La Strada Documentation Center

Sex Workers Organising

Document number
1096
Date
2005
Title
Sex Workers Organising
Author/publisher
Journal of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights, Volume 12 Issue 4
Availability
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Document type(s)
Media/News,
Keywords
Nandinee Bandyopadhyay Ana Lopes; Ashwini Sukthankar; USAID; South east Asia, Marianne Jonker; European legal frameworks; Women’s Network for Unity; Sex work: Women’s Agenda for Change; Unionisation of sex workers; Violence, Elena Reynaga;
Summary
EDITORIAL: These is undeniably controversy about whether it is appropriate to treat the sale of sexual services as a form of work. Even the language used to discuss prostitution is a site of tension: some advocates insist on talking about it as ‘sexual slavery’, and assert that the only ethical approach is to rescue those trapped within it. There are still others who see prostitution as crime, where the prostitute, if she is not a victim, must be a criminal disrupting public order. This issue of IUR is not a forum for arguments about whether or not sex can be work but rather asks – how is a labour rights analysis relevant to prostitution? As the Spanish trade union Comisiones Obreras writes here, the claiming of labour rights as sex workers’ rights is a dramatic shift away from the old conversations about how to deal with the ‘problem’ of prostitution – whether through decriminalisation, state regulation, or abolition – and places the emphasis on sex workers’ own understanding of their interests. Many of the articles here address the role of unions in this context, in terms of their strengths as well as weaknesses in dealing with sex worker communities.
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