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| Thierry Schaffauser |
While Amnesty International adopted a policy favouring full decriminalisation of sex work earlier this year, the labour movement remains divided: should it see sex work as violence against women, to be abolished (Bindel 2003), or as a legitimate occupation needing to be unionised (Hardy 2010)? Sex workers have organised for their rights since at least the 1970s, even forming or joining trade unions in some cases, but the labour movement tends to ignore these efforts.
Sex workers do matter!
The debate around decriminalising sex work often focuses on questions such as whether or not we like the job, if we have been forced to engage in it, or if we have been raped as children. These questions are never asked about other workers before defending their rights. As sex workers, we accept that work is, most of the time, not a choice but an economic constraint, and we are able to distinguish between slavery, forced labour, and the consented exploitation of our work.
The conflation of sex work with trafficking conceals much about the reality of sex work. For instance, peep shows, bars, or massage parlours have to hide the fact that sex work happens. As a result, neither condoms nor information about safe sex are available in those workplaces. In some clubs, employers refuse to pay for heating while workers are almost naked. In others, sex workers now have to pay fees to enter when they used to be paid for their presence. Legal constraints on sex work allow websites and newspapers to censor our adverts as they please, making us pay again for new ones.
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| Frauke Banse |
After the collapse of the Rana Plaza Building in Bangladesh in April 2013, there was massive public outrage on retailers and brands in Europe. It was under these conditions that a coalition of Bangladeshi unions, workers’ rights organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) and the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC), and the global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union was able to establish the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. This agreement, known as the Accord, was to be signed by brands and retailers sourcing from Bangladesh. It is legally binding and has high standards of transparency. Labour and capital are represented equally in the governing body of the Accord, and workers´ health and safety committees, with at least 50% of representatives drawn from labour, have to be established in the factories covered by the Accord. The Accord provides the chance to reduce the incidence of deadly accidents in Bangladesh´s garment industry. Due to heavy public pressure, more than 200 companies have so far signed the Accord. It now covers more than 1 600 of nearly 6 000 Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories in Bangladesh (BGMEA, 2014; Accord, 2015).
IndustriALL (2013a and 2013b) sees the success story of the Accord as a potential model for new forms of global industrial relations.[1] Similar sentiments were raised by the International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) and the German retailer KiK (ITUC, 2014; KiK, 2013). However these sentiments tend to overlook, first, the specific circumstances under which the Accord came into being and, second, the problems of practical implementation.
