'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."   Link: Telegraph | News | 'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'. Here is an excerpt:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

So, what to make of this? On the one hand, to oppose requiring women to accept jobs in brothels or face cuts in benefits seems to risk moralism. It suggests that one thinks that there is something particularly bad or degrading about sex work and something unseemly about sex workers. On the other hand, to support it seems anti-woman and anti-feminist (the article doesn't say whether the brothels advertise for male prostitutes). Support suggests that one sees no difficulty in forcing women to have sex against their will, that one supports a form of bureaucratized rape.

In my view, the stand off or dilemma here indicates the fundamental contradiction at the heart of so-called welfare reform that forces people to take jobs or relinquish benefits. The tension around forced sex work points to a more fundamental problem in the ways that the state serves the market. The market is supposed to involve free choice; wages are supposed to attract workers to jobs. But, in this instance, what we have is a situation where the absence of a choice is fully visible, where the wages are not enough to attract workers, and where the state steps in to provide the elements of necessity (lack of welfare benefits) and compulsion (forced into an available job) to supply the market with labor.  So, one is not free not to work in the sex industry.  One is presumably also not free not to work with toxic waste, in a mine, with harmful chemicals, etc.

(The American version of this same issue forces women to work while providing no allowance for childcare--or even education since only training directly related to a job 'counts.')

Comments

[ele]

Seems to me that if a woman can be forced to take a job as a postitute than the same should hold for a man. If prositution is no longer imoral. And of course we are told that homosexuality is no longer imoral. Than men, steight and gay, should also be required to take a job as a posititute in in a gay brothal. Why not. What if good for women is also good for men.

[George W.]

Wow, thats a great point. The issue is still a crappy one, but I admit it would be interesting to see gay brothels have the same sort of power over men(off course they dont...). I know its wrong to force people to this...but it would interesting to see the social response to that kind of measure, or the effects on pop-culture. Perhaps germany could become a tour cite for gay men or something...

[Adam Kotsko]

According to Bitch PhD, this story is not actually true -- it was "just a rumor." The discussion of the implications of such an event still stands, of course.