Barriers to Organising

Abstract

While qualitative significance can be attributed to the emergence of the first instances of sex worker union organisation in Australia, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and the US in regard of the relative ‘underdevelopment’ of comparable organisation in Canada and New Zealand (and elsewhere), this cannot be correctly done without at the same time also locating this phenomenon in the context of the quantitative sparseness of the overall extent of this development. Although speaking of COYOTE and PONY in the 1980s, Plachy and Ridgeway’s (1996:34) observation is equally applicable to sex worker union organisations of the 1990s and 2000s. They commented: ‘The reality beyond this [sex work] debate is that only a tiny minority of sex workers have ever heard of these organisations’. Alternatively, and speaking of the 1990s, Altman (2001:102) argued: ‘Most people who engage in sex for money have no sense of this [the sex work discourse] comprising their central identity, and they may well be repelled by attempts to organize around an identity they would strongly reject’. Similar points about the degree of representative-ness by those who subjectively see themselves as sex workers for all those who are objectively sex workers have been raised by others (e.g. Bernstein 1999:111; Zatz 1997:283). Therefore, and in conjunction with the previous chapter, this chapter examines the forces and processes that have served to act as barriers to the unionisation and union organisation of sex workers.