Strippers Unemployment: Kansas Supreme Court Rules Exotic Dancers Have the Right to Employment Benefits

In a Kansas Supreme Court ruling strippers have won the right to basic employment benefits.

Salon.com reported that a former exotic dancer was filing for unemployoment against Club Orleans of Topeka seven years ago. The ruling comes after this and establishes that strip clubs cannot treat its strippers as freelance, independent contractors, which most strip clubs do around the country.

Melissa Gira Grant said in the Atlantic last year, "By managing dancers like employees but putting them on the books as independent contractors, club owners get out of paying dancers the benefits they're legally entitled to, which could include worker's compensation, unemployment, and health insurance if they qualify."

Salon.com reported that Bubbles Burbujas who is the founder of the blog Tits and Sass and an exotic dancer said that though it is a win for exotic dancers, its not as simple as it may

"Once you are classified as an employee, the money you receive for private dances and on stage can be considered as money paid to the club for a service, and therefore the club gets to decide what percentage of that you might get to keep," she said to Salon.com. "In every club where one of these lawsuits has succeeded, the end result has been that the amount the dancers pay out to the club increased."

The ruling decided that club owners must contribute to state unemployment insurance funds.

Michael Merriam, an attorney for the company that owned Club Orleans since 2002, said to ABC News that the ruling "was incorrectly decided."

"The court relied almost entirely on the fact that we had some house rules which were requested by the dancers. They were designed to keep everything legal," Merriam said to ABC News. "And the court relied on that fact alone to say we had control over them and that made them employees."

The client doesn't have plans to appeal the decision that the supreme court made.

A spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Labor said to ABC News, "All decisions concerning unemployment are based on the applicable law and the specific facts of each case."