Thrusting their crotches before a construction site backdrop, four male-model types hoist hammers up to their gym-perfected torsos, smiling as if there is no other place they’d rather be than the stage of the Rio Hotel & Casino in the Las Vegas Chippendales show. Women of all ages gawk and scream as the men rip off their white tank tops and toss them into the audience, strip off their pants, swivel, and display their tanned butt cheeks. It’s one of the few places in the world where women are ogling and men are being ogled.
The Chippendales—what the performers themselves are called—come from a range of ethnic and educational backgrounds, are straight and gay, married and single, but they have a few things in common. According to dancers, as recently as 2019, organizational rules dictate that they’re at least six feet tall, have a six-pack, and have no more than a quarter inch of body hair.
Chippendales is also the name of one of the oldest male strip shows in the nation. Bachelorette and other parties travel from across the United States and the world to gaze at the nearly nude men, paw at their pecs during lap dances, grab their butts, and stare at their genitals, which are always enrobed in hand-crafted pouches (full-frontal nudity is heavily restricted on the Las Vegas Strip).
It’s easy to forget that the Chippendales, while thrusting to techno music as smoke billows in the air, are workers doing a job. Onstage showers and pantomimed sex on silk sheets are not a typical day at the office. Chippendales, originally featuring shirtless hunks in bow ties and cuff links when it was founded in 1979, has nearly always been seen as a curiosity or a joke (see: Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live in 1990). Forty-six years on, the Chippendales are asking to be taken seriously.
In October 2024, two Chippendales dancers, a married gay couple who also work as interior decorators, attempted to do something the show’s workers have never done: unionize. One half of the couple, Freddy Godínez, came up with the idea. Godínez looks like an AI-generated model, with a perfect five-o’clock shadow, a rippling eight-pack, and taut, tattooed forearms. He had no dancing experience when he started with Chippendales at age thirty-eight, but learned from his husband, Alexander Stabler, a forty-year-old with spiky blonde hair and a physique that gives away his background performing rope acrobatics with Cirque du Soleil.
Like nearly all of the nineteen Chippendales dancers, Godínez and Stabler worked part-time while holding down other jobs. Chippendales explicitly tells workers that they should treat the job as a side gig, according to multiple performers. Wyatt Hopkins, a Viking-
esque muscled man with ginger hair, took the job with Chippendales as an on-call position while he continued performing in Zombie Burlesque and Dita Von Teese’s burlesque show at The Venetian Resort. Usually, he danced with Chippendales once a week. Hopkins says he felt “disrespected” by the pay: “However, I chose to focus on the value of working alongside longtime colleagues, which was far more important to me than the compensation itself.”
Some Chippendales work all nine shows a week, which run Tuesday through Sunday (Friday through Sunday are two-show days). Until November, the tattooed and chiseled Chippendale Emerald Depree was a nine-show guy—as full-time as cast members get, working about thirty hours a week. A typical day at Chippendales usually begins around 6:30 p.m., when nine of the cast members arrive for rehearsal. They twist and thrust to the beat of Bad Bunny’s newest song, learning blocking, because shows change regularly to keep up with the TikTok crowd. At 7:15 p.m. there’s a show meeting, and then they suit up in their cowboy costumes, starting with their bespoke “cock socks,” and the show begins. They run through a series of choreographed dances to songs like “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” ripping off their white tank tops with gusto and tossing them into the audience, where eager fans clamor for them like foul balls at a Yankees game.
After the show, they trade their thongs for black slacks and bow ties, and line up onstage in their shirtless glory for photos with the primarily female audience members, who shell out $35 each for the privilege. “They tell guests that this is how we make our tips, because we can’t get tipped in the casino because of gaming regulations,” Godínez says. In fact, performers only receive fifty cents of that $35. When Depree complained about the low photo pay, he says the show’s higher-ups told him that the Chippendales used to make only twenty-five cents per photo. “I was like, ‘You guys are trying to make us feel better because we’re making an extra quarter?’ ” he adds.
After photos, which last from thirty to forty-five minutes, they head to the “Flirt Lounge,” Sharpies in hand, to meet with throngs of audience members, clutching the men’s discarded ripped tank tops, waiting for autographs. The Chippendales quaff their two free staff drinks in between scribbling their signatures, sometimes on women’s cleavage. After fifteen minutes of fan service, they are free to leave, around 10:30 p.m, unless they have an 11 p.m show.
Stabler started at Chippendales four years ago as a “specialty act,” bringing the thrill of the Cirque rope show to a male strip revue that competes not only with four other male revues but also with illusionist David Copperfield, the Blue Man Group, Shania Twain, and concerts in the Sphere. When Chippendales offered Stabler $100 per show and no benefits, he was disappointed. “But I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and we’re taught that opportunities are scarce, and so I negotiated what I thought felt fair,” Stabler says. What he thought was fair was $140 a night for his aerial silks performance and $110 for when he was just dancing.
Soon after Stabler was hired, he learned there was a job opening for a part-time show host. He immediately thought of his husband, Godínez, who already had a Chippendale’s body and happened to be training for a fitness competition and taking vocal lessons. Godínez was hired and given an offer similar to Stabler’s: $100 per show. Despite low pay and requests that the buff Godínez slim down and become tanner, Godínez saw Chippendales as a good opportunity. But at some point, after a year of being in the show, he changed his mind.
Godínez wondered if anyone else felt Chippendales dancers deserved better treatment. Many of the dancers did. A dancer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said he had been brushed off when he asked for $25 more per show after a positive performance review. Hopkins remembers saying that “other shows on the [Las Vegas] Strip that show as much skin as we do get paid a lot more.” He says he’d asked Chippendales to match the rate he got for Zombie Burlesque and was told “there’s no budget.” Depree says a union was necessary because the work environment “was toxic.” He says he wasn’t treated with respect and was refused a day off for the Sabbath. “The dance captain told me the reason why I can’t go on tours is because … they don’t like Black people in Germany,” Depree says.
Godínez, who has spent his career in hotel management and has a master’s degree in urban planning, decided that something could be done. He convinced Stabler that a union was not only feasible but necessary.
Godínez reached out to Actors’ Equity Association, which agreed to represent the performers. “Organizing is actually pretty similar, whether it’s a strip club or a theater or a McDonald’s,” says David Levy, Actors’ Equity’s director of communications. “At the end of the day, it’s about the workers saying we deserve better.” Actress and model Brooke Shields, who is president of Actors’ Equity, is fully supportive. “They work hard; they should be compensated, end of story,” Shields tells The Progressive in an email. She’s been a fan of Chippendales for decades and even celebrated her nineteenth birthday with them in the 1980s. “We just had the best, best time. It felt, in a weird way, wholesome,” Shields remembers. “They were such nice guys.”
The day in October before Actors’ Equity was going to announce they were working with the Chippendales dancers, Godínez and Stabler met with management. They said they loved Chippendales, but they wanted “a livable wage, access to benefits, proper compensation for merch,” Stabler says. They asked management in the meeting to voluntarily recognize the union. But the talk didn’t go well, and that did not happen.
While most of the Chippendales The Progressive spoke with support the union—the majority of dancers signed authorization cards—not all do. Depree said that the better-paid dancers are not supporting the union. “They’re not going to want to go against the hand that’s feeding them,” he says. The anonymous dancer adds that “[Guys] that have been there for a long time, for some reason, don’t agree with [the union].”
Godínez and Stabler haven’t taken the stage since Actors’ Equity announced the union on October 8. It’s not because they don’t want to thrust their hips to the cheers of a margarita-fueled crowd. It’s because they’ve been left off the schedule. Hopkins also says he has seen a dramatic reduction in hours. Since October 2024, he has only been scheduled once. Depree was fired after he didn’t show up to work on the Sabbath. Actors’ Equity says all dancers known to support the union have been left off the schedule. At the end of 2024, the union filed an unfair labor practice claim, alleging retaliation and seeking the workers’ reinstatement and other remediations.
In January, the Chippendales show moved venues for the first time in more than twenty-four years to the Linq Hotel & Experience. The entire cast was forced to reaudition for their jobs on January 3. Stabler, Godínez, and three other vocal union supporters were not rehired. “It’s a very clear and transparent union-busting tactic to weed out any supporters,” Stabler says. “We looked good, and we nailed the audition. And prior to October, when we filed for the union, Freddy and I were star employees.”
Management has hired white-shoe antiunion law firm Fisher Phillips to represent the company—not an unusual reaction. Retaliation is a common response to unionization efforts. “One in twenty of the people that have supported unions and tried to organize in a given year are being illegally fired,” says Harry C. Katz, the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University—and he thinks this is an undercount. While attitudes toward unions have become more positive in the past decade, particularly among younger workers, Katz says only 6 percent of private sector employees in the United States are unionized, compared to 33 percent in the 1950s.
Since the unionization push, the show’s casts have shrunk from nine or ten performers down to seven or eight. The acrobatic silks act Stabler performed has been scrapped, now that he’s off the schedule and the other performer who does it is injured. “Not only is it harming the folks that are not being scheduled, but it’s also harming the folks that are in the show, because they’re having to do a lot more,” Stefanie Frey, director of organizing and mobilization at Actors’ Equity, tells The Progressive.
Some dancers have told Stabler that they should pull back on the fight because it’s been difficult for management, but Hopkins disagrees.
“We love what we do. We love the opportunity that we’ve been given, but [Chippendales] doesn’t have a show without us,” Hopkins says. “Why can’t we get higher wages? Why can’t we get these benefits? When we get up there, we’re practically naked. We should be compensated for that.”
Management representatives did not respond by press time to requests for comment on this story.