January 31, 2005
Does an IT Background Qualify you for the Brothel?
This just in from Germany, ‘If you don’t take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits’.
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.
To that I say, you reap what you sow.
You build a nanny state. You are economically and socially liberal. You decide that people who are out of work should receive benefits. And they should recieve benefits until they can find a job. Someone offers them a legal job. And since you’re the government, you can’t exactly call it immoral. They turn down the job. So you cut the benefits. What’s the problem here? After all, if I were unemployed and wanted to keep the benefits, couldn’t I call working for a French company “immoral” because I disagreed with their politics? If I was religious, couldn’t I refuse to work in a bar because I thought drinking was immoral? The slippery slope argument applies here. If you can refuse to be a prostitute, can’t I refuse to do whatever job you offer me, under the guise of immorality? And aren’t I then still entitled to benefits?
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.
Really?! I guess bars in Germany are a lot different than here in the States!!
“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.”
After all, you can’t discriminate, right?
Good luck, Germany. Lets hope that some continued idiocy like this will help you pull your collectivist heads out of your collectivist asses. After all, this sounds like much more of a French policy.
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There is a lot of stupidity in the world. The Germans have just shown us another example. I’ve been looking into this to see if it’s a hoax, but so far, it looks legit. Go figure.
The “nanny state” comment hits the nail on the head. These people are not being “sent into the sex industry” they are being offered a job. They can do what everyone else can do if they are offered a job they don’t like — not accept it.
In the “olden days”, people saved for a rainy day, if they had a clue. That way, when hardship might come in the form of losing a job, sickness, that kind of thing, the decision-making power was in your own hands. You could decide to take a job you found distasteful, or to live off of your savings and be as thrifty as possible until another opportunity came along.
Now, the government forces you (your employer really, but since they net pay us less to pay these taxes, it works out about the same) to pay into unemployment programs. Now, once you are fired, the government makes these decisions for you, and if you do not like those decisions, you do not have the money you have (in effect) been saving (held so generously for you by the government).
So what do we end up doing? The same thing we are doing for our retirement. We are taxed to pay into social security, which would ostensibly be a steady source of income upon retirement but we know we should not count on receiving any benefit from this, so we put aside a second slice of our income for retirement. Just as we pay (through our employer of course) into the unemployment program, we cannot count on receiving this benefit, either, and so we put aside a fourth slice of our income for a “rainy day” situation.
Okay that is enough rant from Sam today, I’m starting to sound like a capitalist and that is my cue to figure out where my reasoning went wrong…
-sam
You’re aware that this story has essentially been proven false, right?
http://www.theennead.com/amptoons/blog/archives/2005/02/01/false-story-alert-women-in-germany-probably-not-being-forced-into-prostitution-by-welfare-state
Actually, I had not seen that at this time, thanks for the update.
From what I can gather from Snopes and the Reuters article (both linked through your provided link), it seems the Telegraph’s article is a gross exaggeration, although there does seem to be some truth in it.
So far, this is what I can tell from comparing notes of all the articles: People who run “sex industry” jobs, which may or may not include actual prostitution, can try to find employees through the job centres. However, they are not advertised openly, they are only advised to people already willing to do them. The law may allow you to lose your benefits if you refuse a job, even in the sex industry, but so far that law has not been enforced.
I suspect that this 25-year old waitress was actually trying to be a waitress, and was recruited by something like a strip club or brothel for a waitress job, and then they wanted a little “more” from her. Her refusal may have been construed as a refusal of a waitressing job, not a refusal of a sex industry job. But that’s purely conjecture.
My apologies for not doing my homework on this… Just goes to show you, you can’t always believe what you read.