Last week there was a big kerfuffle about a German woman who was allegedly told she would lose her unemployment benefits if she didn’t accept a job at a local brothel. The idea being that since Germany recently legalized prostitution, prostitution was a legal job, unemployment regulations require that you not refuse legal jobs, therefore if the woman refused to apply she lost her benefits. Q.E.D.
Turns out it may not be all that. According to a comment on the ChicagoBoyz.net version of the story a German national says:
"Everybody calm down. Germany is finally starting to reform its labor market, and some opponents of the labor market reforms offered this as a theoretical case, for the new laws do not explicitly exclude prositution from the list of jobs you can be forced to take, if you don’t want to have your benefits cancelled. But of course nobody can be made to accept a job as a prostitute, for it would amount to rape, our constitution also forbids this."
Also
The article in the Daily Telegraph seems to have been cobbled together from several German sources.
The information about the waitress who was told to interview for a job that turned out to be at a brothel was taken from an article on "jungle-world.com," which calls itself a "leftist weekly." That article was posted July 30, 2003 (!!). The 25-year-old waitress was told to contact the company "Reni Massage." The woman found the company’s website and figured out that it was a brothel and decided to not get in touch. According to the Berlin employment center, the job posting had been sent to the woman by mistake. The job offer had been for bar staff (not for "sexual services," as the Telegraph article claims) and it hadn’t been obvious from the information that the employment center had received that the company was a brothel.
The second part of the Daily Telegraph article contains information also found in an article from the leftist alternative Berlin daily "tageszeitung," filed on December 18, 2004. Both articles quote a Hamburg lawyer called Mechthild Garweg (note that the Telegraph misspells her first name). In the "tageszeitung" article, Ms. Garweg notes that there is nothing in the law regulating unemployment benefits that would prevent an employment center to force a woman to work as a prostitute if she wants to keep her benefits. It is clear from the article that this is merely a theoretical possibility. German employment centers have meanwhile asserted that they would not be passing on job offers for prostitution.
And finally, a word about the English-language source of the article:
The Torygraph[sic] is about as anti-European (and linked to that anti-German) as you can get it from a broadsheet (let’s ignore the tabloids for now).
You can’t really be surprised about this kind of shoddy reporting and scaremongering from them, they won’t pass an opportunity for some good EU/Germany bashing.
All links can be found approximately here. The bottom line though appears to be that the story while false, was too good to pass up by those antagonistic to a) prostitution b) welfare-to-work legislation c) Germany.
That first point, though, from the German national that it’s still constitutionally rape to force someone to have sex against his or her will whether prostitution is legal or not is an awfully compelling point in favor of legalization here in the U.S.
figleaf
Update: Rumor debunker website Snopes.com is on the case. Their conclusion is that while the story’s validity is uncertain, it does look as though the primary source proposes the story only as a hypothetical situation and not an actual occurrence.
