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The Belgian parliament on Thursday has approved a law that will allow people to work with sex – said sex worker, category which includes anyone who offers services related to the sexual sphere in exchange for money, such as escorts and porn actors and actresses, and which includes both women and men and non-binary people – to obtain regular employment contracts from employees.
The law is part of a broader sex work regulatory reform program that Belgium undertook in 2022, when it was among the first countries in the world to decriminalize prostitution. So far, however, the thousands of sex worker of the country (95 percent of whom are women) could only work as freelancers, and not as employees: from now on they will therefore be able to obtain more stable contracts, and greater guarantees on respect for working hours, remuneration and access to social Security.
The ministries of Economy and Labour, Health and Justice had drawn up the text of the law, working for months in collaboration with experts and associations dedicated to children’s rights. sex worker. The final version of the text was approved by a large majority, with 93 votes in favour, 33 abstentions and no votes against. The law will also allow sex workers to refuse to perform certain services or interact with specific clients without this constituting grounds for dismissal, and requires that an emergency button be installed in each of the rooms where the services will take place.
The law also provides obligations for employers, who must not have a criminal record, must maintain their main registered office in Belgium and ensure that there is always a person available in the workplace who can intervene in case of emergency. Anyone you employ sex worker outside this legal framework he will be prosecuted for exploitation of prostitution.
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The law touches on an issue historically considered one of the most divisive topics within feminist movements. In Belgium, in recent years, most of the country’s feminist groups have expressed themselves in favor of the progressive decriminalization of prostitution, but there are nevertheless various abolitionist associations which, with various arguments, believe that prostitution cannot be considered a form of work and must be abolished .
Those who support this thesis think that prostitution is not exercised after a free and conscious choice, and that instead it is one of the forms of patriarchal violence and capitalist exploitation, as well as harmful on an individual level and for all women in general. In the specific case a collective of around twenty feminist groups criticized the fact that the text does not help people to leave prostitution if they wish, and that it does not take into account the problem of “exploitation of women’s bodies” by the predominantly male clientele.
Other experts instead fear that the new legal framework protects some people but makes the condition of others even more precarious, starting with foreigners who are in Belgium without a residence permit and who therefore cannot sign employment contracts. The concern is that these people will continue to be exploited by criminal groups who obviously act outside the parameters of the new law.
On the contrary, secondo Daan Bauwensspokesperson forBelgian Union of Sex Workers, one of the associations consulted during the drafting process of the text, the legal recognition of sex work would limit these risks because «thanks to the classification in labor law it will be much easier to identify situations of that type. If labor laws are not respected, the person can be convicted of pimping or human trafficking regardless of whether the sex worker whether they have a contract or not or whether they are legally in the country or not.”
– Read also: The national meeting for the rights of sex workers in Bologna