Influences on Unionization

Abstract

The previous chapters recounted the various projects to unionize sex workers and create sex-worker unions. Despite frequent frailty and failure, these attempts have still provided some ‘voice’ mechanism where few existed before on matters of workers’ rights the wage-effort bargain. Some of the projects sought to go beyond mere ‘voice’ by providing a ‘mandate’ for collective actions to be taken, sometimes in regard to seeking to regulate the wage-effort bargain, even if the improvements in material outcomes have often been limited and disappointing. ‘Voice’ and ‘mandate’ have been generated through the creation of organs of self-agency.¹ This chapter undertakes a thematic examination in order to consider the generalized forces and processes that have influenced unionization. These are important issues for a leading sex-worker organizing advocate, Melissa Gira Grant, proffered that: ‘sex workers have already thought of every single proposal for organisation and unionisation. So, the reason that it isn’t happening is either that workers think it’s a great idea but don’t have resources, or it isn’t a great idea’ (Red Pepper April 2015).² In suggesting: ‘We need to get sex workers the resources to organize, and we have to get rid of laws that criminalize sex workers’ (Red Pepper April 2015), Gira Grant implied the barriers and obstacles to unionization were merely or largely ones of resource availability and decriminalization.