Community Chat

[Laura14]

I have worked in the industry for the past 15 years and I'm in the South.  I have never in all my 15 years and 20 plus clubs ever come across religious discrimination for membership.    

The biggest issue we have had in the past decade across three different ownerships in my lifetime has been fraud with supposed family members because you want to keep the integrity of the membership program.  For most clubs that means a legal spouse (not girl/boyfriend of the week) and kids under 25 who are covered under one set of dues.

It never fails that you have someone trying to put their cousin, neighbor, mistress (actually had that once), friend, etc on their membership so one person doesn't have to buy their own membership and pay the associated fees.  

Understand that, if you join a club, you will be signing a contract and make sure you understand that and how to get out of it if you end up not liking it or the people.  Most clubs offer guest programs and introductory memberships so you can see if you like it before you commit to it.  

[Moonchilde]

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@Laura14 wrote:

I have worked in the industry for the past 15 years and I'm in the South.  I have never in all my 15 years and 20 plus clubs ever come across religious discrimination for membership.    

The biggest issue we have had in the past decade across three different ownerships in my lifetime has been fraud with supposed family members because you want to keep the integrity of the membership program.  For most clubs that means a legal spouse (not girl/boyfriend of the week) and kids under 25 who are covered under one set of dues.

It never fails that you have someone trying to put their cousin, neighbor, mistress (actually had that once), friend, etc on their membership so one person doesn't have to buy their own membership and pay the associated fees.  

Understand that, if you join a club, you will be signing a contract and make sure you understand that and how to get out of it if you end up not liking it or the people.  Most clubs offer guest programs and introductory memberships so you can see if you like it before you commit to it.  

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The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; for several years thereafter there were test lawsuits, and there are still "public vs private" lawsuits today. Mostly though, the great majority of clubs and organizations do not restrict membership because it costs time and money to defend, is bad PR, and they often lose in court.

So no, in the past 15 years, you were unlikely to see any blatant discrimination, but it certainly existed through the 1970s and probably 1980s.

[Laura14]

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@Moonchilde wrote:

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@Laura14 wrote:

I have worked in the industry for the past 15 years and I'm in the South.  I have never in all my 15 years and 20 plus clubs ever come across religious discrimination for membership.    

The biggest issue we have had in the past decade across three different ownerships in my lifetime has been fraud with supposed family members because you want to keep the integrity of the membership program.  For most clubs that means a legal spouse (not girl/boyfriend of the week) and kids under 25 who are covered under one set of dues.

It never fails that you have someone trying to put their cousin, neighbor, mistress (actually had that once), friend, etc on their membership so one person doesn't have to buy their own membership and pay the associated fees.  

Understand that, if you join a club, you will be signing a contract and make sure you understand that and how to get out of it if you end up not liking it or the people.  Most clubs offer guest programs and introductory memberships so you can see if you like it before you commit to it.  

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The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; for several years thereafter there were test lawsuits, and there are still "public vs private" lawsuits today. Mostly though, the great majority of clubs and organizations do not restrict membership because it costs time and money to defend, is bad PR, and they often lose in court.

So no, in the past 15 years, you were unlikely to see any blatant discrimination, but it certainly existed through the 1970s and probably 1980s.

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Of course it did.   

I can honestly tell you the only discrimination I've seen in the past two decades in this industry was with same sex couples.  And it wasn't intentional discrimination.  Our state law (before the Supreme Court ruling) legally defined spouses as a man and a woman.  As a corporation doing business in that state, if we say spouse in our contracts, it's automatically defined under the state law we operate in.  We have to enforce that in our contracts.

The three owners I have worked for were human beings with common sense and usually made an exception on a quiet case by case basis but a local club here did not. They refused to be in violation and they had to go to court after being sued.  They won even though they didn't.  In the end, both sides were out a lot of money and bad PR to boot all because both sides tried to do the right thing.    

Personally, I think we need to be careful about dredging up the past.  We've come a long way since the times you've mentioned and we need to acknowledge that desperately, especially now.  Not everything we see or read about is as it appears.  Most people, including those that run businesses, really want to do the right thing by people but also not get taken advantage of in the process.