Canadian strippers establish their own pole position for Grand Prix weekend

A group of strippers in Montreal, Canada are planning to strike on Saturday, May 23, timed deliberately to coincide with the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix — one of the busiest and most lucrative weekends of the year for Montreal's strip clubs. 

The action is being coordinated by the Sex Work Autonomous Committee (SWAC), a group that has been building toward collective action for sex workers since 2019. 

The central grievance is one that labour lawyers and HR professionals across Canada will recognize immediately: workers who are classified as independent contractors but whose day-to-day conditions bear little resemblance to genuine self-employment. 

“If they say we work three shifts a week, we do; if they say we show full nude on stage, we do; if they say our heels are too short, we buy taller ones, because if we don't we will lose our jobs,” SWAC said in a statement to media.  

The strike's timing is intentional. By withdrawing labour on the most profitable weekend for strip clubs in the city — last year, 352,000 people attended the Canadian Grand Prix, according to Formula 1 World Championship — SWAC said it intends to demonstrate that the industry can’t function without the very labour it currently classifies under restrictive independent contractor terms. 

What actually makes someone an independent contractor? 

Melanie Samuels, chair of the Employment and Labour Group at Singleton Reynolds, says the legal test has always looked past the label on the contract to the substance of the relationship. A genuine independent contractor, says Samuels, is “taking their own risk of loss and profit, using their own tools, not taking day-to-day direction on their job duties” — and may work for more than one client. 

“If someone's setting their shift, directing them, giving them performance reviews, giving them benefits — those are indicia of an employee,” she says. 

Rich Appiah, principal at Appiah Law, maps the same terrain from a common law perspective. Decision-makers, he says, will examine the level of control the alleged employer has over a worker's activities — “how they do things and when they do things” — as well as whether tools are provided, the degree of financial risk the worker bears, and the degree of choice the worker has in how and when they perform their work.  

Critically, no single factor is determinative, according to Appiah: “"A decision-maker will look at all of the factors collectively and give its best judgment as to whether or not there's an employment relationship,” he says. 

Both lawyers also flag a point that HR leaders can’t afford to overlook: a written contract calling someone an independent contractor doesn’t settle the question. “There's much case law that suggests a written contract classifying a worker as an independent contractor is not determinative of the worker's status,” says Appiah. “A decision-maker will look at the factors and then determine on a factual basis whether someone has been working as an independent contractor or as an employee.” 

Where the dancers' case may be tested 

The Montreal dancers describe a picture that, on several of those factors, may look more like employment than self-employment. They’re required to comply with management-set shift requirements, stage presentation rules, and dress codes — yet without access to benefits or worker protections, according to SWAC. Workers who fall ill absorb the financial impact personally. Those injured on the job have no recourse. 

Appiah sees those facts as pointing toward employee status. “They will be scheduled for work just like any other employee and they'll be expected to work in a specific location, expected to perform a certain service, and their appearance would be dictated by the establishment that has engaged them,” he says. “Those factors to me suggest that the workers could be seen as employees very easily.” 

Samuels is more cautious, pointing to the absence of wages as a complicating factor. “The biggest indicia of employment is if you're getting paid for your work,” she says. “If they're not getting paid for their work — they're just being given a stage to do their own work on and then they give a cut for rent of the stage — that's more likely to be an independent contractor.” 

Adding to the complexity is the bar fee model. In its statement, SWAC said that last year, one Montreal club charged $110 per night during the five nights of Grand Prix weekend. At an average of 60 dancers per night, that club generated approximately $33,000 from bar fees alone. “Nobody should be paying to work, especially if you're not receiving a wage,” one dancer told CBC News. 

Samuels acknowledges the tension: “If it goes to a hearing, that's going to be a really interesting decision,” she says. 

Moving toward a tipping point 

The Montreal strippers’ action arrives as governments and courts across Canada are taking an increasingly protective stance on worker classification. Since June 2024, the Canada Labour Code has established a presumption that workers are employees unless the employer can prove otherwise — a change specifically designed to protect workers who are wrongly treated as independent contractors. 

Samuels notes that “governments across Canada are protective of employees who are potentially being exploited,” pointing to British Columbia's Temporary Foreign Workers Protection Act as one marker of that shift. “There's definitely a movement towards protecting more vulnerable workers who don't get benefits and who are working for one company,” she says. 

Appiah agrees, noting that populist actions of conservative governments has led to an increase in worker protections. “I definitely see a trend that would favour workers being classified as employees rather than independent contractors,” he says, adding that courts and tribunals tend to move more incrementally than legislatures, but the direction of both is the same. 

Appiah says he’s also seeing more workers challenging their classification outright — a trend he attributes, at least in part, to the rise in employers using contractor arrangements to avoid obligations. “I would suspect that more and more it's employers who are looking for the advantage of classifying workers as independent contractors so that they can avoid certain tax liabilities and some other responsibilities that go along with the characterization of workers as employees,” he says. 

Underlying factors of classification 

For HR executives, the practical takeaway from both lawyers is the same: the label in a contract is the starting point, not the finish line. 

“The big takeaway for HR professionals is to ensure that when they classify a worker as an independent contractor, all of the other factors that underlie that type of classification are present,” says Appiah. “Otherwise, they put themselves in hot water from a tax liability perspective, from a dismissal liability perspective, and from a health and safety liability perspective. It's really important that they get the classification correct.” 

The Montreal Grand Prix exotic dancer strike is an unusually public illustration of what happens when that gap between form and substance goes unaddressed for too long. For HR leaders in every industry, the question is whether their own contractor arrangements would survive the same scrutiny.