Seattle ? Eight-hour days, five days a week, and the flexibility to stay home if one of her children is sick.

It’s better than selling insurance over the phone, or working as an assistant in a nursing home. In those jobs, she worked 12-hour shifts, sometimes six days a week.

But dancing in Seattle’s strip clubs, Jessica is an independent contractor. She chooses her hours. She can take a day off whenever she wants.

“I have the freedom to do that without getting in trouble,” said Jessica, a 25-year-old single mother.

Next month, Seattle voters will decide whether to repeal strict new rules that could kill a dancer’s business. An ordinance approved by the City Council last year targeted the lap dance – the staple of any dancer’s income – by requiring performers to stay 4 feet away from customers, banning direct tipping and forcing clubs to turn up the lights.

Mayor Greg Nickels proposed the rules after a judge declared a city moratorium on strip clubs illegal. The goal of the ordinance, which has not yet taken effect, is to discourage new clubs. Police say it also will ensure that dancers and customers at the city’s four strip clubs are following current laws against lewd behavior.

For their part, club owners have spent nearly $1 million on the Referendum 1 campaign to overturn the ordinance, arguing the rules are both intrusive and impractical. Dancers are conspicuously absent from the lawn signs and television ads.

Society has so many stereotypes about strippers, Jessica said, it is sometimes just tiresome. Some people see them as corrupting. Others see them as exploited. Sitting in her living room the other day, Jessica and another dancer, Tina, said they were just working women.

For safety reasons, neither woman wanted her full name used. Both go by stage names at work. The women described the day-shift drill: a line of dancers in near-darkness at noon, waiting for customers to walk in.

As Tina does her lap dances, dressed in a bikini or lingerie, she has one thought on her mind: “This much closer to the electric bill.”

The women have heard talk in the media about how dancers earn so much money they can buy new cars and houses. Maybe that happens, they said. But not for them. Jessica makes about $40,000 a year, she says – enough to support her two sons, if she buys Halloween decorations after the holiday, and saves them for next year.

Current law allows them to dance naked on stage, but requires some clothing when they are talking on the floor to customers, or performing lap dances. The only real advantage to the table dance is proximity: Customers are inches away from their fantasy, rather than the 6 feet that is supposed to separate them from the dancers on stage.

The new issue here, the women said, is society’s sense of outrage over the job they do. It’s clear in the wording of the ordinance, the language about how clubs are “detrimental” to society.

The women have a vision of what Seattle will look like if the new rules take effect. Talk about crime, they said: Men once satisfied with a table dance will move on to escort services. Street prostitution will go up.

And hundreds of dancers could find themselves out of work with no funds available to retrain them. They’ll be just plain out of work.

With four years of community college between them, the women said it would be hard to find jobs that would both pay the bills and allow them to spend time with their children. Public assistance, they said, was not an option.