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10. Collective Interest Organization among Sex Workers
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· 221 ·· CHAPTER 10 · Collective Interest Organization among Sex Workers Gregor Gall The “sex work” discourse posits that the act of carrying out sexual services is an act of labor and work on par with others forms of “conventional” labor and work in the service sector. Some forms of labor have often been denoted as “erotic” and “emotional,” where the “heart” is managed and commercialized (Hochschild 2003). Consequently, those who provide sexual services are workers, and more specifically sex workers. And among sex workers, commentators, and social scientists, the sex work discourse has now been sufficiently established and accepted, and one of the significant issues emanating from it concerns the representation of sex workers’ interests at work. Within the sex work discourse, there is a justified assumption that sex workers have interests that contrast and conflict with those of sex industry operators (like club or brothel owners). As a result, sex workers cannot rely on sex industry operators to either represent their interests or provide a means of doing so. Rather, sex workers require independent means of interest representation—namely, by sex workers, of sex workers, and for sex workers. Because of the power imbalance between individual sex workers and sex industry operators, sex workers are compelled to band together and form collective organizations that seek to offset this asymmetry in power. Therefore, this chapter holds that sex workers as workers require the means by which to engage in the processes and outcomes of collective interest representation within both their site of work and their working lives. To consider these processes and outcomes, I examine three examples of nonunion collective forms of self-organization in Australia, Canada, and the United States. The decision to study nonunion forms arises because of 222 GREGOR GALL the difficulties that sex worker unionization projects have experienced to date (see Gall 2012). Therefore, I considered it important to study alternative forms of collective interest representation. Doing so can help in evaluating the generalized challenges facing sex-workers’ collective selforganization , including providing insights into types of sex worker interest representation that are based upon the labor union form. The generic context of studying any form of sex worker collective selforganization is that the conditions of sex workers’ labor is different from those of other workers in two key aspects. First, this labor is not regulated by the state in the same way as other work; instead, it is more heavily regulated , often through criminal codes and hostile public policies that are rooted in value systems that view it as a form of deviancy and as a social problem (see, for example, Cheryl Auger’s chapter in this volume). In many Australian states, prostitution is lawful but heavily regulated, while in Canada prostitution has been technically decriminalized since the 1970s but almost any activity associated with prostitution is illegal (e.g., living off the income of prostitution, soliciting clients, and running brothels). In California, strip shows and exotic dancing are lawful while prostitution is not. Second, this labor is also socially regulated by citizens; with the exception of loan sharks or those workers who produce nuclear weapons, sex workers face a level of public opprobrium that is unrivaled. The resulting stigmatization reinforces the criminalization of, and hostile public policies toward, sex workers. Given all of this, any form of sex worker organization for collective interest representation cannot solely focus on the site of work if it is to be effective. Labor unionism is the most obvious way for workers—including sex workers—to create appropriate and independent forms of interest representation . Of course, for sex workers, their labor unions need to be more than conventional labor unions that concentrate mainly on interest representation concerning work and employment in the workplace, especially given the aforementioned extra-workplace forms of sex work regulation. Sex workers’ labor unionism also needs to take into account that, for the most part, sex workers are not employed: they often have no contracts of employment and do not work together in large numbers. Instead, they often work alone and do not have a fixed place of work. In other words, the characteristics of sex workers’ places of work seldom conform to those other workplaces (such as factories) where unionization has been relatively easy. So it is not particularly surprising to find that projects to [18.117.153.38] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:25 GMT) COLLECTIVE INTEREST ORGANIZATION AMONG SEX WORKERS 223 unionize sex workers have been slow, fitful, fragile, and uneven despite many...