The day after Christmas, Jupiter Jetson got an e-mail from her employers at Sheri’s Ranch, one of the oldest legal brothels in Pahrump, Nevada. It contained a new employment contract that her bosses wanted her and her coworkers to sign as soon as possible. After reading through the terms, Jetson sat down on the floor of her living room and began to cry.

“I immediately knew that unless we figured something out, my career is over, because I can’t sign this,” she recalled thinking to herself. “If they won’t back down, what am I supposed to do?” For the past eight years, she’d worked at Sheri’s as a “courtesan”—the ranch’s term for its employees. She’d built a close working relationship with the brothel’s management, who trusted her and often came to her for her advice. The new contract—a copy of which The Nation has seen—felt like a betrayal of that bond.

It shows management attempting to secure extensive rights to workers’ likenesses as well as their intellectual property, including any “photographs, videos, [or] writing” created during the course of their employment at Sheri’s. The contract also slipped in language that would give Sheri’s management the power of attorney over its employees, which came as an even greater shock.

“Almost every section had something that led back to them owning our [intellectual property], them owning our likeness, them being able to sign our name on documents,” Jetson said. “We had an attorney look at it, who confirmed that we weren’t just overreacting. This was a truly cartoonishly evil contract that they were asking us to sign.”

For people like Jetson, who also models and works in the adult film industry, or Adalind Gray, who recently started a band, the thought that Sheri’s could swoop in to claim the products of their labor is unbearable. “A lot of us are artists,” explained courtesan Paloma Karr, who is also a writer and activist. “We have all sorts of other jobs. The implications are not well outlined on how far they could go, with how predatory they could possibly be.”

“This is how you end up finding out you’re the spokesperson for French fries in Germany, and you didn’t see a dime because you have signed an unlimited license to your photo for no additional compensation or consideration,” Jetson added. “This is not something that only affects people who have IP to protect. If you have a face, if you have an identity, and if you have a future, you have something to protect from this contract.”

Current Issue

March 2026 Issue

Faced with such a disturbing ultimatum from management, the workers at Sheri’s did what workers everywhere do: They got organized.

As soon as Jetson told her about the new contract, Molly Wylder, another longtime Sheri’s employee, hopped online and began mobilizing her coworkers. “Discord was a high-speed, highly effective method for us to get everything together,” she explained. A small server she’d originally set up as a place for workplace chatter rapidly morphed into a fast-moving organizing hub, and as the news spread, the courtesans began to plan their response. They knew that they’d have to take action, but weren’t sure how. “We tried individually reaching out,” Jetson said. “Then we tried crafting a group letter, where about 25 of us signed on to it. As time progressed, they started getting more and more insistent, and we realized they’re going to just start telling us that we need to sign or leave.”

As time went on, the tensions rose between management and the courtesans who still refused to sign. It became clear to Jetson that Sheri’s workers might need to call in reinforcements. She reached out to her friend Siouxsie Q, a writer, adult film director, and sex workers’ rights activist, for advice. Q drew on her past experience working at the Lusty Lady, the country’s first unionized strip club, and got Jetson in touch with Carrie Biggs-Adams, a union official in San Francisco. From there, the courtesans’ story made its way to the Nevada office of the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Marc Ellis, the president of CWA Local 9413 in Sparks, Nevada, was thrilled to get the call. He’d been waiting for them.

In 2023, after a months-long strike, dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, California, unionized with Actors Equity. Ellis took notice. “At that point, I literally went to my local and said, ‘If they’re doing it in California, we need to do it in Nevada, and we might as well do the brothels while we’re at it,’” he explained. “In my mind, their job is no different than mine. I work for AT&T; they work at Sheri’s. We both have legal jobs, and everybody should be treated with dignity and respect.”

A Zoom meeting was arranged. “The first thing [the union] said in the meeting was, ‘Immediately, upon taking this call, you have some protection from us,’ and the breath that I was able to let out hearing that…,” Wylder said. “The raging storm inside quieted a little bit. It was really nice to hear that somebody had our back, that wasn’t just other sex workers. We are such a tight community because we are all we have, and it’s nice not to be all we have.”

From there, things moved quickly—very quickly. As Ellis remarked, “What they’ve done in six days normally takes us six months.” Once Wylder, Jetson, Karr, and the other women on that Zoom call decided that unionizing was their best hope, they brought the idea to their coworkers, answering questions and whipping up enthusiasm through clandestine in-person conversations at work and open discussion online. “Through phone-treeing and using Discord, we got the vast majority of the ladies who work at the ranch to sign those cards in under 48 hours,” Wyler said proudly. “Sex workers are used to moving fast and breaking things, and we did. We had to. The threat was so imminent to all of us.”

On February 11, The Nevada Independent broke the news that the courtesans were officially unionizing with the CWA as the United Brothel Workers. If successful, they will join CWA Local 9413, whose members now include workers at AT&T, DirectTV, and St. Mary’s Hospital. But the courtesans paid a high price for their actions. 

Thanks to the ranch’s ever-present security cameras, Sheri’s management were already aware of the organizing effort, and responded to the petition for union recognition by unceremoniously firing Jupiter Jetson, Molly Wylder, Paloma Karr, Adalind Gray, Genevieve Dahl, and Gwen Bunny in quick succession. Some, like Jetson, received the news via e-mail; Gray was fired in person after first attempting to sign the new contract with an “under duress” notation. Thinking quickly, she started recording the conversation on her phone when management confronted her. “I was not breaking any laws, certainly not violating the contract, [but] they didn’t like that I was standing up for myself,” she explained. “And at that point, I was officially wrongfully terminated.”

Under Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, it is considered illegal retaliation for an employer to fire an employee for “organizing, joining, or supporting a union,” and CWA Local 9413 has already filed multiple unfair labor practices (ULPs) complaints with the National Labor Relations Board on their behalf. After organizing their historic union at “warp speed,” the United Brothel Workers will now have to wait for their ULPs to wind their way through a sluggish court docket.

As frustrating as the process may be after that initial rush, the workers are comforted by knowing that Ellis has their back. Sex workers have been organizing for centuries, but it is rare to see a union of CWA’s size and stature work so hard to bring them into the fold. “It has been really beautiful to be accepted by this huge organization that didn’t have to put their reputation or their name on the line,” Jetson says. “And they did it purely to protect a group of sex workers. It’s something that I’m just very honored to see in my lifetime.”

There’s one more legal wrinkle that needs to be ironed out before the United Brother Workers can start thinking about the contract they want. The women who work as courtesans at Sheri’s are hired as “independent contractors” by their employers (Jeremy Lemur, the brothel’s marketing director, provided a statement to Mother Jones that emphasized that specific phrasing multiple times). However, the terms of their actual jobs may not pass the “ABC test,” a legal framework used to determine whether a worker should be considered an employee. Under the NLRB, independent contractors are excluded from having the right to unionize, which has been a major thorn in labor organizers’ sides.

However, Nevada’s independent contractor criteria does cite the ABC test, and one of the three requirements that must be met to qualify is whether “the person has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the services, both under his/her contract of service.” As Ellis points out, workers at Sheri’s, who reside at the brothel during their two-week shifts, enjoy no such freedom. “Do they make their own schedule? Can they work from home? If I tell you, ‘You need to do this job, but you need to be here from this day to this day and work from this time to this time,’ you’re not a contractor, you are an employee,” he explains.

In the meantime, they’re raising funds for the terminated workers, speaking out about the union drive on social media, and asking supporters to sign a petition calling on Sheri’s to reinstate them. There’s no call to boycott the establishment; if anything, the terminated workers want the business to thrive. “We’re fighting to keep our jobs, not to get Sheri’s shut down,” Jetson says. “As a matter of fact, if you can please come and spend very good money on our coworkers in our absence, we would absolutely appreciate it. Whether they signed a union card or not, we stand in solidarity with our other coworkers.”

The United Brothel Workers may only be a few weeks old, but they’re acting like a union already. (They even have the perfect picket sign slogan ready to go, if their fight gets to that point: “Bust Nuts, Not Unions!”) Making history wasn’t their goal; they had just wanted to protect themselves and improve an unfair, predatory working environment. But as Jetson says, that’s what every other labor organizer throughout history has wanted, too. “Company towns, exploitative working contracts, things like that have always been what sparked the biggest progressions in labor rights,” she explained. “And really, that is what’s happening here, in the realest tradition of the American labor movement.”