Sex Worker Union Organising

One of the ways workers can secure better conditions is through trade unions’ negotiation with employers. Unions for sex workers are limited to countries were the sex industry is legal and quite formal, and to employed sex workers. Usually sex business managers go to great lengths to avoid admitting an employer/employee relationship with sex workers. Trade unions have also been reluctant to allow sex workers to join them even when it is technically possible. Resistance to unionisation comes from sex business managers and others who have financial interests in sex workers remaining unorganised or who believe that prostitution should, or could, be abolished. Professional associations [i.e. pressure groups] are easier to form than unions. They may be open to a wider range of people and can be more flexible in their approach to problem solving. In some countries such associations have a stronger tradition than either unions or regulations which govern the workplace. Professional associations generally promote self-regulation. They do not usually have the capacity to enforce standards as a trade union might.

The reporters flocking to cover our organizing drive often had a difficult time understanding what we do as ‘work’, but the job has always been defined in MY mind by the repetitive manual labor it demands. Punch a time clock, spot an open window, make eye contact, pout, wink, swivel your hips a little, put a stiletto-clad foot up on the window sill to reveal an eye-full of your two most marketable orifices, fondle your tits, smack your ass, stroke whatever pubic hair you haven’t shaven off, repeat these ten steps until the customer comes, then move on to the next window, repeat the process until your shift’s over, punch out. Some call it the fast food of the sex industry: We produce assembly-line orgasms.

This short chapter has two central tasks. The first is to give an overview of the size and nature of the sex industry. This can be achieved by marshalling together the available evidence that is derived from an array of secondary sources to demonstrate the overall size of the industry and the sizes of its constituent parts. The second is to very briefly sketch out an understanding of how this industry is now an integral part of contemporary society and economy, both in terms of national units (i.e. countries) and globally. The thrust of this consideration is not only to show how the sex industry is a major part of economic activity under late capitalism on a par with other leisure industries and activities but that it is one which has reached an unprecedented ‘lift off’ in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of the growth and development of information technologies. So the rising consumption of commmodified sex, sexual services and sexual artefacts has become a major cultural and consumerism ‘turn’. At the same time, it is also to suggest that the sex industry is a primary manifestation of, and tool by which, this social and political system of capitalism objectifies and commodifies sexuality, sexual desire, and women, their sexuality and their bodies in particular.

Almost exclusively prior to the mid-1980s, where there existed any collective organisations of sex workers, these were collective organisations of prostitutes where prostitutes themselves and an array of supporters constituted pressure groups to campaign for the general improvement in the conditions of prostitutes. These groups were neither trade unions nor trade unions of sex workers. Nevertheless, these groups have provided a source of inspiration to the collectivisation and unionisation of sex workers of the period under examination. By firstly constructing an agenda and terms of debate whereby the term and discourse ‘sex work’ emerged and by secondly organising themselves publicly and collectively, the prostitutes’ organisations have constituted both a discourse and a form of organisation to be emulated by other sex workers in terms of legitimacy, identification of interests, self-pride and self-confidence. Consequently, the attempt to create sex worker trade unionism has existed in an environment where some of the necessary conceptual groundwork has already been laid out and where breaking new ground is that bit easier with the precedent set by prostitutes. This chapter begins by considering these first examples of the self-organisation of prostitutes in the seven countries under study before then moving to provide an assessment of their strengths and weakness alongside an analysis of the trajectory they represent.

Although the history of organising prostitutes in the United States is replete with acronyms, the biggest advance in organising of sex workers has taken place under the auspices of the EDA, the Exotic Dancers’ Alliance, an organisation dating from the early 1990s. However, and of portent for the experience and success of contemporary unionising attempts in the US, it is worth noting a number of antecedents. Although not necessarily of any identifiable causal link, these show that initiatives to unionise have been taken in the past where grievances gave rise to attempts to organise collectively. Therefore, these instances suggest that the more recent attempts studied in this chapter are as not as exceptional as they might at first sight seem. Historically speaking, several attempts are reported to have been made to organise prostitutes and exotic dancers.¹ Burana (2001:150) recorded that other burlesque artistes in the 1950s and 1960s were members of the union, the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA). Although AGVA continued to exist, by the early 1980s, for reasons that appeared to be connected with racketeering, burlesque artistes and strippers ceased to be members of the guild (see also Corio and DiMona (1968)). More recently, a number of occurrences are noteworthy. Under a drive to unionise in 1983, two dancer union activists disappeared without trace and have never been found.

This chapter examines the process of collectivisation and unionisation of sex workers in Britain since the late 1990s. It consequently, and almost exclusively, focuses on the London-based International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) and the GMB general union adult entertainment (i.e. sex workers’) branch and their subsequent activities. The creation of the IUSW provides the starting point for this chapter. This is followed by the joining of forces of the IUSW with the GMB to form a GMB adult entertainment branch. From here the policies and activities of the IUSW/GMB adult entertainment branch, and responses of others to these, are described and assessed. Amongst the practical and historical obstacles facing the IUSW and the GMB adult entertainment branch are those concerned with the challenges of not only creating a new social project but one that is, in literal terms, starting from scratch and in agnostic and hostile environs. Finally, consideration is given to the future of the IUSW in Britain and the GMB adult entertainment branch with regard to the wider issues of interest formation and means of collective representation, that is, how workers who conduct sex work came to see themselves as ‘sex workers’ and how this has led to propensities towards collectivisation and unionisation.

This chapter examines sex worker organising in Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and New Zealand. It seeks to consider these examples of sex worker organising in their own right as well as attempting to provide the basis for considering sex worker union organising in Britain and the US in a broader cross-country context vis-à-vis differences in a number of factors such as attitudes towards the sale of sex, sexual services and sexual artefacts, the legal regulation of these and trade union traditions. The reason for not considering the development of sex worker organising in each country separately arises for two reasons. Firstly, that practically there was less available material on sex worker union organising in Australia, Germany and the Netherlands than compared to that available for the Britain and the US (see discussion of methodology earlier). Secondly, the two countries chosen for comparison, Canada and New Zealand, were selected because they have not yet experienced significant developments in sex worker union organising but have ample experience of sex worker organising through pressure groups. Therefore, Canada and New Zealand obviously had less in the way of developments with which to engage in close comparative analysis. Given the consideration of sex worker organising in Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and New Zealand, it is appropriate to also examine in this chapter the international dimension to the IUSW, particularly where one of its relatively strongest groups outside Britain is to be found in Canada, and to briefly survey other developments in other countries concerning sex worker self-organisation.

This chapter examines the general or ‘higher level’ forces and processes towards the collectivisation and unionisation of sex workers, rather than the more specific or ‘lower level’ tendencies which were examined in the previous three chapters. Collectivisation and unionisation are conceptually separate processes but most often in practice with regard to sex workers, both represent a singular process, which is referred to as becoming ‘organised’. However, in the next chapter concerning barriers to union organising, this generalisation is qualified through contextualisation. Consequently, the task of this chapter is to construct and present an overall analysis drawing on the preceding chapters, particularly Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Specifically, this chapter engages in the process of generalisation and abstraction by identifying the common features and characteristics across the seven countries under study in terms of the context, intention, process and outcome of the union organising of sex workers. At the same time, this chapter is also wise to the differences and dissimilarities between these contexts, intentions, processes and outcomes of sex worker union organising amongst the different sex worker sub-groups. Again, some of this latter material will be located in the following chapter. Therefore, Chapters 8 and 9 need to be held in conjunction with each other to gain the rounded totality intended.

While qualitative significance can be attributed to the emergence of the first instances of sex worker union organisation in Australia, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and the US in regard of the relative ‘underdevelopment’ of comparable organisation in Canada and New Zealand (and elsewhere), this cannot be correctly done without at the same time also locating this phenomenon in the context of the quantitative sparseness of the overall extent of this development. Although speaking of COYOTE and PONY in the 1980s, Plachy and Ridgeway’s (1996:34) observation is equally applicable to sex worker union organisations of the 1990s and 2000s. They commented: ‘The reality beyond this [sex work] debate is that only a tiny minority of sex workers have ever heard of these organisations’. Alternatively, and speaking of the 1990s, Altman (2001:102) argued: ‘Most people who engage in sex for money have no sense of this [the sex work discourse] comprising their central identity, and they may well be repelled by attempts to organize around an identity they would strongly reject’. Similar points about the degree of representative-ness by those who subjectively see themselves as sex workers for all those who are objectively sex workers have been raised by others (e.g. Bernstein 1999:111; Zatz 1997:283). Therefore, and in conjunction with the previous chapter, this chapter examines the forces and processes that have served to act as barriers to the unionisation and union organisation of sex workers.

This has been an exploratory study of sex worker unionisation and union organisation for two reasons. One reason concerns the implications of examining the embryonic nature of the salient intentions, processes and outcomes. The second concerns the consequences of the enforced truncation of the research methods deployed. Together, these mean that the account and analysis contained herein need to be viewed in the following terms: laying out the first attempt to establish the broad and general terms and framework concerning sex worker union organisation across a number of national economies-cum-societies. Hopefully, the research will then constitute something of an opening sortie and ‘work-in-progress’ for the wider field. The research methods used were appropriate and fruitful to this task at the chosen level of the unit of analysis. The book has sought to operate on the terrains of meso- and macro-, and general and specific levels as a means to integrate analysis of the processes of accumulation and exchange, identities, ideology, labour, markets and regulation within the dynamics and form of capitalism. Particular attention has been paid to the levels of the work setting, broader social institutions and wider social relations. Throughout this, sex work and its work settings have been recognised not just as relatively diverse phenomena, but an explanation for diversity has been put forward with regard to contingency and indeterminacy for the processes and outcomes of wage-labour and consequent implications for unionisation.