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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

How do you ensure that the person performing sex work is being compensated for sex work, versus some form of exploitation (whether that's the platform or an individual exploiting)?

A sex worker union [1] who can negotiate with distribution companies and platforms, lobby legislators and payment facilitators (who should not be prohibiting payments for legal business transactions), and ensure quality working conditions and anti-exploitation controls are in place.

[1] https://www.iusw.org/ (just an example, not familiar with them specifically, just demonstrating the existence of such an org)

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This is an important question in terms of all work.

But even without being able to answer it, restricting sex workers' choices via deplatforming and criminalisation invariably makes them less safe, so I'd argue that we should stop doing that anyway.

Letting them actually report exploitation to the police would be a start (and no, swedish model bullshit doesn't achieve that, if you criminalise any part of the transaction they realistically can't take full advantage of the existing protections under law).

Completely agree with both you and gp.

IMHO, the "right" way to fix these issues is to make sure people have a choice.

Many girls get into sex work because it's either sex or starve. We need to (as a society), give these people a third alternative. Ideally, this would result in only people who WANT to be sex workers to go down that path (pretty much like only people who WANT to be CEOs are CEOs).

I could not agree more.

Same way you ensure any other person isn’t being exploited. Society provides resources allowing the person to have the opportunity to not be leveraged into exploitation as their only option.

Yeah, not so much. North American developed countries aren't shining examples of labor protection champions. I'd refer to parts of Europe [1] and New Zealand [2] on how to protect sex workers in a more substantial way.

[1] https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/Declaration_bookle...

[2] https://www.nzpc.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Model

Well that and the labor protections we do provide end up primarily benefiting businesses and unions over the individual workers themselves.

Same here in Europe. I don't believe it's possible to have unions (or governments) that work for the individual.

It's possible but the majority of stakeholders need to be actively engaged in managing that entity. Otherwise it will be taken oven by the bad actors trying to primarily benefit themselves.

Yeah, but that ceases to work once that entity is too large. I personally think the limit is around 50 or so, but I don't see the need for union in a 50-head company.

I've literally never seen a functioning union anywhere I went (I live in Europe). Everyone I met in my life, in a bar, etc is angry at their unions.

> I personally think the limit is around 50

Incidentally, I personally think the limit for communist societies is around 50 people or so.

Agreed! My experience from (adult) summer camps etc is that after 50 or so it becomes impossible to know what's everyone up to, and distrust starts rooting.

Another issue is that people have unrealistic idea about what can and should be done in a day/week/month. They don't care about their own work nearly that much, and will forgive themselves a lot, but will expect others to upheld that unrealistic standard.

Definitely not the same "in Europe". Maybe in some of it (after all the two biggest countries in Europe is Russia and Ukraine). In Scandinavia unions work really well for the most part - at least extremely well compared to the US. It is one of the biggest reasons for the Scandinavian model.

I'd say "most of it", you're right that there are two countries where it seems to work at least a little - at great costs though, I have many Scandinavian colleagues (working in hi-tech fields) that left their country because of overregulation.

There's a survivorship bias here. Of course you are going to meet the people who left the country.

On the flip side, as a native Scandinavian I have many colleagues from outside of Scandinavia that moved here because of many of the things unions have accomplished - 25 days of paid vacation, a culture of working your 8 hours a day and not more than that, and a child care system that allows you to spend more time with your kids.

Sex workers are vastly exploited in Europe too, sadly.

Not all of them are, but it does not seem like the issue has been solved.

I agree, but I think you inverted it.

"Exploitable people are pushed into sex work" is closer to being true than "sex workers are exploited," only because almost no one starts out as a sex worker if they have better opportunities.

As a NZer this is something I feel like we got very right. It has always just felt like an incredibly sensible and mature approach. It's a lot safer for everyone and it's not a big deal. The sky didn't fall down and the country didn't go astray. It all just got safer for everyone and things continued as normal.

How does this work on the internet where there are a 100+ separate countries involved?

>Same way you ensure any other person isn’t being exploited.

"It's estimated that internationally there are between 20 million and 40 million people in modern slavery today."

"Human trafficking earns global profits of roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers, $99 billion of which comes from commercial sexual exploitation"

"Estimates suggest that about 50,000 people are trafficked into the US each year, most often from Mexico and the Philippines. "

>Society provides resources allowing the person to have the opportunity to not be leveraged into exploitation as their only option.

"In 2018, over half (51.6%) of the criminal human trafficking cases active in the US were sex trafficking cases involving only children"

https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-human-tr....

UBI

The easier for them to press charges when mistreated, the more control they have over places and customers, the safer they are.

E.g. abilities like hiring bodygourds, platforms that allow them to vet customers etc.

Interesting question, because I would be tempted to say "use the same safeguards as any other labor", but there are definite grey areas there. I suppose a union is the best way to go about it, but I don't know how that helps independents, side gigs, or people just trying to break into the industry..?

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