Sex Workers Unite by Melinda Chateauvert

Author:Melinda Chateauvert [Chateauvert, Melinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6140-4
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The problem is not new. Labor unions representing women have clashed with companies repeatedly over ageist sex discrimination.

Playboy routinely fired waitresses who didn’t fit the Bunny image. Union organizers and shop stewards in HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, now UNITE HERE) fought this practice for years, demanding the club provide a definition. Workers complained they were let go at the first sign of “crinkling eyelids, sagging breasts, crepey necks, and drooping derrieres.”67 In Hugh Hefner’s opinion, they were women who had aged out of the job; since age discrimination wasn’t illegal, HERE’s efforts to protect its members were stymied. But HERE made Playboy show more respect to the women who represented the brand.

In 1964, Myra Wolfgang, HERE’s legendary organizer, forced Hugh Hefner to the bargaining table at the Detroit Playboy Club, signing a contract for Local 705, the first union contract for sex workers. During the negotiations, they bargained over exact specifications for the uniform, which Wolfgang called “more bare than hare.” HERE also wanted a rule that allowed customers to look but not touch.

Wolfgang found out about the problems at the Playboy Clubs from her own seventeen-year-old daughter, Martha, whom she sent in undercover to work as a Bunny. Though underage, Martha was hired. She told her mother about the “no wage” policy: bunnies worked only for tips, they weren’t even paid the paltry below-minimum-wage restaurant worker hourly rate. Wolfgang organized a picket of HERE volunteers dressed in Bunny suits and carrying signs that read, “Don’t be a bunny, work for money.” Reporters liked the barbs she threw at Playboy, “Women should be obscene and not heard.”68 In New York City, the Teamsters jousted with HERE for control over the Playboy Club, supporting the “Bunny Strike” during the blizzard of 1967.69 By 1969, HERE had organized the Bunnies in every US club. The next time Playboy laid off a group of “defective Bunnies,” they filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which ruled in the women’s favor. Local shop stewards were known as Bunnies who “bit back.”

Contemporary sex-worker activists might complain that Wolfgang chose to organize the Playboy Clubs for HERE; the women, apparently, did not ask for union representation on their own. But Wolfgang’s willingness to organize the Detroit club, to send in her own underage daughter as a spy, and HERE’s support for women workers over the long run, also shows that some labor organizers were more concerned with working conditions than with sex. The NLRB also focused on labor relations.

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1970s, the American Massage Parlor was one of the three places that employed most of the town’s lesbians. Almost all of them were “very political,” had belonged to such organizations as Radical Lesbians and the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and were mostly broke, earning $2 an hour at the university bookstore or as maids at the Holiday Inn. Denise T. Turner, who identified as butch and an athlete (the parlor offered a weight-training

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