Belgium is working towards new laws regarding sex work, making the workers eligeble for pensions, healthcare plans, contracts and overall more legal status. This was done in corporation with sex workers, orgs surrounding sex work and my place of work, the Union.

Now, I worked with former sex workers and human trafficking victims myself and I am aware of their struggles. I am not going to outright deny their right to fight for improvement.

What bugs me is the normalization of an industry that is heavily, and I mean very heavily, infested with human rights abuses. For every one empowered sexworker there are a thousand human trafficking victims. Giving them a pension is not helping in the slightest.

And then there is the whole thing of tying things like unemployment benefits to you wanting to look for work. Here in Belgium your benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job that is offered to you through government instances. What if we further legitimize sex work and you refuse a sex worker position? There have been caes already of the instances offering unemployed actresses porn jobs, so why not offer them sex workers contracts? And why not cut their benefits of they refuse a fitting job? Right?

And everyone is so happy about it. As if the whole industry is one collective of happy people doing a fun job instead of the horror it is.

Sorry for ranting but fuck me what a mess

  • rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml
    27·
    3 months ago

    I completely agree here! I remember joining an org where an Ethiopian lady, who works for an org that saves victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, gave us a lecture about this. She said the following(I am paraphrasing):

    Sex work is not work. Let’s use an example of a job. When you grow old in the job, you gain experience and produce better value and services which in the end will be rewarded with more money. In other words, most workers earnings increase when they get more experienced. In sex “work”, it doesn’t happen that way. The time where you are paid the most will be when you start. In other words, the younger you are the better the pay. This contradicts fundamentally how most jobs and work goes. With this in mind, offering sex for money is not work but the most ruthless and inhumane exploitation.

    To this date, I still remember her words.

    • muzzle@lemm.ee
      44·
      3 months ago

      I agree with the sentiment, but by this definition any professional sport, or modelling, and most acting, is not work.

      I think there are other, better arguments to separate sex work from other forms of work.