Exactly! Right after the initial COVID shutdowns, there were stories on the news about landlords trying to solicit sex from female tenants who were suddenly unemployed and unable to pay rent. If "sex work is work", why is this request any more outrageous than a landlord allowing a tenant to do maintenance or gardening around the property in lieu of paying rent?
And then there are issues regarding government assistance. Like, if a woman is receiving unemployment and refuses a job offer to work in a legal brothel, she could lose her benefits (this actually happened in Germany). Once governments start treating prostitution like any other job, it becomes hard to justify letting desperate women opt out of it
Yes! and it makes the fight against sexual harassment in the workplace nil!
Then again, why would I expect rich woke women to give a damn about the female worker?
Wasn't there a situation in Germany where women were denied unemployment benefits after they had refused to take up a job as a prostitute? Most people would agree that if you refuse a job you're qualified for, even if it's working at a grocery store or being a janitor, you shouldn't be collecting benefits. Basically every young woman is "qualified" to be a prostitute. I'd love to hear people bending themselves into a pretzel explaining why refusing work as a prostitute is different from refusing work as a janitor. Society considers people who think certain jobs are beneath them and then beg for money lazy and entitled but I've never heard of anyone calling women who don't want to have sex for money that. Actually, women who do have sex for money are the ones being called lazy and entitled.
This is exactly where I see this heading so I looked it up. This article is dated but the agency admits that if they could require women to prostitute themselves under current social norms, they would.
"Other duties as assigned."
If sex work is just regular, everyday labour, workplace sexual harassment doesn't exist anymore.
I actually don’t know about that. There are a lot of things that are work that’s legal and your boss can still not require you do that and you can go to management and HR about it. Like if you are a teaching/research assistant your professor can’t expect you to clean his car and get his dry cleaning. That’s not in your job description. I know a few professors did that when I was in graduate school until the Dean had a meeting and asked the professors to quit doing that or they find themselves with no assistants and told assistants that they didn’t have to do things that aren’t in their job description. Should sex work ever become legal we all should remember that.
It can be put in the job description, though. "Other duties to be determined" would probably suffice as well. Then you run into the issue that pennygadget raised above - what do you do when women refuse to take the job? Can they get unemployment?
They can’t. That’s when you go to HR. There is in no circumstances where an engineer or a teacher needs to give a blow job for anything to do their jobs. It’s the same as asking an engineer to get coffee, you can and should say no. It’s not part of an engineers job duties. Or a teacher to clean the principals house. Those are beyond the general job duties of a teacher and they can say no and keep their jobs.
It's unlikely to fly in professional jobs, sure. But what about jobs that are already mostly or entirely about keeping customers happy, like sales or the hospitality industry?
Not in the US. It's illegal to ask a director level employee to wash your car. That director level employee can quit but not sue you. It's just bad management to require stuff like that. And someone higher up might not approve of you doing it. But again, not illegal.
In other countries, where workers protections are stronger, employers can only require employees to do things in their job description. But they can still change the job description and add more things to the list.
I always like to point out to those that think sex work is a legit job, that if it were to become fully legal, there’s nothing to stop your boss from requiring you to perform oral sex on him. If you neglect some of your job duties, you’re fired. There’s no argument they can use without looking like total hypocrites.