New York City is where many young dancers go, hoping to find their fortunes; it is also where many studio owners wait, hoping to make theirs.
Today Granovsky & Sundaresh filed a class action lawsuit against Body & Pole Inc., a boutique fitness company in Manhattan that offers classes in pole dancing and aerial fitness. You can read the complaint here.
The lawsuit alleges that for years Body & Pole has finagled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free menial labor from aspiring dancers and aerialists.
Body & Pole invites performers to apply for its so-called Work-Study program. According to the lawsuit filed today, Work-Study participants are made to do 14 hours (or more) of menial labor every week for Body & Pole: cleaning Body & Pole’s toilets, scrubbing its sinks, doing its laundry, selling its merchandise to the public. But the Work-Study participants aren’t paid for their work; the lawsuit alleges that they are just given free access to Body & Pole classes and programming.
Of course this kind of barter is exactly what is prohibited by American minimum wage laws. If you work in New York City, you have to be paid $15 per hour. And you are entitled to be paid in U.S. dollars, not just in company credit.
But even considered as barter, Body & Pole’s Work-Study program was a raw deal, the lawsuit alleges. The average Work-Study gave about 750 hours of labor to Body & Pole each year—which is worth $11,250, even at the New York City minimum wage. But all the Work Studies got in exchange, the lawsuit alleges, were classes and other privileges that Body & Pole sold to the paying public for at most a few thousand dollars a year.
So this was not an innocent unpaid internship, according to the lawsuit. In fact, almost none of the Work-Study participants were students enrolled in any academic program at all. And if a Work-Study forgot to do something as simple as unload the laundry, according to the lawsuit, Body & Pole’s managers would discipline them by suspending their privileges to take classes at the studio.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are three former Work-Study participants, Piper Johnson, Rebecca Pardue and Ro Pluviose. They seek to recover unpaid wages, as well as other damages, for every current and former participant in Body & Pole’s Work-Study program 2016. Their attorneys are Benjamin Rudolph Delson and Alex Granovsky of Granovsky & Sundaresh.