Posts by Emma Hart
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If someone wants to keep their job at McDonald's because it's, at that moment, the only thing between them and the dole, but we have intercepted management sending other employees through the burger machine, haven't they sort of forfeited the right to a frank and open discussion about what works for them legislation-wise?
Seriously? A hundred women a year come to Iceland from overseas to work in the sex industry, and some of them may or may not be trafficked, nobody seems to know, and so every single sex worker has forfeited the right to have a say when their job is taken away from them by legislation?
Also, how do you know why that person is working at McDonald's if you haven't asked them? Aren't you just making an assumption? Rather paternalistically?
It seems to me to be simple pragmatism. The people working in the sex industry are the people who know the most about it. They know what will work for them, better than someone who's never seen or spoken to a sex worker possibly can.
But what? Government-run brothels?
Well, how about the system we have here? The one sex workers prefer to the much-vaunted Swedish model, again brought in without consultation with sex workers, and which British sex workers have steadily and fruitlessly opposed. The carrot - help with transition out of sex work, harm reduction, medical help, other employment - all that can be done without a stick which simply makes sex wokers' lives harder, and more effectively where sex work is legal. (There are now fewer prostitutes in Sweden, and fewer people using them, but the rate of violent attacks has risen dramatically.)
I have pages of links which have never quite made it to a column. Try this one:
Pye Jacobson, a founding member of Sex Workers and Allies in Sweden, who has been organising for sex workers’ rights since 1994, says that the Swedish laws have forced sex work underground, increasing the amount of pimping and middle-men. At a recent meeting on the proposed legislation, held in Parliament and sponsored by John McDonnell MP and the Labour Representation Committee women’s caucus, Jacobson said: “Now we have internet pimps, who arrange where we can put our ads for a ridiculous amount of money, and apartment pimps because we are not allowed to rent an apartment and work from it.”
Perhaps most worryingly, she also claimed that sex workers were now less likely to report violence to the police, since this would inevitably entail an investigation into their working lives and result in the closure of the brothels where they worked or heavier policing of red light districts. Whereas under the old laws male clients would sometimes report cases of violence from other clients or pimps, now none of them are willing to risk arrest in order to look out for the girls whose services they use.
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Of course, by closing down the known businesses, you're only left with the unknowns, and not necessarily any closer to finding the real lawbreakers. I guess the hope is that in a place as small as Iceland, there are no secrets.
What are the odds, though; am picturing a small country that decides to go 100% vegetarian. I bet you could sniff your way to a bacon speakeasy if you put your mind to it.
I wasn't going to get into this, because it makes me feel like I've been wasting two years of commenting, but Jolisa, they'll move to out-call stripping. You know, the strippers who come to parties. Or private homes. Full of men who used to go to strip clubs, where there were bouncers, and crowds, and other strippers to back you up. Vast improvement, right?
The porn will always be with us
Yep, and that might not be a problem, except ideologically. (Warning: comments of usual 'comments on the internet' quality, though perhaps worth reading for the woman who says "anti-porn feminists have never claimed 'porn causes men to commit sexual violence against women'.")
Law around the sex industry should surely be made in consultation with people who work in the sex industry, like it was here. And in case Julie Bindell is confused, that doesn't mean going into a strip club, looking at some strippers, and deciding they look unhappy, then leaving. You don't even treat children like that, only animals.
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I spent about 1 or 2 months on the dole after I left university and was made to feel like a criminal.
From what I've seen through friends, there doesn't appear to have been any kind of culture change. It's an adversarial system: the basic assumption is that every single person who comes through the door is trying to rip them off. Nobody would tell you what you were entitled to, you had to already know.
You do get some great people working there, but they also rotate your case workers, so you don't build up a rapport or end up working with someone who actually knows your case. We needed to transition from a UB in my partner's name to a Sickness Benefit under mine, which couldn't be done, so our case-worker paid us manually for a few weeks.
A couple of months later we got a letter saying we'd been overpaid X thousand dollars, and they'd already started taking it back out of our bank accounts. We had to wait for what was now our ex-case-worker to get back from holiday to sort it out, by which time WINZ had quite simply stolen a couple of hundred dollars from us. There'd been no investigation, there were simply payments they didn't understand, so they took the money back.
Because the cost to society of letting people fall through the cracks is *much* greater than the cost of supporting a few people who are lazy.
QFT. And I think they know that, it's simply that the ideology is more important than the end result.
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I know what you mean, I need my 20 hours in bed just to cope with the drinking.
Drinking! Drinking! Wait, I'm not going down that road, there's a shoebox in the middle of it.
I'm going to quietly bookmark this page for future pick-me-up purposes.
You totally deserve it. We really must have breakfast together again in future.
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Those women on the DPB have children - how are those children going to eat if their benefit is halved because their mothers can't get non-existent jobs?
Well, that's their fault for being born to such lazy whores, etc.
This is my way of dealing with my over-powering anger. I saw a friend of mine give up on a relationship because his girlfriend was on the DPB and there actually was a guy in a parked car across the road from her house every night and she could lose her benefit for receiving "emotional support". Which you'd think would lead any sane person to then ask, "What are these people supposed to EAT? Where are they supposed to live?"
I've been on both Sickness and Invalids' benefits, and I know what work-testing will do - the stress will make people sicker. My designated doctor visits would pretty much reduce me to sixteen hours a day in bed again for a couple of weeks just from sheer stress.
What benefit can they possibly believe comes from treating people like criminals? And how can a government possibly retain any credibility when demanding people work while it sacks its own workforce?
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Why, do you think it's a joke?
A little pre-posting googling, just in case I'd been accidentally a bit accurate, revealed that this was seriously considered in Australia in 2004. Australia. We practically have to do it.
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Did Haywood put you up to this?
Um, yes. I constantly need to be put up to things. That's why Megan is such a bad influence on me.
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Announcement is here, Deborah.
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Being in the right and dead strikes me as a very bad deal.
Being in the right and killing someone doesn't seem so great, either.
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Doesn't Mr Chauvel actually have a kid himself?
I've spent some time mulling this today, because it just doesn't seem possible for that fact to have escaped people, even Rodney Hide, over the last few days. Part of me wonders if they're deliberately trying to get Charles to mention his own family, so they become 'fair game'.