Forcing a worker to take a specific job or lose unemployment benefits is completely antithetical to the original intention of unemployment benefits.

We as a society hold on tightly to the thought that the women (and transgendereds) for rent in the back of our local weeklies are in a completely different situation than this German woman. We need to tell ourselves they’re not prostituting because there are no institutionalized benefits for starving, homeless young women in the USA, because if we collectively didn’t believe that then we would be as outraged about their economic coercion into prostitution for survival as we are about this German woman’s.

Or is that not the difference that matters? Is the difference that matters not that women are coerced into prostitution (duh), but that middle class women working conventional jobs like waitressing might be coerced into prostitution? Does that scare people who ordinarily don’t pay much attention to how poverty-stricken women are regularly coerced into prostitution?

And I apologise for the horrible grammar in that question. :)

This has now been officially debunked as Repug. propaganda: Snopes.com has it:
[www.snopes.com/media/notnews/brothel.asp] as well as Sadly, No:[Sadlyno.com]

[sadlyno.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1190].

Plenty of European & social welfare bashing just for the fun of it, and for appealing to the women hating lovelies out there!

[No, that’s not my real email]

Isn’t the problem the 10% unemployment rate? It should be only, what, 5%?

The impression I got from the original article is that the agency that was the brothel contacted the lady in question themselves after viewing her profile on some . And I don’t think it’s out of reach (even by Canadian laws) that if you are offered a legal job, that you can be “forced” to take it, to some extent. Certainly if you don’t take it you’d better be prepared to defend your position to some very critical people in charge of wether or not you get another cheque. And not all job centers, in my experience, are goverment funded/controlled.

So I don’t think the two articles are contradictory, but I do think there is enough contradiction to want to know more.

In Vancouver BC, where prostitution is deciminalized, a pregnant woman trying to leave her abusive husband was told by a social worker that she should enter the sex industry, and I mention this one case of many because I read about it just this weekend.

I think fromaway asks the million dollar question: “How is a woman who is asked to choose between prostituting herself or losing her welfare/unemployment benefits any worse off than a woman who has to prostitute herself to survive because there ARE no such benefits?”

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030505&s=pollitt

relevant? you tell me.
regular writer for the same newspaper writes negatively on welfare in England.
this same paper carries a story about some horrid, unconscienable thing perpetrated by the Germany’s welfare system, one that is much more comprehensive and protective than the British one.

and that’s just the very first link you get under British Welfare State. I’d bet further searching in the Telegraph’s archives would reveal a general leaning right, at least on the issue of goverment assistance.

(exotic dancing) vacancies would not be displayed in job centres… job centres would not look for prostitutes… employment agencies would not offer sex industry jobs to people who hadn’t specifically mentioned it as an area of interest.

How much clearer can it be? Fundamentally they don’t even offer that kind of work, let alone coerce people into it.

Furthermore Germany has special laws about sex work, including a prohibition of coering people into sex work, and provision that sex workers can quite at any time for any reason, without working (for example) a period of notice. However, I don’t have a handy link to that.

A spokesman for the Federal Labour Office said that if job seekers said they were prepared to work as, for example, dancers in strip bars, advisers could put them in touch with any suitable employers, but vacancies would not be displayed in job centres.

He also stressed job centres would not look for prostitutes on behalf of brothels, nor offer sex industry jobs to people who hadn’t specifically mentioned it as an area of interest.

So her article and Amp’s article can’t both be true.

It certainly is an interesting complication to the legalization of prostitution. If this sort of thing is to stay legal and the EI is to stay distributed as it is now in Germany, they’ll have to somehow more clearly mark what “field” a job is in… and that means not lumping phone-sex in with a standard call center, amoungst other things. I mean seriously, they’ll warn you in a job description that you have to do heavy lifting or be exposed to poor air quality, apparently we now need a warning for semen contact, sex talk and alcohol distribution.

Not sure which would be more degrading, the standard help desk or the phone sex ;-)

1. Sexual contact carries with it the risk of transmitting diseases, including HIV/AIDS.
2. A prostitute cannot determine whether her/his client is disease-free.
3. No method of protection, other than abstinence, is 100% effective in preventing STDs.
4. As some STDs, including HIV/AIDS, have life-altering, long-term health effects, including death, preventing the spread of STDs in in the national interests.
5. Therefore, no person should be forced by the state to risk exposure to STDs.

No?

How is a woman who is asked to choose between prostituting herself or losing her welfare/unemployment benefits any worse off than a woman who has to prostitute herself to survive because there ARE no such benefits? Seems to me Robert is putting the cart before the horse.

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=664273

The main problem with arguing that prostitution is a job like any other is that you’ve got to ignore the fact that it’s often either slavery or something very close to it. Most prostitutes are stuck with it because they cannot do anything else (addiction, abject poverty) or because they’re controlled by the mob. This bit of nastiness is, of course, just some mean-spirited smuck at the UI office having a bit of fun with this woman, but the notion that the government will become a pimp is a bit hard to deal with.

There’s not a whole lot of women who are clamoring to become hookers, after all.