” she says.

A sexual assault involving a Montreal stripper last summer, which deeply affected the local community, pushed her further into activism with SWAC. For her, the incident underlined the need for clear protocols if similar cases arise again.

Police, perception and the limits of protection

Goldman and the filmmaker both say police attend clubs and surrounding nightlife areas regularly, particularly during high‑profile events. But they describe that presence as more akin to surveillance than support.

Goldman says current criminal law frameworks position sex workers primarily as victims, and that repeated police visits do not automatically translate into safer conditions on the floor. “We’re not saying we don’t have bad working conditions and we don’t experience violence at work,” she says, but she believes workers themselves are best placed to confront that violence through organizing, rather than through constant police intervention.

The Montreal police service, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), says its nightlife operations focus on public safety, crime prevention, monitoring for exploitation or trafficking and ensuring the environment is safe for both workers and the public. The force says it has received positive feedback from some workers.

Organizers say they attempted to contact several strip clubs in Montreal to put management views on the record for this story, but did not receive responses.

How city zoning and permits shape the labour market

Montreal’s strip‑club economy is also shaped by urban planning decisions that, in practice, limit worker mobility and choice.

Goldman notes that opening new erotic establishments is impossible in most boroughs. In the districts where such businesses are allowed, zoning rules often confine them to specific pockets, some of which are hard for workers to access late at night.

Prospective owners face layers of regulation, including the need for special alcohol permits and public consultations. In a city where only a handful of neighbourhoods maintain more permissive rules – such as the Ville‑Marie borough, home to clubs like Café Cléopâtre – the result is a highly concentrated and tightly controlled market.

“This makes it that there’s even more competition between each other [the dancers] and the clubs have like a monopoly,” Goldman says. In that environment, dancers say refusing a shift, challenging fees or raising concerns about safety carries extra risk, particularly when a global sports event promises big crowds and higher takings for venues.

Historical echoes and international precedents

The current push for collective action sits in a longer arc of sex‑worker organizing in Canada and beyond.

In June 2000, for example, sex workers in Montreal gathered to discuss the formation of a federal political party, the Parti Populaire des Putes (popular party of prostitutes), as part of a broader decriminalization campaign. Academic work by Concordia sociology professor emeritus Frances Shaver highlights the wider stigma that affects all sex‑industry workers, including those who do not identify as sex workers or sell what the law defines as “sexual services.”

Elsewhere, dancers have successfully unionized. Strippers in two U.S. cities have formed unions, and in San Francisco, performers at the Lusty Lady peepshow eventually bought the theatre and turned it into a worker‑run co‑operative after first unionizing in the late 1990s. That branch ultimately closed in 2013 after a rent dispute with its landlord.

Legislatively, a number of countries – including Australia, New Zealand and Belgium – have taken steps towards decriminalizing parts of the sex industry, reshaping the way labour and safety are regulated. Within Canada, however, a search for “Canadian strippers’ union” still turns up primarily the Canadian rock band Stripper’s Union, rather than a formal labour organization.

Jennifer Worley, author of Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power, has traced a key structural shift in the industry to 1988, when the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco moved dancers from employee to contractor status shortly after introducing lap dancing. Shaver notes that such arrangements are cheaper for club owners and typically associated with larger numbers of dancers on rotation.

Some performers nevertheless prefer contractor status for the flexibility it can offer. Others argue that without legal recognition as employees, their ability to influence workplace rules, especially during major sports weekends, remains limited.

Unionizing as a route into the policy conversation

For many advocacy groups, decriminalizing sex work is the primary objective. But there is no single agreed path to get there, and workers themselves do not all share the same priorities. Comments on SWAC’s social media channels, for example, reveal divisions over pay structures and flexibility. Some fear that formalization or unionization could push undocumented or migrant workers further underground.

Goldman argues that those concerns need to be resolved through collective bargaining structures that currently do not exist in Canada’s strip‑club industry. She points to the era when dancers were paid hourly wages as evidence that different models are possible, even in a sector so intertwined with nightlife and sports tourism.

Her view is that building a recognized union could create legal and political leverage that forces lawmakers to reconcile labour law with the realities of a heavily policed, partially criminalized industry. The federal regulatory framework that governs buying and selling of sexual services remains central to that debate, and workers involved in the strike stress that they want to be at the table when legislative changes are discussed.

At the same time, the law around purchasing sexual services – including lap dances that simulate intercourse – is set out in Canada’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, summarised on the federal justice department’s own site at justice.gc.ca. Any effort to change dancers’ legal status or expand formal labour protections will have to be squared with that nationwide framework.

The sports economy’s stake in what happens next

For international sports audiences, the issues raised by Montreal’s strike may appear distant from the grid, the paddock and the podium. Yet the weekend’s success does not rest solely on lap times.

Major events such as Formula 1 grands prix rely on vast local ecosystems – from public transport and hospitality to security and entertainment – that extend well beyond the circuit. Strippers and erotic massage workers are part of that extended supply chain, absorbing the risks of volatile earnings, rising fixed costs and legal ambiguity in order to meet the influx of visitors.

When those workers strike at peak demand, they are not only challenging club owners but also testing how far a city’s sports‑tourism machine can run without them. For event organizers, sponsors and local authorities keen to present a seamless festival of speed, the labour conditions in neighbouring late‑night venues are rarely front‑and‑centre discussions, but they are woven into the same economic story.

Goldman is realistic about the scale of the challenge. The three Vancouver dancers who walked out in 1967 secured a deal within days. In contrast, building a cross‑industry union in Canada will likely be a longer and more complicated process.

Still, she says, the principle that drove her predecessors onto that Vancouver sidewalk remains intact. “I’ve always been a militant at heart and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but in the end, I still believe in organizing and that when you come together, things can get better.”