Author Tip Jar
Recently the Belgium government took some rather historic steps in the legitimization of Sex Work. In a unanimous decision (how often do those happen in government!?), on May the 3rd the Belgian Parliament voted to provide sex workers with “labor contracts”, putting the profession on the same legal footing as most other occupations. Accounting, nursing, farming, prostitution… to the government of Belgium, they’re all more or less now the same thing. In general, the expectation throughout The West has been that any employee / employer relationship ought be governed by various rights and responsibilities held on both sides. Of course, what those rights and responsibilities are, specifically, varies from country to country, but things like a guaranteed number of days off each year for example, or health insurance, or maternity leave, are supposed to be contractual obligations the employer owes to the employee. Just as Joe in the Belgian accounting office or Sven in the Belgian factory has enjoyed the security of such benefits for decades, with this new law in place, sex workers in Belgium will also be able to enjoy a more formal, much more legally defined framework of employment. That could be good. I’m not a woman and I’m not a sex worker, so the ends and outs of the trade are beyond me. What I do know though, as someone intimately familiar with the ends and outs of corporate employment, is that such contracts are never one-sided.
Employees’ rights always come hand-in-hand with their responsibilities.
Be careful what you wish for.
In liberal spheres (I don’t use that as a pejorative, it’s simply accurate), the new legislation is being widely touted…
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