Welcome to the Walmart Family - Or Else?!

Germany has an unemployment problem. With 10.5% unemployment, it’s one of the highest rates in Western Europe. Still struggling to absorb eastern Germany and saddled with a barely growing economy, Germany has become willing to consider restrictions and cuts to its comparatively generous social welfare system. The unemployed must register with the Labor Office and be available to its placement service, agreeing to accept a job found for them if it is consistent with their training and experience.

Two years ago, Germany decriminalized prostitution. Now needing pay taxes and employee health insurance, brothel owners were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

A 25 year old former IT professional, who was willing to work outside her field and had worked in a café, was called for a job interview only to discover that the prospective employer is a brothel. She refused the work and now faces a possible loss of benefits because any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit.

I support legalizing prostitution as means of bringing sex industry workers out of the margins and affording them protection of their rights. Currently subject to violence and rape with little legal recourse, criminalizing prostitution creates a substantial barrier to exiting the sex industry. But prostitution is not just another job. Yet that is not how German law currently sees the matter.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

At first blush this seems like liberal political correctness run amuck. And there is some truth to that. But that isn’t the whole story. The ability of employers to force the unemployed to work for them, presumably at whatever wages they set, would be corporate America’s wet dream. We are, of course, dangerously close to that line. We in America reserve the worst treatment for the poorest and most vulnerable, those not in the unemployment system but in the welfare system. An eighteen year old in the US not on welfare must work full-time, if work is available, if they are living with a parent receiving welfare payments. School does not count towards the work requirement. We may not be at the point where McDonalds can troll the unemployment offices for conscripts, but effect of our current system is virtually the same.

And before any of you conservatives start looking at Germany’s system with envy, consider what would happen if you were unemployed and there was a job opening at a local clinic providing abortion services. And liberals, imagine being forced to work at a meat processing plant, or for the tobacco industry or for – perish the very thought – Walmart! The point is that there are plenty of jobs other than prostitution that someone might object to on moral grounds.

But there is a second element to this story that isn’t exactly from the liberal playbook. Reconsider the above quoted statement. "There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry." (Emphasis added.) Why only women? I’ve been to Germany. It has a large and vibrant gay community. (And let’s face it, men are the primary consumers of the services of sex industry workers – male and female.) Imagine, even in liberal Europe, if an unemployed straight man was required to have sex with men or lose his benefits. The problem would be fixed - pronto.

Of course, no one has yet actually lost their benefits in Germany for refusing to become a prostitute. This may well be resolved. And we’ll probably never hear about it if the logical and reasonable conclusion is reached.