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.
Click To Tweet

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.

Most discussions around the work of Ramiro Gomez focus on his figures. It’s these bodies in space — compositional space but also public space — that make an impact.

Their presence is at turns subtle and demanding, quiet and attention-grabbing.

The faceless figures that the Los Angeles-based artist creates represent laborers; workers who often exist on the fringes of society and go unnoticed. As part of a series reflection on labor, class, and race, Gomez creates both life-size cardboard cutouts and two-dimensional pieces. The cutouts represent the quiet presence of these laborers even while they disrupt the everyday experience of passersby. A cardboard cutout of a nanny once stood near a park. Another cutout showed a man tending to the greenery outside the Beverly Hills Hotel. These often don’t last long out in public spaces — but their presence lingers.

In his paintings, Gomez brings these same figures into spaces of luxury — decadent homes and modern pools that the laborers work to maintain. The artist has also gained acclaimed for placing his recognizable figures in pieces by acclaimed artist David Hockney. Formerly a live-in nanny, Gomez takes inspiration from both his own experiences and the people in his life.

Now, the artist is the subject of Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez by Lawrence Weschler. The book came about after a serendipitous moment; during a Chicago visit, Weschler happened to hear about the nearby Expo Chicago art fair. Having just seen Hockney’s pieces at the Chicago Art Institute, he was surprised to find Gomez’s work riffing on that same artist. Weschler also happens to be friends with Hockney.

Weschler writes about Gomez’s work in Domestic Scenes, bringing a written component to the many forms that the artist’s work has taken. “You get a sense of how it was that it all came together,” says Gomez. “How it was that I moved from being a nanny to painting about my nanny job and then creating the magazine series that eventually leads to the cardboard cutouts that eventually leads to the Hockney series.”

The common thread that connects these pieces is those signature figures. Each scene prompts conversations surrounding labor, luxury, and race, but Gomez lets viewers come to their own conclusions.

“My tactic as an artist is simple: to just reflect it and put it out there visually for people to understand a truth that exists,” says Gomez. “Not the truth, because there is never a truth for everybody, right?”

Even while his pieces often depict iconic Los Angeles locations — and reflect a decidedly L.A. architectural and design style — Gomez has found that his figures translate to a range of cultures. As he puts it:

“I like to say that it goes beyond the American political machine, if you will, and it joins the conversation or puts it further in a universal perspective . . . My favorite thing is having a reaction from someone in Bangladesh writing back in whatever form they can, through email messages saying: ‘I really appreciate your work; it reminds me of this that I’m doing,’ or someone reaching out to me in Europe, or someone reaching out to me in South America, someone reaching out to me from Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong — it’s so surreal that my work has reached all these other spaces.”

Gomez attributes this to a certain “contemplativeness” and “quietness” that characterize his figures and his compositions. These scenes come from a very personal place, but Gomez ultimately wants to “let everybody find answers or search for answers themselves.”

This extends to his social media presence as well. He often shares photos that depict figures in a similar way as his art. One photo shows a female worker cleaning the floor at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her figure is one not often seen in Instagram shots that usually focus on the art and glamorous parts of such visits.

“The way that I see museums is perhaps not how other people see them,” says Gomez. “However, as I share in social media, my eye will naturally go to those spaces. My mom’s a janitor, so if I’m in a museum, my recognition of janitors is natural. It’s also not an artistic choice. It has become that because I do paint about that, but with or without my paintings, I’m still recognizing the janitor just because I come home and I know what that janitor is like — as a mother.”

With Domestic Scenes, the artist hopes that more people can see his work — without the need to attend a museum or visit a gallery. There are few books that focus specifically on the interruption of luxury and the stark truths of labor — often art books can be seen as items of luxury themselves. But Gomez has already seen how his work impacts people from a variety of backgrounds — and how it helps generations navigate the tricky space between class identities.

For example, the artist remembers receiving a message from a student at Harvard whose mom and dad also both worked as laborers. “It’s hard to understand what that means, but your work gives me a little bit of peace,” the student shared.

For Gomez, the most satisfying part of publishing the book will be seeing it with his parents. “I will find a lot of comfort in seeing my book at my parent’s house in a coffee table, especially because of all that I’ve been through and what it means for that book to be created,” he says.

One of these friends happened to live in Los Angeles, and a friend of hers happened to run a small boutique in Echo Park called Otherwild. This friend of a friend requested a few of the shirts to carry in her store, and I began mailing batches to L.A., each time in an odd selection of colors and sizes. I started screen-printing rather than spray-painting the shirts, so the text wouldn’t fade. But other than that, my production method changed not at all: I kept printing on shirts from thrift stores. The whole affair was casual, fun, and free of incongruities.

Then, during a single week in October 2015, two things happened in swift succession. First, Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot posted a picture of herself on Instagram wearing one of my shirts. Later in the week, Lena Dunham posted a picture of her hot, male chiropractor friend in one of the tees. 17,019 likes and 266 comments later, I was left wondering if I needed to scale up.

And here is where my quandary began. Everyone around me seemed certain I was sitting on top of a gold mine. They suggested I drop out of grad school. And why not? It was just a short leap to that prototypical 21st-century American elysium: contented early retirement following wildly successful social media-fueled entrepreneurship.

But the path between me and Matriarchy moguldom was cluttered with all kinds of historical, socio-political, and ecological undesirables. Because of the way the clothing-manufacturing industry works, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make a T-shirt about the exploitation of women without, well, exploiting women.

My struggles began with the most basic of elements: what to use to make my shirts.

Having spent the last five years researching contemporary practices in the textile and clothing industry, I had no wish to make a product with conventional cotton. The global garment industry is basically a system that sucks water from the developing world and delivers it to rich countries (the U.S., Europe, and Japan) in the form of cotton — and this trend has accelerated exponentially since the fall of garment tariffs in 2005. And then there’s the widespread use of Paraquat in cotton farming, which is linked to Parkinson’s and leukemia in agricultural workers, and was banned in Europe but is used regularly here in the US of A.

Moreover, I had no interest in printing on shirts sewn by non-unionized child workers in factories where basic safety, let alone fair wages, could not be guaranteed.

In 2013, I visited spinning factories in Tamil Nadu, a major hub of knitwear production in Southern India, which has 1,600 textile mills with a workforce of more than 400,000 workers. Sixty percent of the total labor force consists of girls and young women. The mills employ what its critics call the “Sumangali scheme,” three-year “apprenticeships” that come with a lump sum payment at the end, aimed at rural girls in Tamil Nadu to help them pay for their dowries.

The term “apprenticeship” helps mask the fact that the women are paid radically less than India’s minimum wage. The lump sum payment also prevents women from leaving the mills before the contract ends, for fear of losing years of wages if they did — even in the case of injury or abuse.

Once the young women have signed on to a mill, abuses appear to be rampant. One recent report by an NGO gathered information on 93 workers in Tamil Nadu over a three-year period and documented several cases in which workers were paid only part or none of the promised lump sum at the end of their term.

It documented four deaths and numerous injuries ranging from the dramatic (“rods pierced neck,” “clothes/hair pulled into machines”) to the more mundane (cotton in stomach, cotton in lungs, tuberculosis, asthma, bronchitis, fainting spells, insomnia). The courts have, upon examination, declared the scheme to constitute “bonded labor,” an appellation the Southern Indian Mills Association is lobbying to have overturned.

The more I learned about the clothing industry’s history, the more I came to understand how patriarchal forces have enabled sustained abuse.

Industrial textile production emerged in England as a phenomenon powered by the underpaid labor of women and children. Today, the exploitation of women in textile and garment manufacture is the dual product of patriarchal control and the colonial legacy.

Some liberal economists argue that textile labor, no matter how exploitative, is a good thing for women in poor countries. In The Travels of a T-Shirt on the Global Economy, the economist Pietre Rivoli argues that the female textile and garment workers of the developing world are “sisters in time” with America’s own Lowell mill girls, those underpaid but ever-sassy heroes of America’s industrialization mythology.

What the two sets of women share, Rivoli writes, is “the cotton mill and the sweatshop as the ignition switch for the urbanization, industrialization, and economic diversification . . . as well as for the economic and social liberation of women from the farm.” In this problematic industrialization-as-superhero narrative, the women of Tamil Nadu are being saved by the spinning mill from starvation and abandonment.

The general pattern of women moving into industrialized labor is familiar: First, a seismic shift in land ownership or trade policy breaks the viability of the agricultural village (in this case, destruction of the traditional textile industry by the British). Then, factory work is offered to the dispossessed as a consolation prize.

This can happen in a scenario as militarized as that in Guatemala, where the widows left by the government’s war on the indigenous population streamed into garment factories in the 1980s, or as legalistic as that in England during the Enclosure Acts (primarily put into place in the late 18th and early 19th century), when peasant cultivators barred from access to ancestral common fields were forced into factory work in Lancashire.

But even if we assume, as Rivoli does, that countries with bitter post-colonial legacies will follow the U.S. along metamorphic phases as predictable as those of a monarch butterfly, it is still worth asking whether the ends justify the means. Or, more to the point, if whether there is any likelihood that a society that relies on cheap female labor to pull ahead in the global economic race will abruptly start valuing its women once some invisible threshold is crossed. In this respect, the United States, where economists note a distinct trend toward the “feminization of poverty,” should serve as a cautionary tale.

Given this history, it is going to be quite a journey to build my “Matriarchy Now” empire in a way that makes the Matriarchy proud. So far I have found two American companies I’d be willing to work with: one called Spiritex, based in Asheville, North Carolina, that manufactures clothing in the U.S. that exclusively uses organic cotton grown, spun, woven, and sewn in North Carolina; and another called Lunatic Fringe, comprised of two women and a spinning mill that use ecologically sound California cotton.

I recently ordered a batch of MATRIARCHY NOW baby onesies from Spiritx and put them up on an Etsy site. I have also planned a research trip to the Greensboro area this month to tour some new cut and sew facilities that are just beginning to reappear in that region almost a quarter century after NAFTA gutted its textile and garment industries.

For now, though, I am still screenprinting on shirts I find at thrift stores. And no, I’m not rich yet.