Labor – Page 4 – Feministe

The Economist Debates: Women

The debate issue over at the Economist right now is “This house believes that women in the developed world have never had it so good.” Which… ok. May be true. But I’m with Terry O’Neill, who opposes the whole premise of the motion:

The “you’ve never had it so good” canard has long been used as a smokescreen by those who would avoid or deny society’s most intractable problems. For women, it is tantamount to being told to sit down and shut up. We will not. The motion is insulting, and I reject it.

She continues:

It is not good that the wage gap between women and men has narrowed by less than half a penny per year since 1963. It definitely is not good that because of gender pay discrimination women in the United States are at higher risk of poverty than men, especially in retirement. Denial of equal pay for comparable work is a form of oppression of half the population that underlies lower productivity, higher poverty rates, more old age poverty, more ill health and family instability.

Women in the United States do make up half the workforce, but that hardly makes us equal. Since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, women have closed the wage gap by a mere 18 cents. Today, women’s median annual paychecks reflect only 77 cents for each dollar paid to men, with African American women paid 68 cents and Latinas just 58 cents (in nearly every arena, women of colour are short-changed at startlingly high rates).

Recently The WAGE Project concluded that full-time working women lose a startling amount of wages over the course of their lifetimes: an average $700,000 for high-school graduates; $1.2m for college graduates and $2m for professional graduates. I ask all of your female readers to pause a moment to reflect on this statistic. What might you do with $700,000? Pay off your mortgage? Send your kids to college debt-free?

Yes, many women in the Western world — especially middle and upper-class women — experience privileges and opportunities that were unthinkable a few generations ago. And we certainly have our feminist foremothers to thank for a lot of them.

But too often, “Look how far you’ve come!” is shorthand for “…so be grateful and stop complaining.” Men are never told to be grateful for what they have and how far they’ve come, or lectured on how other men over there have it so much worse and so why are they agitating for greater benefits? Head over there and join the debate.

Health Insurance, Unemployment and Bankruptcy

Thanks! Low-wage conservatives!

Awhile back*, I posted about my daughter’s premature birth, hospitalization, my concurrent job loss, and…..health insurance. I tried to explain to non-U.S. readers exactly why the loss of a job meant the loss of healthcare and probable bankruptcy. We take that for granted in the U.S.—that in the event of a serious illness like cancer, in the event that one doesn’t have a spouse, parents, siblings, or a trust fund, that one will probably go bankrupt. That for most of us, serious illness or injury means the loss of a job. And the converse, too—that the loss of a job means crossing one’s fingers and hoping one doesn’t get sick or injured, because one will be left without a means of getting treatment. The two situations go together here like thunderstorms and rain.

So, when the illustrious Lauren of Feministe sent me this link, I wasn’t surprised at the findings. As costs have gone up, the number of uninsured people has risen exponentially. This graphic doesn’t even delve into the problems of rising deductibles (hence, a bigger bite of the paycheck). The 7% cost given for the average Illinois worker with family coverage is I’m assuming the pre-tax income cost—not take-home pay.

Here’s another interesting graphic with a timeline, on job losses and unemployment rates. Notice any similarities to the graphic on health insurance? How about this one on bankruptcies?

Over 60% of bankruptcies in the U.S. are the result of medical bills, and three-quarters of those people had health insurance at the time of their diagnosis.

The public option is still polling strong, so where is the political courage? WTF?

*wanna read a story much worse than mine? Check out “How I lost my health insurance at the hairstylists”.

Photo Essay: Factory Like A City

Run, don’t walk, to David Bacon’s photo essay, “Factory Like A City”, posted at Z magazine. It’s about Toyota’s announcement of the closing of the NUMMI plant in Fremont, California after General Motors announced it was withdrawing from the partnership. It’s a good illustration of the exponential effects of the demise of manufacturing in the United States. From the essay:

The plant employs 4,500 workers directly, and the jobs of another 30,000 throughout Northern California are dependent on its continued operation. Taking families into account, the threatened closure will eliminate the income of over 100,000 people.

Frankly, I think that’s a conservative estimate. It’s probably based on the immediate results. The long-term effects (absent a replacement plant of similar nature) would be greater—just ask someone from the Rust Belt.

Keep this, and other stories of other soon-to-be or already shuttered plants in mind when reading about corporate bailouts. Those bailouts are not for—and were not meant to be for—the workers. Keep this in mind when you hear the ludicrous phrase, “jobless recovery.”

There is no such thing as a jobless recovery. Not for working people.

It’s Cold & Flu Season….Do You Have Paid Sick Days?

Not a day goes by lately that I don’t see some update or another on H1N1, or on the seasonal flu vaccine. It’s that time of year again. The National Partnership for Women and Families has a good site on supporting paid sick days, as both a worker justice issue and a public health concern. If you are a U.S. reader, visit their interactive map and find out about campaigns going on in your area. In Illinois, 46% of Illinois workers do not have paid sick days; that’s 2.3 million workers. Women Employed is leading the Illinois Paid Leave Coalition in support of the Healthy Workplace Act (HB 3665), state legislation that would:

allow employees to earn up to 7 paid sick days per year, accrued hourly for every 30 hours worked
provide leave for the employee’s own illness, to care for family members, or for medical appointments
both full-time and part-time workers qualify

On the federal front, the Healthy Families Act would offer the same thing nationwide—seven paid sick days per year, for the 48% of workers in the U.S. (and 80% of low-wage workers) who do not have them.

Expensive? Not according to a study conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

9 to 5, a national organization of working women, has an action alert on this issue, with sample letters to the editor for local activism.

Let’s face it, we’ve all gone to work sick. That’s where we catch most of our illnesses—at work, because others are doing the same thing. And those of us with kids—well, those classrooms start resembling a sick ward around November (my daughter’s school had a notable number out for a couple of weeks last winter; it’s a Title I school, so most of the parents are low-income with no sick leave). It doesn’t have to be this way.

Lu Lutta Continua

American icon “Norma Rae” dies after struggling with her insurance company to cover her chemo

crystalleesutton_de54b

La Lubu already wrote about this (do check out her post), but I want to re-emphasize it: Crystal Lee Sutton, the woman who fought to unionize her workplace and inspired the film Norma Rae, passed away at 68. She died of brain cancer, after battling for her insurance company to cover her chemotherapy.

She could change the face of labor rights in the United States, but couldn’t get health care coverage until it was too late. Sutton’s life was inconic and patriotic; her death is tragic and all too American.

Will the Last One Out of ***** Please Shut Out the Lights?!

A pithy saying often heard in the Rust Belt, reflective of…..the loss of community, dearth of culture, malaise/apathy, physical atrophy/blight, urban decay, exodus, and general collapse that accompanies job loss and its attendant economic withering. The recent economic downturn is hardly new to most of us in Flyover Country™. That doesn’t mean there still weren’t jobs worth losing:

Herrin, Illinois (pop. 11,835): 1,000 jobs lost with the closing of the Maytag plant in 2006.
Decatur, Illinois (pop. 81,860): 1,000 jobs lost to Caterpillar layoffs announced in 2009.
Galesburg, Illinois (pop. 34,000): 1,600 jobs lost to the Maytag closing in 2004.
Rockford, Illinois (pop. 157,000): over 15% unemployment; layoffs at Gates Corp., Pac-Sci Motion Control, Amerock, Hamilton/Sunstrand, Clarcor, etc.
Belvidere, Illinois (pop. 20,820): initial layoffs at the Chrysler plant 1,000; could potentially impact 3,800.
Rantoul, Illinois (pop. 12,400): 770 jobs lost to Collins & Aikman closing

Where to begin? Danville, Illinois (pop. 34,000) is enduring the layoff of 195 at Freight Car America, but that’s a small number in comparison with the losses of the 1980s and 90s at General Electric, General Motors, Hyster, Bohn Aluminum, Teepak, Anchor Hocking, etc. Streator, Illinois (pop. 14,190) once billed itself as “The Glass Container Capital of the World!” when Owens-Illinois had 3,500 workers; now Owens is down to 250. Kankakee (pop. 25,561) is losing 119 jobs this year at American Spring Wire. Jacksonville, Illinois (pop. 18,940) is weathering the shuttering of ACH Foods and EMI. Pontiac, Illinois (pop. 11,864) is losing 262 jobs at the Interlake facility. Mattoon, Charleston, Bloomington, Peoria, Quincy, Rock Island, Springfield, Havana, Clinton, Pinckneyville, West Frankfort, Sterling, East St. Louis, Granite City, Moline, Ottawa, Carlinville, Hillsboro, Salem, Paris, Olney, Mt. Carmel, Joliet, Aurora, Chicago and its satellite cities—you’d be hard pressed to find an Illinois city that hasn’t been negatively impacted by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Here’s a list of TAA petitions to the Illinois Department of Employment Security; for a longer list that includes petitions still under consideration, you can visit the U. S. Department of Labor TAA site here and type in “Illinois”.

NAFTA hasn’t been kind to my state. Jobs with Justice produced a paper that outlines the job erosion. Jobs lost in Illinois since September 2008 now number 268,000. But again…..we’ve been hemorrhaging jobs for three decades. Prisons are seen as one solution. The state legislature seems to think that casinos and legalized video gambling in bars will make up the difference. Welcome to Illinois.

Or Michigan. Indiana. Wisconsin. Ohio. Missouri. “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores…Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more….They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks…Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back….”* That album came out in 1984. It’s worse now. The damage is cumulative. When those jobs left, they took entire communities with them. The lost wages (and benefits) from manufacturing jobs were just the immediate loss. Other jobs that depended on those plants (like say….electricians) left too. Other jobs that depended on the disposable income from those jobs (grocers, hardware stores, credit unions, etc.) left. Economically abandoned cities became commuter villages as folks hardscrabbled a living by increasing their drive time. The recent economic ‘downturn’ isn’t recent. It needs to be understood in the context of what has been happening across the world over decades. This is what it looks like in my slice of the world.

This is what my whole state looks like. Death by one thousand cuts.

*Bruce Springsteen, “My Hometown”

Crystal Lee Sutton: Labor Heroine

Crystal Lee Sutton, originally of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, died of cancer September 12 at the age of 68. She was instrumental in the 10-year fight to unionize the J.P. Stevens mill, where she once worked for $2.65/hr.

You may remember her as “Norma Rae”, as portrayed by actor Sally Field in the Oscar-winning film of 1979.
norma_rae_union

Crystal moved on from the J.P. Stevens mill after becoming an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union; she eventually returned to school and graduated from Alamance Community College, who maintains her records of the organizing battle and a website about her life. She was initially denied coverage by her insurance company for treatment for her cancer; her husband worked two jobs to help pay for her medical care. The North Carolina State AFL-CIO is also accepting donations for her medical bills.

“It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world.” –Crystal Lee Sutton

Rest in peace, Sister. Lu Lutta Continua.

headnod: Uniongal

Caty Simon and the Virtues of Vice (part two)

Oh, LOL. Sike. Before I go, I present the conclusion of my email interview with the one and only Ms. Caty Simon. Part one is here.

Why do you think people on all sides of the issues involved have such strong feelings about Natalie Dyan and the choices she makes/made about how to make money and what to do with her own body? I’ve heard people argue that her exploitation of the patriarchal concept of virginity serves to increase/strengthen virginity’s cultural currency rather than undermine it and thus is problematic from a feminist standpoint (shockingly, this is not my take on it.) Thoughts?

Do you think you could just post a link to my N Dylan piece? I feel like I’ve said all I have to say about that. [Yes, you can read said piece here]

As you know, I’m in favor of decriminalizing prostitution and all drugs. Some people in the sex workers rights/decrim movement seem to distance themselves from drugs–which is understandable given the stereotype of sex workers as drug addicts, but also problematic as plenty of sex workers (like plenty of the population in general) do use illegal drugs. I noticed some local NYC harm reduction trainings recently by sex workers orgs. Do you think there’s a shift happening, that sex workers rights organizers are moving towards addressing drug use (in a non-paternalistic way) rather than trying to run from it? How do you see criminalized sex work and criminalized drug use as being intertwined? Do they intersect strategically?

Short answer: I do see a shift happening, but not nearly enough of one and not soon enough.

I do understand the political distancing, because we did want to get away from the agency-less TV movie image of the low income (when most of us are actually middle class ), exploited & abused (when most of us are independent workers & thus have no one to exploit or abuse us, or work with people we trust), STI infected (when most of us have safer sex than the general population), and horrendously, obsessively drug addicted (when–although there’s no real statistical evidence, because all of the evidence we have comes from abolitionists with an agenda that study the most downtrodden in jail, not a representative population, and most of those of us caught in that position tell researchers what they want to hear in order to cope and survive–it seems, like we are not more likely to use drugs than the general population, only excepting the two facts that many young, middle class or affluent people use drugs of some kind–in fact, this population uses the most drugs in this country, contrary to popular belief; and the fact that black markets often intersect.) The crack ho walking around with sores and track marks and disease is unfortunately still the image that comes to mind when many mainstream people think of the word “prostitute”. So I do understand the initial tactic of distancing–what I don’t understand is the contempt. I remember excitedly receiving every issue of $pread I ever got, only to see sex workers who were interviewed say dismissive awful things about girls working to support habits and self-righteously differentiating themselves from them. I remember reading a blog by a prominent sex worker’s rights activist which haughtily stated that there was obviously a difference between decriminalization of drugs and decriminalization of sex work, without even deigning to mention what that difference was . Callgirl, by Jeanette Angell, a woman I very much admire and a text I think is incisive and sophisticated, just fell back on the disease model of addiction to understand her friend’s problems with crack, without using any of the anthropological insight and nuance that shone throughout the rest of the book on that topic.

Even now it feels like the attention being paid to drug using sex workers is an us vs. them thing–the poor ignorant them who don’t know any better, a sort of noblesse oblige. The white, middle class, educated sex workers that, let’s face it, dominate the movement, believe that the harm reduction services they offer at places like St James’ infirmary are for powerless street workers, not for their own drug use.

It’s a shame because I do believe these two issues are intrinsically connected. It’s all about Puritanical criminalization of the ownership of one’s body ( a major tenant of feminism and the reproductive rights movement) and the right to take risks with it–sex workers take on the risk of stigma, STIs, and most of all, meeting strange men in a male-dominated society in which sex and violence are constantly intertwined and confused. Yet, they make our jobs more dangerous by criminalizing us instead of allowing us to go to the police for our safety.

Drug users take risks with their bodies as well–but most of these risks are either magnified and turned into bogeymen by the media and drug enforcement or exacerbated by criminalization. People die of cigarette habits eventually from lung cancer, but although the physiological addiction is as strong as that of heroin or tranquilizers, nobody ever has their basic day to day life patterns disrupted because of nicotine addiction, b/c cigarettes aren’t subject to ridiculously inflated black market prices so that one has to spend an inordinate amount of time earning money for them. Heroin and opiates, my drug of choice, are seen as the most deadly, pernicious drugs–yet they really have no long term health risks involved with them besides addiction and overdose that aren’t caused directly by criminalization, inflated black market prices and the poverty they bring about, and lack of clean needles and harm reduction education. Even addiction and overdose could be risks that were minimized in a decriminalized environment—a pure supply would ensure the easy calculation of one’s tolerance and dose, preventing overdose, and widespread harm reduction education would allow people to understand the timing of doses necessary, to prevent physiological addiction.

This culture is in fact truly absurd in its mores around mind altering substances. The pharmacopoeia that we know of as illicit drugs has been with mankind for thousands of years, and, for example, before the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, cocaine and heroin were available over the counter and did not cause any major social upheaval. In fact, most users of opiates were middle class women and doctors, and many among those two groups distinguished themselves while having active habits . In contrast, the pharmacopoeia that Big Pharma shills us to cure the every new ill of our psyches they invent by the year is not truly tested, since, as congressional committees are finding out around now, most of the research trials and the journal articles written about them are directly financially linked to the companies which sell them. Lately, interoffice documents have been discovered by mad movement groups that prove without doubt that the makers of drugs like Zyprexa and Prozac knew about serious side effects of their products such as adult onset diabetes and common suicidality and even homocidality among children and teens that took their products, but hid them from the general public. Class action suits are now in progress. Sometimes, this strange ambivalent attitude about mind altering drugs reaches ridiculous heights when drugs that are scheduled and criminalized without prescription are legitimized and prescribed at high doses under the auspices of psychiatrists—the fact that we demonize speed users and yet prescribe children with amphetamines (without even giving them a choice, in their status as minors) is frankly crazy, especially in light of recent finding that such “treatment” stunts their growth and makes them extremely emotionally volatile.

As for the argument that drug users hurt others because of drug related crime, the only drug with a statistically significant correlation to violence is alcohol, and the vast majority of other drug related crime is based around black market turf wars in a market that has no other way to mediate itself but violence, a market that the prohibitionists themselves have made lucrative enough to kill for by making it illegal and therefore highly profitable because of monetary compensation for the risk. Decriminalize, and just like the gangland violence around liquor disappeared when the Prohibition of the 1920’s ended, so would this violence. As for the small proportion of violence that remains that is caused by altering one’s mind with these substances, the crime should be in the act itself, not in the ingestion of the drug. We teach people to drink responsibly even though alcohol is the most volatile, physiologically addicting and damaging drug there is. There are certainly ways to use other drugs responsibly, as the fact that statistically it seems that most users of addictive drugs are not, in fact, addicts, attests.

Just like sex workers, drug users are criminalized for a non violent act that truly only has to do with themselves and their bodies–except that drug users are punished much more harshly, serving sentences that can be much longer than those of murderers and rapists under mandatory minimum sentencing drug laws. In fact, our drug laws are one of THE major reasons that our prison industrial complex is the most highly populated in the world. And just like sex workers, drug users are seen as agency-less, except that, instead of being exploited women or loose nymphomaniacal tramps, they are seen as the helpless against evil compulsions–physiological addiction is seen as the demon possession of our age, as if drug users were incapable of making moral decisions or any decisions that valued anything else above their drug of choice. And finally, just like sex workers, there are those who feel they are being liberal and benign towards us by advocating programs that force us to transition away from our current lifestyle–to medicalize rather than criminalize the problem, force us into treatment, the way sex workers in newly Communist China were forced to learn factory skills. These factions may be more well meaning than those that favor criminalization, but again, they’re about denying us our own ability to choose.

Both sex workers and drug users are subject to the policing of their own bodies, coercion, and criminalization. Perhaps in the short term sex workers might be wary of taking on the other group’s stigma, but in the long run, we’ll be stronger in political unity–strength in numbers seems like obvious political strategy to me. I’d like to see sex worker’s movements, as the more established groups, stop making derogatory references to drug users, run informative stories about drug decrim in their publications, fight ALL the injustices of the prison industrial complex and not just stick with their single issue, and acknowledge the fact that drug use is classless.

Finally, like all of mainstream America, we need to stop seeing drug use as always destructive. It’s all about set, setting, and situation, not the drugs themselves–context. Almost any drug, used in a particular way in a particular circumstance, can be a spiritual journey, can be therapeutic, can even be a healthy way to cope in the short term, can be good clean fun–cleaner than alcohol or cigarettes and even coffee, for the most part. No drug should be “angelicized” or demonized totally–they’re just inert substances, it’s our relationship to them that matters. Richard De Grandpre writes a brilliant and readable thesis about this topic in his book The Cult of Pharmacology, which I urge you all to read.

Taking these issues to a global level–do you see the drug war as intersecting with the war on The Sex Trade and/or “trafficking”? How does the criminalizing of drug use and prostitution in/by the US negatively effect the global “victims” of both trades?Taking these issues to a global level–do you see the drug war as intersecting with the war on The Sex Trade and/or “trafficking”? How does the criminalizing of drug use and prostitution in/by the US negatively effect the global “victims” of both trades?

Globally, I see the same outlook towards Third World people making their way in both black markets—they need to be shown the errors of their ways and rescued by the First World, as if they were childlike and could not take responsibility for the considered choices they make. Thailand’s EMPOWER sex worker’s rights organization recently issued a demand from Cambodian migrant sex workers—STOP RESCUING US! The raids in which they are “rescued” and deported back to Cambodia (much like many similar raids throughout the world), are violent, abusive and economically crippling. The workers must then spend money and time to find their way across the border again. Similarly, when the crops of coca or poppy farmers are sprayed from the air by the US with substances that poison their soil and then condescendingly told to a grow a food crop they won’t even break even on, the same sort of violence to their livelihood is done. These people are making rational economic choices in the context of their environments, and yet, they’re treated like misbehaving and/or lost children.

Caty Simon and The Virtues of Vice (Part One)

Soon after I was asked to guest blog at Feministe I emailed my internet friend Caty to ask if I could interview her for one of my posts. She maintains the fabulous blog The Virtues of Vice and is generally one of my favorite people to talk with about politics or pop culture or pretty much anything. Her thinking and writing is both validating and challenging to me, which is a great combination. I’m sure a lot of Feministe readers will be interested in her work as well. So without further ado, I bring you the first part of our Q&A.

Please us give a little introduction to you and your activism and anything else you feel like sharing.

My name’s Caty Simon. I’m a small town escort and activist. I’ve worked with multi-issue low income rights movements all my adult life, from Arise to Social Justice to the newly founded Poverty Is Not A Crime. I’ve participated in campaigns that prevented the criminalization of panhandling in my town, fought against the then illegal status of needle exchange in Massachusetts, and asked local police departments to consider deprioritizing vice enforcement, as well as many others. A few years ago I was in a Curve magazine feature called Top Ten Dyke Activists Under 25 To Watch (or some other equally unwieldy title.) I’m also a member of the board of the Freedom Center, an organization that fights for the rights of those diagnosed with mental illness, exposes the fraud of the pharmaceutical industry, and the human rights abuses within the psychiatric system. Recently I was on ABC’s Primetime Outsiders representing the mad movement and arguing that those diagnosed can live successful lives without psychotropic medication, and that in fact many of these supposedly life saving medications are incredibly neurotoxic. Most of my activism has focused around sex worker’s rights, harm reduction and drug decriminalization, and the mad movement. I’m a biblomaniac & a biblioklept (don’t lend your books to me), and after many years of being a no-TV prude, I took a cultural studies class a few years ago and discovered it was intellectually credible to like low culture, and now I’m obsessed with The Wire and Mad Men. True Blood has awakened this weird vampire sexual fetish in me. I also have been an unapologetic user of IV drugs. I’m not like you. I’m probably a lot more boring, actually.

Can you talk a little bit about your blog, why you started it and what your goals are?

well, there’s this old notion of what people used to call “the deserving poor”, and I think that trope is still implicitly very much around. When a marginalized group agitates for its rights, it naturally attempts to portray its members as good, noble, and most of all, besides whatever difference coheres them as a
minority group, NORMAL–people whom the mainstream are able to relate to and emphasize with. Deserving. Hence, for example, the Ward & June
Cleaverization of many major LGBT rights groups. So in the sex worker’s rights movement, we have the deserving ho, and in the mad movement, we have the person just like you or I who for whatever reason, because of a period of trauma in their life, got diagnosed and was labeled and forced drugged and mistreated. And since out and unrepentant drug users are such pariahs in a culture in which the discourse around the use of mind altering substances is mostly limited to how badly we’ll criminalize those who partake in it, or at best how we’ll force them into treatment, there IS no deserving drug user by definition.

So as I wrote in my live journal once, “But I’m so sick of thinking of what everybody thinks. Image and image and image. I must be the political poster child, not the sad stereotype, I must. I must be a perfectly wholesome all American girl who just happens to have sex for money. The movement depends on it, right? All the other call girls were so angry at me when I started doing heroin. It wasn’t just concern–I was giving them a bad name…”

Because we can’t talk about the complexities of our identities, the many things that make us Other instead of focusing on single issue microcosmic movements, we can’t talk about the intersections between our various issues and struggles, which I think are vital–for example, the paternalistic Puritan criminalization of both drug use and sex work. So, I decided I was willing to put myself out there as the undeserving Other, and talk about all the marginalized groups I was a part of at once so that I could make these vital connections. Even if that meant allowing the inevitable accusations to be flung at
me–I obviously was only escorting to make money to score drugs, I obviously was only a junkie ho because I was crazy, etc.

I’d written about these things before for many years in a pretty widely followed livejournal, but I wanted to write in a less personalized memoir fashion now, because what I’d found is that many readers from the mainstream kept making excuses for me and seeing me as some sort of exception, the kind of tortured smart girl who indulges in all these bad things but redeems herself as an individual because of the fact that she’s bright and engaging, rather than politicizing the issues and accepting rather than excusing what I was.

One post you wrote that I found particularly thought provoking was about the bad rap pimps get. I did see the pimp as the boss– inherently exploitative even if not abusive, so my economic analysis led me to feel negatively towards pimps in general. Your post really made me re-examine and re-evaluate that. Can you talk a little bit about what a pimp actually, legally, is, and how pimps can play an important role in partnership with prostitutes?

Well, to the extent that I’m a socialist/leftist/Marxist/whatever I’d agree that all labor is inherently exploitative and alienating in some way. But if we’re
defining pimps as employers of prostitutes–the BOSS– it’s interesting that we view them as particularly, brutally exploitative, rather, than say, as impersonally exploitative as your boss at the pizzeria that pays you a bit above minimum wage. And that’s of course, again, a direct result of the fact that the culture sees sex work as inherently degrading and dehumanizing, and thus can’t conceive that any sane woman (this second wave feminist analysis, in
portraying these damsels in distress, conveniently omits the fact that so many men and genderqueer people do sex work, since it wouldn’t fit their lurid story so well) would choose to do it of her own volition, so she must be being forced by an abusive boss figure who must be inhuman and heartless to live off the earnings of such work without qualms.

Essentially, the sex worker’s rights movement is a labor movement, and we’re fighting to work the way we choose. And while that includes the right to be independent entrepreneurs–which is why the Nevada system is not a satisfactory system, because it allows the industry to be monopolized by a male dominated draconian big brothel business which doesn’t even allow the women it employs off brothel grounds for fear that they might turn a trick independently, and uses their virtual imprisonment on the job to overcharge them for every necessity–that also includes the right to structure our work in other ways.

Not everyone wants to work as an independent, taking on all the tasks of running an escort business by themselves–working the phones and screening clients can be some of the most exhausting parts of the job. Other workers aren’t criticized for having managers or bosses. Sex workers should be free to choose to work for themselves or someone else.

But beyond labor issues and into matters of the heart: I think the real tragedy of the taboo of the pimp is how those of us who live off
the black market are isolated from each other.

Legally, a pimp is anyone who knowingly takes money from a prostitute. So that means If you were working and your husband was taking care of your kids, he’d be your pimp. If you had a friend staying with you to escape a domestic violence situation and she wasn’t paying rent she’d be a pimp. Your child could be a pimp! If you have ever given money to anyone, expecting nothing in return, they are a pimp, if they know what you do.

I wrote on my local escorts’ listserv on this topic (and I apologize for how I keep on shamelessly quoting myself!):

“I think we should judge every working relationship, every personal relationship, and every relationship which straddles these two categories
on a case by case basis–not assume what they’re like based on class and race (remember, all the evil pimps of the media imagination are usually
black), based on labels. I’ve had a boyfriend who’s taken care of me by hook or by crook when I’ve been too depressed to work, and I’ve also taken care of him–while he did a bunch of work driving me, protecting me, and all sorts of other stuff. I decided where our money went, but some of it did go to him. I have never thought of him as a pimp.”

It seems like the romantic relationships of drug users and sex workers are constantly written off as abusive and or at least totally dispassionate and utilitarian. When I was still doing heroin daily, an ex-boyfriend accused my relationship with my new boyfriend of consisting only of using each other to obtain drugs. Again, nothing could be further from the truth—the reason that I worked with my boyfriend to obtain drugs for each other is because I trusted and
loved him. In the dangerous world of criminalization, I trusted him to care about protecting me from the police and other people who might want to take advantage of me, I trusted him with the money I gave over to him, trusted that he would split the spoils with me fairly, and trusted that he would watch over me and care about my safety when we injected together. He lived up to these implicit promises, and my trust in him as a driver/bodyguard/running partner was vindicated the one day that I did have a problem with a sex work client–he scared away a client that approached me aggressively, got between me and the
violent person with no hesitation, wielding a tire iron and getting the man to back down. I didn’t choose him as a lover because he was handy to me in terms of scoring drugs, I chose him as a running partner, driver, and bodyguard because I loved and trusted him. In an environment in which drug users and sex workers are reviled and criminalized and their safety is not a concern for most people, it only makes sense to team up with good friends and intimate partners, people who actually do care what happens to you. To paint all these relationships as exploitative and abusive by definition does a huge disservice to the people involved—many of whom are trying to take care of each other in an environment that cares nothing about their welfare.

To survive criminalization, people team up to conquer odds with those they trust most. In a heterosexual context, this can often mean a husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend team. Women make the most in the adult industry, and certainly someone working on the black market makes more than someone who doesn’t, so the woman ends up being the main wage earner (especially since most couples realize that having two people work on the black market in the same household is too risky). Often rather than having their male partners work in the legitimate marketplace while they have to hire some stranger to do call in checks, to drive them to outcalls and do bodyguard work, or worse, have an agency that provides these services take a huge cut out of their earnings, they prefer to have their partner do this backup work for them. And it’s hard to work in a profession so beset by criminalization and stigma all alone.

And yet, as sex workers we’re denied the comfort and safety of working with others whom we trust. Even in countries where sex work is decriminalized or legalized in some way, often “pimping” or “procuring” or whatever the label is is still criminalized. Personally, I can’t imagine living in the kind of cold world it would be for sex workers if it was possible to perfectly enforce these laws. I can’t imagine working my first year on my own without the great women employers I started off with, who started me off with clients they knew and trusted, taught me to protect myself from arrest and other dangers, and told me to always trust my intuition. What they took from me financially was a pittance compared with what they gave. And if I hadn’t had my friends living with me at the time, whom I did partially support, who cooked and cleaned from me and supported me emotionally when I was first entering the business, I don’t know what I’d have done.

Why is the idea of a partner who is part of a sex worker’s business so shocking? Is it because many libertarian or leftists accept and respect the sex work that independent, single indie escorts do,but when we talk about a man in a couple who accepts and abets his partner’s work in the industry, they fall back to old sexist knee jerk responses? Like a “real” man would never accept having his partner do sex work, and would certainly never actively back her up in the business? And if he is doing so, then he must be a batterer? If we were talking about the woman being the main wage earner because she had a high paying straight job, we’d never hear a peep about the man in the relationship, even if he did work for the woman–and if you understand sex work as “real” work, there should be no difference between a woman doctor paying the household bills and a woman escort doing the same thing.

I’m not romanticizing anything. I’m not saying that these relationships can’t be abusive or exploitative. But I don’t think they are inherently so because the woman is working in sex work and her partner receives some of her profits, and may work for/with her. In fact, criminalization protects the abusive partner in these relationships when things turn sour. A woman who is intimidated into giving a man all of her income from prostitution is less likely to report that kind of abuse than a woman who suffer the same kind of treatment who earns money through legal means. And because criminalization makes it hard for women to protect themselves, especially on the streets–most prostitutes do not feel comfortable calling the police when a client physically or sexually assaults them (for example, given a recent case in which a U Michigan law school student was prosecuted when she reported being assaulted in the context of a call, it’s easy to see why). So when they have protection, they are reluctant to strike out on their own, even when the person who protects them physically and sexually assaults them and exploits them for their income.

But I have to say in general I don’t think that our working relationships as sex workers are more likely to be abusive than anyone else’s relationships.

Actually, after I posted that pimp entry, I was talking to one of the good old friends who lived with me at the time and she said she really appreciated that entry because, as she said, “I was one of the best pimps ever!” And I really had to agree. Maybe we’ll come around to reclaiming the term–that’d be fun.

I’m really surprised that in all the coverage of the Craigslist murderer, more has not been made of the husband who saved his erotic masseuse/exotic dancer wife’s life from this monster. The husband obviously knew what his wife was doing for a living, and it seems like he was providing security for her. This is a “pimp” as hero. But we don’t get much about this story–no one has followed up with an interview with the husband or the wife–but whenever we hear about an abusive prostitute/intimate partner relationship, we’re sure to get a comprehensive account.

CLEAN Carwash!

We’re still at it!

Image description: Protesters in orange T-shirts reading "PJA" picket outside of a carwash.

This Sunday, May 3rd, the CLEAN Carwash Campaign and Progressive Jewish Alliance will be picketing the Vermont Hand Wash at 1666 N. Vermont Avenue from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Although no carwash in Los Angeles can be described as “good,” the owners of the Vermont Hand Wash in Los Feliz are among the worst in the industry. By protesting the Vermont Hand Wash, we hope to send a message to other carwashes throughout the city. For more information, visit cleancarwashla.org.

Please repost or link to this message on your blog, or forward this to any Los Angeles residents you might know.

Also, please leave a comment if you or someone you know plans to attend. Thanks!