Are Sex Workers Labor?
Wendy Lyon with an interesting piece about the Irish labor movement explicitly excluding sex workers from its definition of labor. It’s hardly surprising, both within the Irish context of discomfort over such matters and within labor writ large excluding those outside of “respectable” forms of work. But it also leaves some of Ireland’s most marginalized workers exposed to danger, violence, and exploitation. I know that recognizing sex work as work means that we are legitimizing the sex trade. But does not legitimizing that trade accomplish anything positive at all?