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Managing Sex Work: On the Job Moonlighting

Fri, 2009-12-04 11:14 — figleaf

The author of Ask a Manager answers an unfamiliar question with grace and aplomb

[Question] “My co-worker is a very open person and tells me to cover for her every time she has to leave the office. Our boss and manager are not here half the time so when they are not, my co-worker leaves either early and/or takes a really long lunch. At the beginning, the excuse for leaving early was because of a date. But she later told me that she’s actually sleeping with people for money. She comes back all proud, telling me how much money she made in an hour.”

[Answer] I’d just be straightforward with her and tell her: “I don’t care what you do in your personal life, but while you’re off making money, you’re leaving me to pick up the slack here. You’re putting me in a bad position, because you’re asking me to cover for you and you’re leaving me with more work.”

Read the quote in context here.

The comment threads are pretty interesting too, some judgmental, some libertarian, some addressing it as a law and order question, others as a straight-up work problem.

A woman from New Zealand takes a similar approach to the Manager

Here in New Zealand it’s not an illegal activity and I would deal with it as suggested above. However if it was an illegal activity, say dealing drugs, then I would be informing management immediately.

The last comment at the moment (dated Nov. 30th) is from the author of the original question clarifying some of the assumptions in comments.

Well I wrote this email in an effort to guide me in the right direction, but really it is easier said than done. I totally agree that prostitution is illegal and she shouldn’t be doing that, but in reality it is a victimless crime. I can not call the cops on her because I just don’t have the heart to do that.

She is really a very good person and is an excellent mother. Most of the people who post comments here assume that since she is selling her body she must be a bad mother. She is not giving that example to her kids. For her kids she works only in the office. Her kids are her priority. Although, I do not agree with her spending habits she provides the best she can for her kids.

Kind of takes away some of the cartoonish shorthand in standard debates about sex work. She’s clearly not “trafficked,” and it would be very difficult to construct her as a victim, a thrall, or dehumanized. But she’s leaving her day-job co-workers holding the bag and pulling her freight plus abusing her responsibilities to her employer.

And yet more evidence that single, blanket characterizations of sex workers, or single, blanket policies for dealing with sex work, would be inadequate to its complexity.

The Scarlet Letter and the Law

Sat, 2008-06-21 10:21 — figleaf

[Quick hi to everyone from the 5th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy, hosted by Amber Rhea. —fl]

So. Back in the late 1970s in my home town a woman I knew vaguely as a customer at one of the bars I worked at wound up having what by all accounts including hers began as consensual sex with a bunch of firefighters at the nearby university-area fire station. After she’d had sex with fourteen, though, she wanted to stop. Instead the two or three remaining firefighters forced her to continue till they’d had “their turns.”

A lot of area locals were surprised, and even angry, when she had the gall to charge those last firefighters with rape and the others with helping them hold her down. After all she was Teh Bhig Slut for having sex with any of them so what difference did a few more make? Just because she didn’t want to anymore? People were even more surprised when prosecutors brought charges in the case.

That was the first time I heard the phrase “no means no” used in a feminist context and even in 1978 or 1979 I only had to hear it that once go get it. There was an even bigger lesson though, and it was one people had a harder time learning: rights, rules, and respect don’t evaporate when someone has Teh Sex, even if you don’t approve of the way she or he chooses to do it.

I mention this because Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors highlights a problem with the criminalization of sex work with the following quote from a New York Times

Jodi Michelle Link, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who specializes in sex and vice crimes, said prosecuting Mr. Elms for his connection to The Erotic Review could be difficult for free speech reasons. She also said that the prostitutes who said they had been asked by Mr. Elms for sexual favors would have trouble making a criminal case against him because they could simply choose not to participate on his site.

...

Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said.

Read the quote, and Bartow’s commentary in context here.

Sound familiar? Mr. Elm seems to have been getting away with straight up sexual harassment of both the hostile-workplace and quid pro quo varieties. But because everyone including the D.A. seem maximally titillated by the prostitution angle the reality of what happened to that sex worker goes by the wayside. Because, after all, how can a prostitute ever be sexually harassed? It’s her job to be harassed, her whole job is quid pro quo. So big whup, right?

But that’s the same mentality that led people to imagine that a woman who’s said yes to 14 men gives up any right to say no to the 15th, 16th, or 17th. It’s the same mentality that lets an asshole judge (Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni, to be exact) say gang-raping a prostitute is just “theft of services” and dismiss all other charges.

In the real world, however, sex workers (trafficked and non-trafficked) get put over the barrel like that all the time. And not to put too fine a point on it but it’s the “being over the barrel” part, not the “being a sex worker” that makes prostitutes unreliable witnesses. If your job is already illegal how much can you afford to disclose before (at least in the witness’s internal deliberations) you put yourself in legal jeopardy?

If the businesses or service providors Elms’s site reviewed were legal, don’t you think victims of harassment and extortion (let along what sounds like kidnapping and use firearm-aggravated criminal sexual assault) would have been taken more seriously? Of course!

I wouldn’t expect a vice-squad prosecutor to understand the nuances, nor to be able to untangle the chain of employment, nor to press the definition of “workplace” for the civil offense of sexual harassment.** but I bet a halfway competent employment-rights attorney could make hay out of this guy Elms.

The problem is that, once again, people get distracted and/or titillated by the “sex” part of “sex work” and therefore miss a lot of opportunities to really land hard on abusers.

[** That’s not a knock on District Attorney Link, by the way. I wouldn’t expect a prosecutor assigned to homicide cases to untangle securities fraud either. —fl]

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