They teach Labor Day to American children ahistorically, calling it a great festival to honor the working people of the United States. But it was actually founded in 1894 as a conciliatory gesture by President Grover Cleveland, six days after he deployed 12,000 troops to break up a wage strike by unskilled railroad ground crews, sparking violence and the killing of two protestors. To take Labor Day back, we must learn from history, and make our understanding manifest with action.

As I grew up and learned the history of working class struggles, Labor Day changed for me, from barbecues and anxiety about the first day of school to a time to remember that history, and to reflect on its implications for the future. Today, as I finish tidying up from my work as a professional dominatrix, I know that Labor Day is a time to honor all workers — those working legally and illegally, in trade unions and unorganized, in factories and homes, in fields and offices.

And, even though our work is criminalized and stigmatized by society, it is a time to honor sex workers.

Sex work is famously called the oldest profession, but it gets little respect. All of us, wherever and however we work — in bedrooms and dungeons and parlours, on the streets, on camera, or dancing on stage — bring skill, ingenuity, creativity, and experience to our work, but media portrayals objectify us, calling us broken or evil, and traitors to the feminist cause. What these portrayals, and the policymakers who use them, almost never do is see us as workers.

But workers we are, and our work isn’t that different from many other forms of labor — especially labor traditionally reserved for women — that society devalues. We use our bodies and our sex appeal at work, but that isn’t unique to sex work. The caretaker who strains her back cleaning the bottoms of bedridden patients, turning them to prevent pressure sores, certainly uses her body; the waitress or secretary knows that femininity, attractiveness, and emotional labor are often unpaid, unacknowledged parts of the job description.

Sex work is famously called the oldest profession, but it gets little respect.
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Sex work is a dangerous job, but so is fishing, or working on an oil rig, or working day after day without enough sleep; while society calls for better conditions for workers, in orchards and unlicensed cabs and Amazon warehouses, it doesn’t stop to consider that that’s what sex workers want, too. Instead, the United States criminalizes sex work, and calls it progressive to do so — even when that criminalization prevents us from organizing and fighting for our rights as workers, and is the root cause of what makes our work dangerous.

On Labor Day, I call loudly for sex work to be decriminalized worldwide, because I know that workers ourselves know best how to stamp out coercion and exploitation in our industry. Society would draw lines between us, dividing those of us who love our work from those of us who hate it, distinguishing those of us with managers from those of us who work independently, splitting us by race or gender or nationality or type of work. But sex workers reject all of those divisions, and stand united across our differences in our call for decriminalization.

If you honor the workers today, honor us. Stand with us.

In honor of Labor Day, The Establishment has curated the following 11 stories about the sex work industry, in America and abroad.

Lessons From America’s First Female-Run Sex Club
July Westhale

Unsurprisingly, almost every early industry boom with a primarily male workforce in America had a sordid entanglement with sex work of some sort, dating back to the early gold rushes — the California Rush in 1848 and the Yukon Gold Rush in 1896. In fact, back then, there weren’t many primarily female work forces with the exception of sex work.

Your Mother Is A Whore: On Sex Work And Motherhood
Jessie Sage

Why It’s Okay To Pay For Sex
Margaret Corvid

In the wake of Amnesty International’s adoption of a policy supporting the full decriminalization of sex work, sex worker rights are under intense debate and scrutiny. But falling to the wayside of this discourse is the fact that arresting clients isn’t the answer to any question that either side of that debate might usefully ask. It doesn’t decrease the risk of violence, rape, and arrest for sex workers. It doesn’t eliminate sex work, and it does nothing to end patriarchy, male entitlement, or rape culture.

I Ain’t Saying She’s A Gold Digger: Sex Work, Money, And Upward Mobility
Margot St. Vincent

I like being a call girl. It is the best paying job I’ve ever had. My strong abilities to be empathetic and kind to a spectrum of people, my tendency to be a barometer for emotional temperatures in the room, and to locate and diffuse situations with aplomb and grace, make me very good at my job.

The Tweets Of A Whore: Persona And Privacy In The Age Of Social Media
Tina Horn

On one hand, I’ll admit that it’s incredible for people who enjoy my sex performance to see what I have to say — about sex, or coffee, or music, or an article. But on the other, sometimes I get the impression that people feel entitled to it because of what I am — which is a whore — and what I do‚ which is making money by working hard at the words and sex I love. I feel as if the world expects me to outsource my imagination, and every ounce of my gut screams at me to stop. After all, my imagination is my livelihood.

I’m A Sex Worker Who Was Raped, Here’s Why I Didn’t Fight Back
Holiday Black

Serial rapists and murderers often target sex workers, with full knowledge that those workers are the most vulnerable due to their lack of protection under the law, before moving on to target other women. It’s almost impossible to get real statistics on the subject of sexual violence against workers due to the criminal nature of our work, but estimates say that those in the sex trade have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job. There are numerous examples of murderers and rapists who target sex workers — but what’s troubling is that, more often than not, we don’t take this violence seriously when it is recounted by those who experience it first hand.

Margaret Cho On Sex Worker Rights
Margaret Corvid

Sex work exists whether or not it is legal, and the fact that we are outside of the “bounds of legality” means we are dying. It’s not right. It’s dehumanizing and sex work needs to be recognized as work.

The Exhausting And Unpaid Emotional Labor Of Sex Work
Margot St. Vincent

Because arrangements are based on the pretense of the “girlfriend/mistress” experience and are often ongoing, the emotional labor required to tend to men and their struggles has me working more hours than I’m actually getting paid for — getting texts that interrupt my private life, dealing with their personal crises that arise at times that are actually quite inconvenient for me (and, frankly, above my pay scale), catering to their changing schedules, and balancing the delicate act of receiving money for services, yet not actually talking directly about receiving money for said services.

Sex Workers And Other Women In The Arts
Violet McLean

As sex workers, we stand at the edges of what culture deems acceptable, and are often subject to violence as a result. This vulnerability to violence is more acute depending on where a sex worker works; if they are transgender, gender non-conforming, or a person of color; and whether or not they hold citizenship in the country in which they work.

Diaries Of A High Femme Whore
Margot St. Vincent

I am an ambassador of reality and fantasy. I sit in on meetings and report back from two worlds. I contain multitudes. So much of my prowess with this comes from surviving domestic violence, from being able to recognize emotional temperatures and diffuse or infuse. To be able to read desires. To be able to self-protect. So I can truly make my subs believe I own them, and I can truly care for them instinctively, unconsciously. It’s a skill I am grateful for, though it comes from darkness.

What A Sex Worker Can Teach You About Working For Yourself
Margaret Corvid

Capitalism loves to tell us that the customer is always right, and that if they pay you, then you, the business owner, must bow to their every whim. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. If you have a boss, in sex work or any other business, dealing with horrible customers can be part of the price of employment — but one of the advantages of working for yourself is that you can give a lousy customer the boot.

I’m sitting here at a beach cafe in glorious Tenerife watching my husband Bob’s head poking above the waves as he swims out to the edge of this dramatic cove and back.

We’re here because our businesses have done well this year. A bumper crop of clients and some saving have brought us this wonderful end-of-year prize.

As we drive around looking for places to swim and sun, we’ve been chatting about our respective businesses. We’re both self-employed, and while Bob’s work — counseling — is familiar to most people, my work can surprise, titillate, or repulse those unfamiliar with it: I’m a sex worker, plying my trade as a professional dominatrix in the south west of the United Kingdom.

Last night — sunburnt, tired, and happy — we piled into our Airbnb, where my husband used the trickle of Wi-Fi to check his email. He frowned as he read a lengthy, detailed enquiry sent through his website. “These are a lot of work,” he muttered. I nodded knowingly; quite often, he will receive an email and spend so much time engaging in back and forth dialogue with a prospective client that, once paid, he winds up making less than minimum wage for his time.

My work can surprise, titillate, or repulse those unfamiliar with it.
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“I tell my clients to phone me before they write or text,” I told him. “Maybe you should do the same!”

For me, a quick phone call is a great screening tool. Most of my clients are polite and loads of fun, but because sex work carries so much social stigma, I am vulnerable to predators, time wasters, and rip-off artists masquerading as clients. Voice is much better than email when it comes to gauging rapport, identifying difficult, unstable people, and filtering out time assassins and no-shows, and a call is a quick way to discuss mutual interests and determine if I’m the right provider for a client’s needs. It’s also a little hoop for a client to jump; if he jumps it, I can feel more confident that he’s eager to visit and is likely to respect my boundaries.

Bob has been watching me run my business for three years, efficiently screening my clients on the phone while he painstakingly crafts email after email, but over our beers and octopus, I convinced him to give my approach a try.

I wondered: What else can a sex worker teach other self-employed folks?

Under-promise and (sometimes) over-deliver.

Whether a client is booking a plumber, a writer, or a sex worker, they might come with high expectations. As business owners, it’s our job to manage those expectations, balancing our boundaries and customer satisfaction.

On my website, I look stern and forbidding, and I’m pretty thoroughly covered up, but my clients are always pleasantly surprised when I walk up to the door in a leather miniskirt and a corset that basically turns me into the goddess of cleavage. It’s just another day at the office for me, but the client feels like he’s won the lottery, and he usually comes back for another visit.

Once You Have Made Pornography
theestablishment.co

If you’re not a sex worker, boobs are probably not what you need to under-promise and over-deliver. But most businesses have some areas of flexibility that you can use to your advantage. Maybe you can offer extended hours to your most reliable customers, or offer a discount to win over a first-time client — and if a client takes advantage of your goodwill, you can always pull back and offer only your basic service.

You’re the boss! You can fire a shitty client.

Capitalism loves to tell us that the customer is always right, and that if they pay you, then you, the business owner, must bow to their every whim. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. If you have a boss, in sex work or any other business, dealing with horrible customers can be part of the price of employment — but one of the advantages of working for yourself is that you can give a lousy customer the boot.

I had a client who was the most demanding jerk I have ever met. Every single thing I did wasn’t right, and for someone who claimed to be submissive, he sure enjoyed bossing me around. He would make bookings on short notice and cancel them, losing me time and money, and eventually I would get an anxiety attack just seeing his number pop up in my phone. I delighted in answering his final call with a gentle but assertive statement: “I don’t think we’re a good fit.” He still calls and leaves desperate voicemails, which I enjoy deleting; probably, he’s pissed off every mistress in the area!

Your time and emotional labor are worth money.

The work you’re paid to do is rarely all the work you do to keep your job. If you’re paid to code as part of a team, you’re probably not paid to make yourself presentable and business appropriate, deal with catcalling and packed subway cars on the way to work, and silently bear the racist rants of your office’s resident Trump fan.

The same holds true if you run your own business, but with the advantage that you can, like a magician, convert bullshit into money. If a client wants to book me in the kink studio three hours away across a rat’s nest of traffic-snarled roads, he’s going to be paying a premium for my mileage, time, pain, and suffering — and he’ll get a better service from me when I feel adequately compensated, rather than resentful. If a client wants to talk about the dirty details with me over the phone while jerking off, he’s either going to pay me or I’ll hang up and append “wanker” to his name in my phone.

The work you’re paid to do is rarely all the work you do to keep your job.
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You can do the same in your business — make sure a charge for your time and energy is factored into all the work you do, even if it’s not technically part of your professional skill set. Your client is not just paying for your expertise; they’re paying for everything that goes into keeping you in the best shape possible to do your job.

Get your money first.

One of the cardinal rules of sex work is pay to play — money first, then I am happy to deal with your boner. Once what is euphemistically referred to as “the paperwork” is taken care of, the client and I can relax and enjoy our time together, without stress or further obligation. There’s also no chance of being nickel and dimed to death, being told I don’t deserve my full fee, or being told that “the ATM is broken and I can pay you the rest next week.”

In your business, can you do the same? Taking your whole fee, or even a substantial deposit, up front shifts the balance of power from your client to you. It doesn’t mean you can’t negotiate discounts for mistakes or request bonuses for early delivery or exceptional performance if you feel it’s appropriate, but it becomes your choice, not the client’s entitled demand.

You’re not a robot.

We all vary in our day to day performance, because of limited energy, poor health, and countless other factors. In a traditional workplace, we’re constrained by rules and guidelines imposed from above, or, if we’re lucky, we’re protected from abuse and exploitation by a trade union. When we are our own bosses, sometimes we internalize capitalism’s demand that we live to work, rather than working to live.

I’m no exception. If I refuse a booking due to tiredness, or take a booking I would rather not take in order to pay the bills, my “inner boss” nags me. I imagine him as a little mediocre white male sitting on my shoulder, ineffectually shaking his fist at me and droning on about targets and responsibilities; then, I imagine reaching up, plucking him up between two blood-red nails, and tossing him in the bin.

What’s taken his place? Upon my shoulder rides a little me — the best me: not just the sex work persona or the hunched-up writer pounding away on the keyboard, but an avatar of all the aspects of me that make me great. She’s perched calmly and proudly on my shoulder, and she reminds me: in work, life, friendship, love, and activism, I know what’s best for myself.

As we enter the new year, I invite you to do the same, and I hope that your business, and your life, prosper and flourish.

D. never sleeps for more than three hours.

In some dreams, he looks around and sees himself and the people around him drenched in blood.

In another dream, he is at home in the north of Syria, near Aleppo, and a missile hits his house. Everyone is hurt, screaming and bleeding. He wakes up shouting and crying. Sometimes the dreams come every three or four nights, sometimes every night. When he awakes, he is unable to fall back asleep.

He wakes up angry; angry at the destruction of his country, and that he had to flee for his life; angry at his separation from his wife, G., who took care of him in Syria, dressing, bathing and cooking for him, helping him to overcome the limitations posed by the hemiplegia that polio left him with after it ravaged his body when he was a child.

G. remained in Syria, and D. had hoped that he could bring her over when he arrived in England and his asylum claim was granted; in possession of a government-issued ID card granting him refugee status, D. could begin the process to bring her over on an airplane, rather than huddled in a truck. But, inexplicably, he was told to wait: his case was still being considered. As the fighting worsened, she fled, and is now one of the few female Syrian refugees huddled in the freezing cold of the Calais camps.

He wakes up angry at the lack of that ID, and angry at the destitution and isolation he faces as an asylum seeker. Sitting in his dingy, stuffy room in Plymouth, a city in the south of England, D. looks at his letters from the Home Office, again and again, and waits for their decision — their verdict on his story, on his life.

He wakes up angry at his past. The nightmares come not just from the echoes of bombs, but from the fearful memories of arrest and torture at the hands of the Assad regime; he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But most of all, he wakes up angry at his isolation. After a harrowing four-month journey, including a leaky boat across the dangerous Mediterranean, after sheltering at night in the forests, barely eating, walking to the Calais border on the shoulders of fellow refugees, after hiding, shivering and wet, in a dripping freezer truck, D. was pulled by police from a truck between Dover and London. He spent days in a crowded police holding cell, and weeks at a dangerous hostel, before he was moved here to Plymouth: first to the second floor of a crumbling, filthy house where he couldn’t move to reach the bathroom or kitchen without extreme difficulty, and then, only after protest, to the ground floor.

What Life Is Like Inside A Refugee ‘Jungle’ Camp

In Syria, D. had driven a car specially adapted to his limited mobility, but here, he fights his exhaustion to accomplish basic tasks. A friend comes to help him wash every 10 to 15 days; otherwise, he struggles to wash himself, and he never feels clean. He tries to cook and keep house, and depends on the inconsistent help of others to get to essential appointments, to buy groceries, or to pick up his meager living allowance. Due to his PTSD, he spends most of his time lying in bed.

He wakes up angry because, as a doctor put it in one assessment, “there are few assertive ways for D. to express his anger.” Offered services and therapy can’t be taken up by a man who can get nowhere on his own, who waited for months for an unpowered wheelchair that must be pushed by an attendant, which sits, clean and rarely used, in the corner of his room, because there is so rarely someone to help him. His life is whittled down to his phone, with which he can, occasionally, speak to his wife — a wife who is thinking of separating from him in frustration and confusion at the long, long delay.

Sometimes, he will throw a plate against the wall, and if it smashes into pieces, he feels better.

When he lived up those 22 grueling stairs, he thought of throwing himself out the window.

Last month, he tried to kill himself. “I feel like I am waiting for nothing,” he said.

Three nights ago, I attended a presentation on the refugees of Calais, where I met D.’s friend S., a Syrian Arab refugee who shares his rooming-house. Moved with passion to help, my husband and I asked S. how we could help him, and he told us that night that he was fine, but that we should meet D., who was burning to tell his story.

The following night, we went out in the dark, driving rain to visit him: a man in his early thirties, a refugee seeking asylum, a Syrian Kurd, from Aleppo, near where British bombs now fall. I met him in his Plymouth rooming-house, which he shares with S. and a few other refugees.

D. was sharp and animated, and watched my husband and I with his darting, bright eyes, sitting in his chair in his bare room. He clutched a nylon binder stuffed with the papers that govern his life; papers from the Home Office, the government ministry that pays for his housing, and decides whether he gets to stay or go; from the NHS, the health service that tries to treat his physical and psychological ailments; from the private agency that found his substandard housing. Though he is in his early thirties, his arms and legs are like hollow twigs, showing the disabling ravages of post polio syndrome, and also, in his case, of torture.

S. served us tea and translated: two years ago, the suburb of Aleppo where D. lived with his wife and family wasn’t safe, and he left, walking while supported by the shoulders of other refugees through the dangerous ocean crossing, and fleeing on foot to Europe, barely eating, sleeping in forests. He did not cross through the Calais camp, but snuck onto a lorry near the border, where he was caught by the police.

When D. arrived in the rooming-house assigned to him on a busy street, 15 months ago, its walls were peeling. The kitchen cabinets were falling off. Tables, chairs, and couches were stripped of their cushions with broken legs, in a scene reminiscent of the video game Fallout 4, where the player wanders around the remains of a nuclear wasteland. It was only fixed after several months, and mice still tunnel in through the baseboards.

Everything in D.’s life rests on the decision of the judge who will decide his fate. “I’m nervous, sometimes I’m crying, because the decision is not just for me but for my wife in Calais,” he said.

The state asks: is he a refugee or not? To find out, the investigators would have to travel to a war zone and find people from shattered neighborhoods that no longer exist. His fate is based on the judgment of those who never set foot in his homeland, and before that judgement, he is powerless.

Recently, D. found a new solicitor, better than the one he had contacted when he made his abrupt landing into the asylum system. The solicitor has at least shaken the system out of months of inaction; finally, D. has received a letter stating his case will be decided in the next two weeks.

What little my husband and I can do, we will. We passed our number to S. and D. and told them to reach out if they needed a lift in our car, which contains an ample boot that can accommodate a wheelchair.

But what we can do is not the point. Not all our efforts, nor all the efforts of the thousands of volunteers who have brought mountains of aid to Calais and other camps — aid that is never enough to counter disease and deprivation among the thousands who shiver there — can ever be the point. The point must be to stop the imperialist powers of the West, of Russia, and of the Assad regime from destroying their homes, and that means stopping a war that can never defeat ISIS.

D. showed me a picture of his wife, G. She was smiling and confident, wearing a fashionable hijab in a patterned grey, but with a cut above her eye from falling off a truck she tried to board to Britain. She is now huddled in Calais, a camp of 6,000 men, women and children, one of only a few Syrian women. “Sometimes she calls me crying, because as a woman, she is at risk,” said D. She does not feel safe, and D. cannot protect her.

“What can we do?” I asked him. “People need to look at us as human beings, not as a lower class of people, and to give us our safety,” he responded.

So, what can we do? We must fight for our governments to welcome the Syrian refugees, and those fleeing from other countries, from any country racked with war; they flee for the most dire and important of reasons. As the poet Warsan Shire said:

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms

under trains

beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled

means something more than journey.

We must welcome them, as countries, as communities and as individuals, because they are our fellow people — and because they believe in us, in the idea of our safe haven, free and peaceful, even as we drop bombs on their homes, even as our native-born sons shoot up their communities.

On Wednesday night, the British Parliament voted to drop bombs on Syria, and eight planes flew almost immediately from a Cyprus base to try their ill-fated attempt on ISIS, to be seen as doing something. Hilary Benn MP, the son of the great anti-war campaigner Tony Benn MP, had given a rousing speech to lead 66 Labour members of Parliament to vote to authorize the bombing, against the wishes of their party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected by a Labour membership who love peace and hate austerity. The 66 traitors voted to drop more bombs on a country that has been torn apart by war; to bomb a country that ISIS wants to be bombed, to trigger its dark apocalypse. I have already seen pictures of children killed by those bombs.

As the bombs fall, S. and D. are waiting to see what happens, in Syria and in their own cases. My own frustration and anger is only a shadow of D.’s heartbreak. He told a counsellor that when he spoke of his plight, he felt a fire pouring out of his body. But when I asked him why he came to this country, D.’s answer, and S.’s, were the same: human rights.

Human rights. They believed in us, and they still do; according to a Plymouth city councillor, most Plimothians, like most people in Britain, want to take more refugees. The council has had an outpouring of people who want to help, but it is our governments, here, in the United States, in Europe, that can make the biggest difference. If we want to stop terrorism, our governments should honor the belief of the refugees in our justice and our mercy. What privilege we have, we cannot shed. It can only be used for good, in the spaces that the marginalized cannot reach.

In my own privileged life, I have learned that speaking up in those spaces feels like laying one’s head down to be cut off, and if it feels this way, then it is probably the right thing to do. The Labour turncoats should have done that; should have laid their nebulous hopes for a Labour victory in 2020 down in aid of Syrian lives. But they didn’t. Shame on them.

In these same few days of fate and horror, Parliament has also declined to make it easier for the families of refugees settled here to join them. America still holds its choice about refugees in its hands, as a refugee-restricting bill that passed the House despite President Obama’s veto makes its way through the Senate. We must stop destroying the homes, economies and ecosystems of the Syrian people, and of every people raged by war and austerity. We must make it easier for refugees to enter our countries, not harder — and we should pave the way for their families to join them.

He wakes up angry, but D.’s anger does not turn him into a terrorist, as the right wing would say happens as naturally as a tadpole becomes a frog. His anger is eating him up inside, and I am ashamed at how my own adopted country, Britain, has failed him in his crushing wait, and how my country of origin, the United States, is poised to make that wait longer and harder for so many.

Next year, I will go to Calais to volunteer, to offer help to the people in that unofficial camp, full of hardship, struggle and strength, and to find stories to share. I will try to find G. if she is still there, but I hope more than anything that she and D. are reunited, and can build a new life together in safety.