There are a number of jobs out there with the explicit aim of helping sex workers to find stable employment outside of selling sex. Some hope to enable us to quit entirely if that’s what we want, whilst others aim to upskill us and make the sex work we still do less precarious. They are distinct from gig work or short-term paid opportunities offered to sex workers from within our own communities because of their goals and the way they capitalize on our identities.
Depending on their treatment of the sex workers they hire, these kinds of employment schemes can be hugely beneficial or they can compound existing struggles whilst exploiting our expertise and desperation. Most fall somewhere in between. Whatever noble goals they might have end up being treated as secondary to obtaining funding. Eventually so many compromises are made that these jobs cease to be the kinds of opportunities they were presented as, with some being still being a net positive despite this shortfall and others causing active harm.
Typically lived experience of sex work and being multiply marginalized is important for the job role in a help-a-hooker job. This might be because we’re expected to provide support to sex workers who will not trust those without experience in the industry, or it could be because we must be marginalized people who are helped by being employed for the project to secure funding. Occasionally, it’s purely because the founder of the project wants to support sex workers. These jobs might be:
- Research roles, particularly those which involve interviewing sex workers.
- Charity and/or peer support roles, doing outreach with sex workers.
- Traditional work (often retail), focused on getting sex workers into the labour force.
As someone who has taken on jobs designed for sex workers multiple times, I’ve begun to identify patterns in the recurring issues which eventually push us out of them and back into selling sex full-time. In some cases I believe these problems can be overcome, however in others they seem to be inherent to the job and I believe they should be communicated clearly to applicants and accounted for when compensating those who are employed.
One major drawback to help-a-hooker jobs in research roles is that they typically include drawing service users and participants from our own communities. If I need to recruit 10 sex workers to interview about their experiences, assuming I do not wish to pester unknown sex workers through their advertisements on online platforms, my only option is to go to the ones I know and share the request for interviewees in spaces I’m part of. Even if I only select participants who I do not know well, we are almost guaranteed to have mutual friends and end up at the same events or in the same brothels as each other. It creates very strange dynamics!
Peer support jobs take these awkward dynamics to an extreme. If we work for a group offering STI tests to sex workers, we might find out the status of someone we personally know who may then fear we will share it with others. Another worker on the same team as us might consult us about case work they’re doing with someone and reveal information about finances or a sexual assault, only for us to discover that we know the service user personally. The mere fact of knowing we are working in one of these roles can make our friends hesitant to tell us things that they otherwise would have, or to make use of the services we help run because they want a separation between their inner circle and their healthcare or other kinds of support. Seeing service users at events can limit our behaviour because we feel like we’re always representing our workplace, so we can’t interact freely or get drunk or be messy.
When we fail to meet the expectations in jobs which exist to help other sex workers, we feel a much stronger sense of shame than the average worker does. In some cases this motivates us to provide better care, but this often comes at a cost. We are highly likely to burn out and exhaust ourselves by taking on extra unpaid hours in service of those we share struggles with. This is often taken advantage of by bosses who will explicitly encourage us to do uncompensated overtime on the basis that the charity sector and projects supporting sex workers are underfunded.
If we manage to keep working in sex worker peer support roles despite the pressures and the tension they put our personal relationships under, another problem we face is the fact we cannot use the service for ourselves. This could mean we’re barred from all kinds of important support due to conflicts with our jobs. I’ve been unable to access free counselling because the mental health professional providing it was my colleague. I couldn’t attend a drop-in to speak openly about bad client experiences, since as the person running it sharing my own trauma would be inappropriate. Seeking advice on applying for financial support had to be informal because I couldn’t be taken on as a case work client by my own boss.
For these reasons, sometimes help-a-hooker jobs that aren’t based around peer support or research are more appealing to us despite the lack of broader social benefit. These jobs might come from “exit” programs run by SWERFs or be more altruistic ventures. No matter who is running them, the idea of being able to be honest about our work history and not needing to rely on fake references and charming employers at countless interviews is very enticing. Disability may be accommodated for when it’s the reason someone is selling sex instead of other work, contrasting most employers who would rather reject us because of the extra effort necessary to hire us. Unfortunately, the lower barrier to entry to these jobs doesn’t mean they’ll remain accommodating or won’t exploit us once we’re in them. Knowing we’re likely used to mistreatment in sex work and that we’ll tolerate a lot to stay out of it actually emboldens a lot of employers!
In any job where your boss thinks they’re doing you a favour by hiring you, they’re likely to hold you to a higher standard. Couple that with whorephobic prejudices an employer is likely to hold that sex workers are unintelligent and especially that poor hookers understand nothing of business, then you have a recipe for a hostile work environment with an unreasonable level of scrutiny. The boss also retains the sensitive information that their employee has a history of sex work, which can easily be held over an employees head in a dispute and make it harder for them to speak out.
I was personally taken in by a job offer to sell books at The Scarlett Letters as a result of promises that it would be a way to sell less sex and work in a welcoming environment. Promises of fixed-hour contracts which would allow me to reference for other things were never met, meanwhile funding was obtained on the basis that some employees were sex workers being given stable employment. You can hear more of the specifics here on Trashfuture, but ultimately I was left in a more difficult situation with regards to selling sex than when I started because I allowed myself to rely on the work.
Once we venture out of sex work and into other forms of employment, relying on it as another source of income, our list of regular clients shrinks. Many of us try to make up the gap between our bills and the traditional job we’ve secured so that we can quit entirely, because we convince ourselves that it is possible. At the point where we can no longer handle the work or we’re let go, we may well be worse off than when we were selling sex regularly and have to scramble to get back to our previous client volume. Losing my last job while heavily pregnant, making me no longer eligible for any parental leave pay, left me in the lurch worse than if I’d been hustling hard for my entire pregnancy to save enough for a break after birth.
I’ve found myself the most frustrated by bosses in these jobs who fail to consider these consequences at all. Running a business is hard and managing a project that tries to do good for sex workers whilst still making enough money to stay afloat is even harder, but that doesn’t excuse ignorance and dishonesty. If you advertise a job to sex workers that only allows one or two days a week of work, it should come as no surprise to you that those employees are still hooking on the side to make ends meet… yet I’ve had bosses express surprise that I couldn’t come to a social gathering outside of work hours because I was meeting with a client.
Regardless of all my misgivings, I don’t want to dismiss every help-a-hooker job as a pointless or exploitative endeavour. I just want to acknowledge the context they exist in. We need all jobs to stop discriminating so harshly against people with CV gaps and be willing to train applicants who don’t have experience to get them into long-term careers. Knowing that will not be achieved quickly, we need to bridge the gap somehow. I think jobs designed to give sex workers a leg up are as good of an idea as any. We just need to be honest about the limitations and seek to mitigate them where we can.
Although I think long-term stable employment should be on offer for those who want it, sex workers can also be supported through the offering of gig work as another way to bridge this gap. A paid writing or speaking opportunity won’t cover all our bills, but for me it’s often been the difference between having to take a client who exhibited multiple red flags and being able to stay home that night instead. For those who cobble together various income sources, it might be enough extra pay to let them skip their brothel shift for the month.
Groups like SWARM pay sex workers to speak at their events and give out grants to those experiencing hardship. Collectives like Working Girls Press publish works filled with writing that sex workers were paid to submit. THORN (Trans Hooker Resistance Network) pay sex workers to run workshops or create written pieces for zines. Tryst pay artists to create images to go with articles written by sex workers who they also compensate. Crucially, not one of these groups expects sex workers to perform our gratefulness for the opportunity and they do not act shocked if we continue to sell sex.
Not every sex worker wants other ways to earn a living. Those who do should have a way not to solely rely on sex work. Building that world takes time and effort, and in the interim we need to support the groups who are helping people as best they can. If you’re a hiring manager or know one then you can be part of the change, encouraging recruitment of people even if a background check shows evidence of sex work or a CV has large gaps in it. For the rest of us without such power, we can keep putting pressure on those who do.
If you’d like to support a project that will pay over 30 trans and intersex sex workers to share their writing, sign up to be notified when the Transactional Intercourse pre-order campaign launches on Kickstarter!
Jack Talks About Sex Work 