Unintended Consequences?

When you make prostitution legal, only non-prostitutes will be criminals?:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

You're an American. You read that, and think "Hahahaha! This is like the episode of The Partridge Family where 12-year-old Danny gets drafted because of a Draft Board bureaucratic screwup! Hilarious!

Actually, the brothel has the law on their side.

Germany legalized prostitution two years ago. Brothels pay taxes, provide the government-mandated benefits every other German employer must kick in - in other words, they're legit.

And like all legit people and businesses, they have rights:

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. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

Too hard to distinguish from bars...? Not the bars I went to when I was in Germany, but whatever.

So here's how it played out:

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel...When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

"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."

The regulations say so!

And for the newly-legit business owners, it makes sense:

Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits.

"Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" said Miss Ulyanova.

I gotta hand it to the Germans. When I was a Libertarian, I sort of tepidly agreed with the notion that the problems involved with prostitution, like drugs, came from their illegality more than the actual service or substance involved.

That, of course, was before I remembered the whole "equal protection" thing.

I wonder if Jesse Ventura's read this yet?

Posted by Mitch at February 1, 2005 07:00 AM | TrackBack