Unionisation of Workers in the Sex Industry

WRITTEN BY DECRIM NOW, A VITAL PARTNERSHIP

In June 2018, sex workers from the Women’s Strike Assembly launched a unionisation drive with the grassroots union United Voices of the World, uniting both irregular migrants and those with secure immigration status. In 2023, the Sex Workers Union (SWU) was established, organising with the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union. Through solidarity and collective action, SWU aims to amplify sex workers’ voices and improve working conditions.

The union offers workers the ability to collectively negotiate about workplace rules and conditions – with both bosses and also the local councils. This includes stopping extortionate high house fees, arbitrary changes to commission structures, fines for being late or having to cancel a shift, and blacklisting and sexual harassment by managers or bouncers.

The union is essential to build collective power. We are not interested in passing judgement on what type of work people do. We recognise that many women, men and trans people have a diverse range of experiences in the sex industry. We respect people’s choices or circumstances about continuing to work in the sex industry or exiting the industry. The reason we want to unionise the sex industry comes directly from our experiences as workers.

The union is worker-led not because we think that being a ‘stripper’ or a ‘sex worker’ is a fixed identity, but because those who have experienced the material conditions of the industry are in the best position to know how to change it.

The union provides a space for workers to negotiate with bosses, develop bargaining skills and increase our confidence to organise at work and change the industry in the interests of workers.

Unionisation is a vital accompaniment to the full decriminalisation of sex work, ensuring sex workers are protected by policies that will help secure employment rights such as sick pay, pensions and regulated hours, as well as increase safety at work.

All workers in the sex industry (except managers or those who have the ability to hire and fire sex workers) are encouraged and welcome to join the union.

Decriminalising sex work and changing local council policies for sexual entertainment venues.

The current laws that regulate what workers can and can’t do with our bodies and the continued efforts to criminalise our workplaces make it difficult, at times nearly impossible, for workers to organise and unionise. One of the main reasons is that we are not considered to be workers. At best we are classified as self-employed (and as such have very few labour rights) but most of the time we are treated as victims in need of saving and rescue.

For the last decade, national governments and local authorities have used concerns about trafficking in the sex industry as a cover to create a hostile environment for migrants in the sex industry. Raids on premises, closure of clubs, arrests and deportations have done next to nothing to address instances of forced and coerced labour in the sex industry. Instead, bosses now have even more power and migrant workers have been forced further underground and into more dangerous and precarious sex work. It is important to remember that just like in other industries where migrants make up a large section of the workforce, when workers stand up together, refuse to be divided by ‘race’ and unionise, we are able to confront injustice and exploitation. However, because of the current criminalisation of the sex industry, unionisation will only get us so far.

We need a union at work and we need to change national legislation that affects our work.

What we want is the removal of all laws that criminalise the organising, selling or buying of sex for all sections and sectors of the industry and for any consensual sexual activity. What we don’t want are special or moral laws that zone sex work and contribute to stigmatising sex workers by singling out our work as inappropriate and make us more vulnerable to abuse by cops, immigration officials and members of the public by relegating it to peripheral areas.