Sex Worker Unionization: Global Developments, Challenges, and Possibilities by Gregor Gall (review)

Gregor Gall’s monograph, Sex Worker Unionization, is better than his previous book on this topic but ultimately disappoints. Rather than focusing on the astonishing and innovative ways that sex workers and other gig economy workers have organized to wield their collective power, Gall criticizes these often-marginalized workers for not following the established procedures of industrial relations. The author presents research on sex workers and sex worker unions (mostly) in the Global North, identifying obstacles to cooperation with established labor unions and outlining their conflicting objectives. This rich data documents decades of struggles by sex workers individually and jointly for state recognition of their grievances as workers, citizens, and human beings. Gall is particularly effective at showing the limits of unionization in the few industrialized nations that have decriminalized prostitution in whole or in part. In anticipation of legalization in 2002, officials of Ver.di, Germany’s Unified Service Sector Union, expanded the union’s internal structure to accommodate sex worker representation, drafted a standard contract, and set up a legal services program. Ver.di assumed that legalization would lead to proletarianization and that, as a result, sex workers would demand contracts. The union then strong-armed a dozen brothel owners into accepting these contracts. Sex workers, however, rejected the contracts because they didn’t provide sufficient benefits. Gall sites social stigma combined with sex workers’ lack of social capital and ignorance about the benefits of registering with tax officials as sex workers as the reason for the union’s failure. Another rather obvious explanation is that neither lawmakers nor union officials ever consulted with sex workers who already had well-formed ideas about how best to improve their earnings and working conditions.

When sex workers take part in the decriminalization process, as happened in New Zealand and Australia, the result has been greater independence and even less support for unionization. Gall maintains that larger society’s lack of support for unions is the primary reason for sex workers’ failure to embrace unionization. Yet his narrow definition of labor unions as entities to “reduce competition among workers, and, thereby, leverage up the economic value of the terms and conditions given by employers in the wage-effort bargain” (12) is essentially inoperable in practical as well as ideological terms. While workers may bargain with owners of strip clubs, brothels, escort agencies, massage parlors, porn producers, advertising websites, reviewers, agents or other pimps (including government workers, landlords, and even union representatives), these (male) intermediaries are not “employers” but facilitators. There is a long history of resistance to these third parties who have bullied their way into the act, often by offering dubious protection in exchange for a share of the workers’ earnings. Criminalization and ill-advised regulation compounds labor exploitation, preventing workers from conspiring to set fees, prohibiting them from working together lest they be charged with brothel-keeping, and deeming advertising as solicitation. Thus, laws and regulations, rather than consciousness, prevent collectivization of and control over services and working conditions.

Read creatively, Gall’s study offers guidance to union organizers who seek new members from the gig economy. The “Uberization” of the workforce by “disruptive” tech entrepreneurs relies on largely unregulated independent contractors who do domestic work, taxi people, deliver goods, perform household tasks, and do other types of piece work and crowdwork. For many aggrieved jobbers, their primary dispute is to be recognized as workers with specific labor rights and social welfare entitlements, rather than as independent operators who must bear all responsibilities and possess few rights. It is instructive that the struggle of exotic dancers to be classified as workers set the precedent for reclassifying Uber drivers as employees in California.

This struggle suggests that sex work, like domestic work, has historically been ignored by trade unionists and society as not being “real” work, primarily because it is done disproportionately by women who are from minority groups or are marginalized noncitizens. Ai-Jen Poo, executive...