The global economic collapse is increasingly taking a heavy toll on the lives of workers and the poor all over the world.
The International Monetary Fund projects the 2009 global economic growth rate at around 0.5%, which is sharply lower than even last year’s anemic rate of 3.4%. The economic crisis is in turn driving a deepening global employment crisis.
Among the harshest effects of increasing global job scarcity is an increase in people entering the global sex industry, an overwhelming majority of whom are women and girls.
Globally, less than half of the world’s working population has salaried jobs. The majority are engaged in informal labor, in which they lack a basic living wage, job security, and occupational safety. Informal labor includes very low-paying jobs in agriculture, the garment industry, and domestic service. Most of the vulnerable jobs are performed by women and children.
Precariously positioned even during the best of capitalist economic periods, women are especially susceptible to the adverse effects of recessions. For example, the waste and scrap recycling sector in India, which has mostly women and children working in hazardous conditions for bare subsistence earnings, is one of the hardest hit by plummeting prices this year.
The number of unemployed women in 2009 may increase by up to 22% relative to 2007 (International Labor Organization, Global Employment Trends for Women).
As the downturn deepens and as employment opportunities dwindle, women are increasingly finding themselves desperate for ways to earn a living and forced to enter into prostitution.
Rates of prostitution currently appear to be going up, with more desperately poor women entering the sex trade in order to meet their own and their families’ subsistence needs. Although limited data is available for 2009, general surveys and past recessions can be used as a guide to anticipate how the proportion of women in the sex industry will increase as the current economic free-fall continues globally.
The reasons that compel a woman to enter the sex trade can often be traced to financial vulnerability. In New Zealand, for example, 93% of the sex workers surveyed since 2003 have cited financial reasons for working in the sex industry (www.nzpc.org.nz).
Capitalism a Disaster for Women
Following the transition into free-market capitalism in the late 1980s, Eastern Europe plunged into a deep recession, with unemployment rates of 40% and higher. The sex industry exploded in the region, with Moldova and Ukraine becoming the highest and second highest traffickers of prostitutes to Western Europe.
During the 1990s, a staggering two-thirds of the 500,000 women trafficked globally each year for prostitution came from Eastern Europe (United Nations Global Report on Crime and Justice, 1999).
The collapse of the global capitalist economy is forcing women to capitulate to the sex trade in other ways as well. Women already in the sex industry are being subjected to further exploitation.
As the recession causes more people to restrict their spending, prostitution businesses are experimenting with new incentives. Some German brothel owners are offering a flat rate deal. Based on the idea of an all-you-can-eat buffet, it allows customers to have sex with as many prostitutes as they like for a single fee (Telegraph, 7/28/09).
Advocates for sex workers are expressing deep concern that with increasing numbers of women turning to prostitution for a living, the growing competition is compelling workers to practice unsafe sex or to make other compromising choices to keep clients happy. There are also concerns of increased violence as a form of control against prostitutes by pimps and gangs (National Catholic Reporter, 4/17/09).
Unemployment and job crises are constants under capitalism, which only intensify dramatically in recessions. Thus, many women are forced to participate in the sex industry under capitalism.
Women and men have to fight together for a fundamental shift away from this system, towards one that can harness the capabilities of technology and society to allow every person to earn a living and live a fruitful life in dignity.