Sex work into - what work?

One recurring theme in the anti-sex work rhetoric is that sex work is demeaning and degrading and nobody would choose it if it weren't for other pressures.

The conclusion that the ASW campaigners draw from all this is that we should get rid of sex work, and then women wouldn't be demeaned or degraded any more.

I wish to draw an analogy with one of the dirtiest, most dangerous, least-respected jobs that is/was recognised as a proper job: coal mining.

Now, I have no direct connection with coal mining. Although my father's side of the family came from an area famed for coal mining, he was not a coal miner, nor was his father. Possibly some of his friends or his father's friends were, I have never really asked. Nevertheless, with our strong siocialist roots, the story of the National Union of Mineworkers is an important part of history that we have learned and passed on. Also, the coal mining industry has spawned a cultural heritage in the form of folk songs and stories as well. From this source material, I intend to draw my analogy.

A famous song, "Close the Coalhouse Door", written by Alex Glasgow, recounts in bitter fashion the hardships that miners faced and the risks at went with the coal trade: "there's blood inside, there's bones inside, there's bairns inside" each verse outlining just why the miners wouldn't wish their trade on the next generation.

Because of how dangerous the mining trade has always been, the NUM had always been one of the fiercest of the trade unions in this country. It was the NUM that led the General Strike of 1926, and who coined the slogan of "not an hour on the day, not a penny off the pay" in the battle to protect workers' rights.

However, in the latter half of the 20th Century, coal became less and less important to industry and the battles of the NUM shifted from being about working conditions, pay, and hours. They became instead about the right to have a job at all. The culmination was the great Miners' Strike of 1984-5. At the time, a great many people on the side of the pit closures were arguing exactly the same line as the ASW campaigners now argue about sex work. "It's such a dirty, filthy, degrading job - why on Earth would you want to keep a job like that? Take the pay-off and be happy!" In a similar round of pit closures in the early 1990s, a similar tactic was used again.

Despite these arguments, and despite the fact that the miners themselves understood too well how dirty and degrading their work was, they fought on to save their comrades' jobs. Because pride and self-respect for themselves (and partly built up through patriarchal expectations of men) meant that in their eyes, any job was better than no job at all. They fought on for each other, until eventually sheer poverty drove them back to work - those who had jobs to return to.

The sacked miners did not return to work. The promised economic redevelopment and renewal was never delivered. Most of them never worked again, or at least, they never worked for any job above poverty-level wages. In the regions that used to service the coal industry, unemployment remains extremely high. I don't have a source for it, but I seem to recall reading or hearing that other problems related to poverty: drugs, alcohol, violence, racism, etc are all also very high in those regions. These problems are now affecting a second generation of people living in those areas - quite possibly a third generation already.

And, however degrading and dirty the jobs were, having no job at all is experienced as being even more degrading and dirty. And at least on this point, I can say that my experience of being unemployed gives me personal data from which to make this remark.

So what I say to the people who campaign against sexwork, who want to see it banned and eradicated, is this: how will you provide the economic renewal and redevelopment? Will you be able to promise it and keep that promise? Do you imagine that at the moment when sex work ceases to exist, that all the ex-hookers will suddenly walk straight into new jobs as secretaries, nurses, saleswomen, etc? That they will instantly find themselves nice, clean, "respectable" work instead?

When a person in a dirty, demeaning, degrading job, loses their job, they don't go and get a better job. They have no job at all. In the UK, where we still have something that passes for a decent welfare system, they might just be able to survive, but in a country where there is inadequate (or no) social security, what will happen is that they starve. They suffer. They die. Or they take work that is even more dangerous, even more demeaning, even more dirty. And yes, I include the USA as a place that has inadequate welfare.

If you are calling for the abolition of the sex industry, this is what you are wishing on women: poverty, starvation, suffering and death.

A prostitute trying to find any other job these days, will have no chance. Having convictions on her criminal record would be a huge barrier for starters (even though discrimination is illegal, proving it is next to impossible). Why? Because prostitution is illegal and stigmatised.

So what's the answer?

Well, strange as it may sound to some people out there, sex work doesn't have to be dirty, dangerous, degrading and demeaning. And it doesn't have to be an economic trap, a black hole from which it is impossible to escape.

Coal mining, by its very nature, involved dirtiness (from the coal dust), danger (from the fact of being miles underground, poisonous gases, rockfalls, etc), and is looked on generally with less than respect with those outside of coalmining communities. But there were still plenty of advancements made over the course of two centuries to make it safer, cleaner and even occasionally more respected.

Sex work, on the other hand, is dangerous largely because of the disrespect with which sex workers are seen; it is dirty only because the stigma attached to it means that it is harder for sex workers to have clean environments to work in; sex workers are disrespected largely because of laws against sex work, and the patriarchal notions of obscenity behind those laws.

It is simplicity itself to make sex work safer, cleaner, and more respected (well, this one may take a little longer than the other two). The ASW campaigners say we mustn't do so, though, because it "makes it easier for them to stay in the job", it "panders to men's sense of entitlement", it "normalises abuse". No. It makes it easier for them to survive long enough to get out. It gives them the right to tell a client to piss off if that client is dangerous or threatening. It gives sex workers protection from abuse.

The simplest things to do to help prostitutes leave prostitution are: to make prostitution a job just like any other; to allow prostitutes to use bank accounts just like anyone else (that way, as a self-employed person, they can give their local bank manager as an employment reference if they want to move to a non-sex work job); to make drug rehabilitation easier for addicts to access; to make it easier (that is, make it possible) for them to complain to the police about abusive clients without fear of being arrested or spied upon themselves by the police. In other words, decriminalise sex work!

This stuff isn't rocket science. Heck, I was able to figure it out all by myself! But, crucially, a lot of these ideas are coming directly from the sex workers themselves, and that carries a lot more weight than any intellectual approach.