Conference Agenda

Sex work as has been described as ‘the ultimate precarious labour’ (Sanders and Hardy 2013) on account of the income and employment insecurity that it entails as well as the lack of social security it provides. Yet, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to sex work in international discourses around regulation for decent work (Heumann et al. 2016: 172). Drawing on research embedded in the European Sex Workers' Research Network, this special session seeks to address this gap.

In contrast to dominant frames that conflate sex work with human trafficking, deviant behaviour or the transmission of diseases, this special session starts from a labour approach to sex work. It is characterized by the recognition of sex work as work, respect for and representation of sex workers’ knowledge and demands as well as the acknowledgement of the structural embeddedness of sex work precarity (Heumann et al. 2016: 181-182). From the perspective of collective mobilisation, emphasising sex workers’ identity as workers in organising may allow for the demand to protect the rights of all people employed in the sex industry, thus unifying sex workers with different immigration status, or identifying with different genders (Andrijasevic et al. 2012: 504-505).

Starting from these assumptions, the panel contributions engage with some of the diverse forms that sex work can take, including brothel-, window-, street- and home-based sex work as well as platform-mediated pornography. Especially Nocella’s contribution shows that, in the context of flexibilization and digitalization of sex work, the line between formal and informal work as well as between different employment statuses is blurred. These findings are instructive for the wider world of work, as under neoliberal economic and restrictive migration governance, the precarious conditions in the sex industry are becoming the new norm for other sectors (Schaffauser 2015: 1).

The session contributions demonstrate that regulation guided by a criminal law approach regularly undermines its stated objectives. Brouwers’ paper highlights that third party criminalization in the United Kingdom (UK) that aims to protect sex workers from violence and exploitation has, in fact, increased the risks that they face at work as well as their policing and prosecution. Moreover, Cubides Kovacsics et al.’s paper demonstrates that even holding a license in the Netherlands’ context of legalized sex work does not prevent sex workers from falling between the cracks of social security.

The Covid-19 pandemic has acted as a magnifying glass that revealed and exacerbated such precarity. Satisfying the ‘skin hunger’ that became a veritable famine under conditions of lockdown and quarantine, nobody clapped for sex workers who provide these essential services (Siegmann 2020). On the contrary, they were hit hard by the double whammy of being prevented from working in (what is widely considered) a contact profession, while simultaneously being excluded from Covid-19 support (ICRSE 2021). For a regulatory environment that effectively supports moves towards decent work for sex workers, greater transparency about the extent and nature of decent work deficits needs to be created, a task that Wijers and Vanwesenbeeck’s panel contribution tackles.

Beyond the formal regulation of sex work through public policy and law, the panel’s interdisciplinary contributions underline the role of social regulation for working conditions in the sex industry. Gender, racialisation, and immigration status intersect with the social stigma that sex work carries. These social hierarchies shape and bend the effects of formal regulation of sex work. This leads Hubbard et al (2008: 137) to argue that despite apparently sharp differences between the regulatory positions of prohibition, abolition or legalization of the sex industry, a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of sex work can be observed. A first step towards valuation as providers of essential services, reducing sex worker stigma is therefore as necessary as legal decriminalization.

Although the criminalisation of third parties and workplaces in sex work in England ostensibly has the goal of protecting sex workers, it not only causes employment precarity of sex workers, due to the absence of legal employment relations and labour rights, but also legal precarity in the form of potential policing and prosecution of workers. This combines to create a situation in which sex workers can be considered hyper-precarious (Lewis et al. 2015, Zou 2015) both as workers and in a legal sense. However, this hyper-precarity is not evenly distributed, with the risk of policing and prosecution being significantly higher amongst migrant workers, workers of colour, and workers in more directly criminalised workplaces such as brothels and street-based work. In this way, a policy ostensibly aimed improving the conditions of sex workers, has instead led to increased precarity and reduced labour rights for workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated containment measures made visible the role of sexual and gender norms in shaping the governance of sex workers’ working conditions. They intersect with hierarchies of citizenship, complicating access to COVID-19 support for migrant sex workers, especially for those without EU-nationality. Our analysis shows how sex work regulation in the Netherlands leaves sex workers in a limbo—not without obligations and surveillance, yet, without the full guarantee of their labour rights. We argue that to effectively address sex workers’ needs and guaranteeing decent working conditions, a shift in regulation from its current biopolitical focus to a labour approach is necessary. The practical implications of such a decriminalization would include the shifting the supervisory authority to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment and broadening the mandate of the Dutch Labour Inspectorate to monitor working conditions in the sex industry beyond suspected cases of human trafficking.

Pornography is a huge industry worth US$ 97 billion globally, in which adult content creators (ACC) work in precarious conditions, associated with the fact that their informal work is both sex work proper and an instance of the gig economy. While currently ACC are self-employed via porn platforms, I argue that they should be classified as dependent workers. Basic labour protections are granted only to ‘workers’ and employees and could formalise ACC’s position during socio-economic emergencies.

This paper assesses ACC’s precarious employment status under UK labour law considering the Covid-19 pandemic and cost of living crisis, in which they cannot seek help due to the stigmatisation of sex work. An evaluation of the terms of use of a selected sample of porn platforms is triangulated through 10 semi-structured interviews. My aim is to suggest ways to empower ACC through labour rights that can support them in navigating the current crisis.

Sex worker rights scholars and activists often counter abolitionist conceptions of sex work as fundamentally exploitative by stressing sex workers’ agency and self-determination. Notwithstanding the value of this argument, it does not facilitate in-depth exploration of forms of exploitation that are present in sex work. Understanding and being able to properly assess the extent and nature of exploitation in various sex work realities, is a prerequisite to develop standards of decent work and social protection, identify adequate interventions to address exploitation and assess the effects of implementation of such interventions. More generally, a detailed understanding and assessment of the extent and nature of exploitation in various contexts is prerequisite to be able to scrutinize the effects and consequences of different sex work policies. This paper discusses a first phase of the development of a Sex Worker Exploitation Index (SWEI), based on literature study and exploratory interviews with sex workers.