We'd Better Treat Them Right: A Proposal for Occupational Cooperative Bargaining Associations of Sex Workers

WE'D BETTER TREAT THEM RIGHT: A PROPOSAL FOR OCCUPATIONAL COOPERATIVE BARGAINING ASSOCIATIONS OF SEX WORKERS Oliver J. McKinstry* In a dimly lit room at a local community center, a group of workers comes together to discuss their work. The agenda includes issues like promoting health and safety standards, standardizing wages, and obtaining health benefits. Before getting through the agenda, however, members of the group share their stories from the job. Some have positive things to say about their work, others are more critical. One thing they all agree on is the unfair amount of animosity they face in the workplace. From their bosses and their clients, to outside government regulators, these workers are constant targets of harassment and disdain. Although they are concerned about the discrimination they face for being low-wage workers, the meeting eventually returns to how the group can obtain a healthier work environment, higher wages, and health benefits of some kind. Although the workers' goals might seem easy to accomplish through collective bargaining techniques under the National Labor Relations Act,1 these workers face hardship in changing the conditions under which they work. People who sell sex face great amounts of social and legal alienation preventing them from effectively organizing collective bargaining units. This comment seeks to explore why prostitutes face such obstacles in organizing and to suggest ways for them to organize effectively and without hardship! * J.D. candidate, 2007, University of Pennsylvania Law School; B.A. 2002, Macalester College. I would like to thank Professor Regina Austin for her invaluable comments early in my writing process. Thanks to Bridget Crawford for her lessons in Feminist Legal Theory. Lastly, I want to thank Professor Clyde Summers for his inspiring lessons in labor law during my first year of law school. 1. The National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. §§ 151-169 (1982) (ent'd 1935), amended by 29 U.S.C. §§ 141-197 (1982) (the Taft-Hartley Act) (ent'd 1947). 2. This work borrows from organizing attempts in other non-traditional work environments such as exotic dancers. "Exotic dancers from popular clubs experience unsafe working conditions, lack employee benefits, are misclassified as independent contractors, and have managers who extort money and decrease their wages. They deal with many of the same issues as other exploited workers, but because of the nature of their industry are 679 680 U. PA. JOURNAL OF LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT LAW [Vol. 9:3 Ideas about and images of prostitution appear in almost every aspect of our society. Sometimes prostitutes are people at whom we laugh,3 sometimes they are people we love. 4 "One may be for or against prostitution, one may adhere to an ideology that seeks to abolish, regulate, or normalize it (through decriminalization or legalization, for example), but one cannot deny its existence all around us."5 Despite the ubiquity of ideas about and images of prostitution, there is a noticeable dearth of academic work exploring the implication of selling sex.6 rarely taken as seriously. Prostitutes are in an even more vulnerable position because their activities are illegal, making it nearly impossible for them to turn to the legal profession to redress their grievances. With limited but promising legal successes, sex workers reached out to the legal community and labor organizers." Minal A. Shah, Introduction, 10 HASTINGS WOMEN'S L.J. 1, 2 (1999). 3. See DAVID SEDARIS, HOLIDAYS ON ICE 84 (Little, Brown and Co. 1997) ("Two young men passed down the sidewalk carrying a mattress, and one of them turned to yell, "Get that ho off the street!" Had we been in a richer or poorer neighborhood, I might have searched the ground for a gardening tool, fearful that once again I might step on the thing and split my lip with the handle. Ho. I'd heard that word bandied about by the cooks at work, who leered and snickered much like the young men with their mattress. It took me a second to realize that they were referring either to Lisa or to her friend, who was squatting to examine a hole in her fishnet stockings. A whore. Of the two possible nominees, the friend seemed the more likely candidate. At the mention of the word, she had lifted her head and given a little wave. This woman was the real thing, and I studied her, my breath shallow and visible in the cold, dark air. Like a heroin addict or a mass murderer, as prostitute was, to me, more exotic than any celebrity could ever hope to be. You'd see them downtown after dark, sticking their hatchety faces into the windows of idling cars. 'Hey there, Flossie, what do you charge for a lube job,' my father would shout. I always wanted him to pull over so we could get a better look, but having made his little comment, he'd roll up the window and speed off, chuckling." 4. See Ismail Kadare, The Albanian Writers' Union as Mirrored by a Woman, THE NEW YORKER, Dec. 26, 2005 & Jan. 2, 2006, at 113, 123 ("On Dibra Street, there was a little coffee shop where the young reporters who worked at the Writers' Union often downed beers when the weather was hot. Next to it was a privately owned fruit stall. It was there that I saw Marguerite for the first time. I was just coming out of the coffee shop when a friend from the Union whispered, 'Look, there's Marguerite, the woman who lives across the street.' I'd heard about her, but so vaguely that I'd forgotten everything-I knew only that she was one of 'those women' of an earlier time, who was said to live with her aged mother in a little house in the alley .... More than any other symbol, it was a whore who made me feel that I was from the capital. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry."). 5. MICHEL DORAIS, RENT Boys: THE WORLD OF MALE SEX WORKERS vii (Peter Feldstein trans., McGill-Queen's University Press 2005). 6. See Shah, supra note 2, at 3 ("In What's Wrong With Prostitution? What's Right with Sex Work? ComparingMarkets in Female Sexual Labor, Elizabeth Bernstein finds that among feminists, 'prostitution has been abundantly theorized, yet insufficiently studied.' Bernstein categorizes the feminist literature into three categories which she defines as 1) radical feminist critiques of prostitution, including works by Catharine MacKinnon and Carole Pateman; 2) sex-positive feminist defenses of prostitution, including works by Anne McClintock and Lynn Sharon Chancer; and 3) feminist contextualizations: situating the meaning of prostitution empirically, including works by Laurie Shrage." (citing Elizabeth Bernstein, What's Wrong with Prostitution? What's Right with Sex Work? Comparing 2007] BARGAINING ASSOCIATIONS OF SEX WORKERS Analysis of the criminalization of prostitution is the largest source of scholarship on the subject.7 Statutes criminalizing prostitution, broadly defined as exchanging sexual intercourse for a fee, 8 have been deemed The development of laws constitutional by the Supreme Court. (...truncated)