Red Dog Café Dancers Allege Employee Misclassification

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A proposed hybrid class and collective action lawsuit claims defendant 10^th Street Taverns Inc., which does business as Red Dog Café, and two individuals unlawfully misclassified exotic dancers at their Oklahoma City establishment as independent contractors to avoid paying proper wages. The plaintiff claims the Red Dog Café violated both state and federal laws with its wage evasion scheme, in which the dancers were allegedly unlawfully forced to share their earned tips with the defendants.

The complaint notes that when applying the “actual economic reality test”—used by Oklahoma courts to determine the existence of an employer-employee relationship in a workplace—to the dancers’ situation, proposed class/collective members should have been treated as proper employees by the defendants.

The case summarily claims the dancers were deprived of rightful compensation as a result of the defendant: