Exotic dancers in Kansas are now able collect unemployment insurance following a state Supreme Court ruling in favor of the workers.
Club owners will now have to contribute to the state unemployment insurance fund now that the dancers are seen as employees of their respective clubs and not as independent contractors.
This ruling comes after a dancer at Club Orleans in Topeka filed an unemployment claim in 2005.
The problem comes from the fact that the dancers earn tips, while the club "rents" the space for them to perform.
But the Kansas Department of Labor argued that the dancers are given a set of rules pertaining to how they interact with customers and the amount they can charge depending on what kind of dance they perform, similar to a set of rules given to employees.
Attorney Michael Merriam who represents the company that has owned the Topeka club since 2002 told 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. "And the court relied on that fact alone to say we had control over them and that made them employees."
Merriam also said that the company has no plans to appeal the court ruling.
"This is the Kansas Supreme Court," he said. "This is where it ends."
But the ruling only applies to the workers who were involved in the case, according to a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Labor.
"All decisions concerning unemployment are based on the applicable law and the specific facts of each case," she said.
There is a longstanding practice of categorizing exotic dancers under the label of independent contractors, excluding them from the right of collecting benefits.
And this is not the first occurrence of the issue reaching the courts.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney whose client base has included dancers from Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut, said that under federal law and most state laws, employees are required to make at least minimum wage plus tips in order to receive employee benefits--an issue that exotic dancers continue to grapple with.