UPDATE: Become a prostitute or lose your benefits in Germany
A Reuters article today clarifies Germany's position on sex work and unemployment benefits.
An article Feministing cited yesterday said that "under Germany's welfare reforms, 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."
Today, however, a spokesperson from Germany's Federal Labor Office said that "job centers would not look for prostitutes on behalf of brothels, nor offer sex industry jobs to people who hadn't specifically mentioned it as an area of interest."
That's a relief, but the legalization issue has certainly sparked some interesting conversation...
Pinko Feminist Hellcat and Alas, a Blog on the same.
Posted by Jessica - February 01, 2005, at 11:55AM
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Hmmm. Now I'm curious about the Telegraph's stake in publishing what appears to be a bogus story, especially given the paper's right-wing (and generally anti-feminist) politics.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. (And heck, even good news sources sometimes screw up. The interesting thing will be to see if the Telegraph publishes a retraction.)
A lot of righties on my blog and elsewhere have suggested that this is what happens when you pay unemployment benefits. They neglect to remember that most prostitutes do what they do out of desperate poverty that can be alleviated through things like welfare and unemployment benefits.
This has now been officially debunked as Repug. propaganda: Snopes.com has it:
[http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/brothel.asp] as well as Sadly, No:[Sadlyno.com]
[http://sadlyno.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1190].
Plenty of European & social welfare bashing just for the fun of it, and for appealing to the women hating lovelies out there!