Unionising Sex Workers and Other Feminists

Abstract

A minor movement of strippers and sex workers are unionising as the Sex Workers’ Union (SWU) branch of the Bakers Food & Allied Workers Union. SWU have produced a counter hegemonic perspective on law and society in the process of class struggle. This perspective demystifies the view that strippers and sex workers are free workers and enterprising subjects, or unfree vulnerable victims in need of state protection. SWU's counter hegemonic perspective inverts this common-sense assumption and posits that strippers and sex workers are unfree workers and free sexual subjects. This demystification is evident in SWU's ‘feminist law work’, which demands decommodification and decriminalisation for all sex workers by working within, and against, official law. In conclusion, I argue that there are at least three reasons why other feminists should support SWU by ceasing eradication of sex work via criminalisation and closure campaigns. This would open space for a politics of solidarity between sex workers and other feminists, centred on the conditions within which sex workers’ labour is commodified.