Hiya gang!

I think Elizabeth hit upon the exact contradiction in what Anthony posted. Support for collective organizing can be difficult to reconcile with individual "freedoms," and while I strongly support collective organization within and across workplaces, I do see that this involves some potential downsides as well.

 Anthony, for example, writes about dancers who wish to organize against lap dancing or against outright sex within strip clubs, asking:

Is this really about taking away "the collective rights" of workers who organize to retain the old standards...or is this more about mere moral opposition to loosening those standards out of fear of losing their livelihoods, and using the collective barginning process as a wedge for their personal moral objections to loosening the rules of contact??

How is that any different from, say, a majority of parishioners at a local Catholic church getting together as a "majority" to oppose the ordination of a priest at their church because they don't like the priest's more open stance on abortion rights or homosexuality?? Sure, they have that right as members of that church to do so, but, is their stance of maintaining a conservative (if not, arguably, reactionary) position justified merely because it represents a "majority" view??

 I have no doubt that dancers had a wide variety of reasons for not wanting to have outright sex in the clubs, ranging from a preference for the artistry of dance to something of a moral revulsion to prostitution (and a complete distancing of erotic dance from that). Nevertheless, I would side with worker self-control over and against "anything goes," despite the fact that I would undoubtedly disagree with many things that the collective would decide. I'd also say that any sort of community - including a conservative church group - should have a right to select its own leaders (recalling them if necessary); the fact that this process will not automatically result in a perfect system doesn't negate the things that are valuable about this approach. If the idea here is that refusing to allow others to do sex-for-pay in an environment designated as a strip club is inherently conservative (when doing so causes others who do not wish to do sex to lose a large number of clients), I simply disagree. 

Anthony also writes that:

 I think that it is a legitimate argument to say that you really do think that it is right to regulate what dancers can and should do....and that any attempt to loosen the rules is simply a plot by management to break the unions. That is pretty dangerously close to the antiporn "liberal elitist" argument, in my personal view

Well, I support the ability of sex workers to collectively regulate themselves, and to me that is quite a different stance than "liberal elitism" (which I identify with the efforts of outside do-gooders to impose standards from the outside. To me, the ability of people to have as much control as possible over their local working lives is not the same as having politicians who operate within a so-called "democracy" introduce a standard via the law. 

In an earlier post, Anthony also writes that:

[Having a majority decide against sexual contact] still places a huge disadvantage on that minority who does want sexual contact, and they would probably be motivated to either (1) leave the union and go on their own and find employment in a non-union shop that would allow for more open expression; (2) forming their own counter-organization and competing directly with the majority orgianization for bargining rights; or (3) go along with the majority and suffer quietly (or not so quietly, possibly risking undermining the union from within). 

I have no doubt that these three scenarios could all happen in the scenario we're talking about, but just to be clear, the example given still posits a world in which a minority is sexually persecuted by the "moralism" of a majority. In fact, people not wishing to do prostitution were forced to go to the few remaining clubs that did not have prostitution, or to remain within the clubs with prostitution and to do the best they could (a situation that put them at an extreme disadvantage). The people who felt compelled to remain (for a variety of reasons) but who did not want to do sex were the ones who were forced to "go along with" the will of...not even the majority, but of management. People indeed got screwed over by this situation, but not the people identified in the above theoretical example. We need to be able to see both how people can get oppressed by the logic of individual sexual rights as well as vice versa.

 But to return to the three dangers that are identified above, all three basically seem perfectly fine to me. And in terms of finding employment elsewhere, I'd be much happier with a system that enabled strip clubs and brothels to compete against each other than a system that placed erotic dancers and those doing sex into such direct competition within the same club. Having multiple clubs of various sorts does not resolve the difficulties of competition vs. collective decision making - competition is merely removed from the individual level and replaced by competition between institutions - but this solution generally seems to me to strike a fair balance between the rights of various parties. To address a theoretical (but completely unrealistic) possibility, a fully collectivized system might enable the entire commercial sex industry to control (and possibly restrict) the actions at all clubs, but in general I support the ability of people to control their own lives, so the personal right of individuals to engage in whatever sort of sex work they choose seems inviolable. That'd be one limit I place on collective management over these things, and ideally there would certainly be more freedom involved than just that.

Anthony, I'm wondering if your rejection of this line of reasoning stems from the fact that you believe there are no circumstances whatsoever in which a majority has a right to place some sort of restriction on sexual behavior. I also reject the suggestion that any and all attempts to regulate sex derive solely from sexual puritanism. Is that really what you are saying? If not, what would be appropriate limitations based on your line of reasoning, and why do you reject what happened in the case under discussion here?  

 In terms of the specific case of San Francisco, Anthony also writes:

If San Francisco is like any other jursdiction I know of (though, to its credit, it is a tad more liberal than most), the prospect of loosening up sexual contact between client and worker certainly has its benefits to management (more money for them and those workers willing to do such behavior); but it also carries with it much risk...particularly, the wrath of the media and the State, which would, since they are still controlled for the most part by conservative, sex-negative forces who care less about dancers' rights and their economic livelihoods, see such openings as an invitation to the same old "licentiousness" and call upon the full power of the authorities to crack down on such "illicit" and "filthy" behavior. 

Indeed, I'd say that if any group would be given the benefit of the doubt by the media and the dominant forces, it would be exactly those dancers whom you so kindly praise for their "collective activism" in resisting the call of their management to, as they would probably put it, "further degrade themselves". 

 Anthony certainly has a point here, though the situation is much more complicated than he suggests. Indeed, workers who were resisting the introduction of sex in the dance clubs at time utilized explicit and implicit anti-prostitution stereotypes in fighting what was going on. I initially got involved in this story when writing a piece for the SF Bay Guardian; the title for the piece (which I did not choose and would not have chosen), was "Peep Show Pimps," thus relying upon and reinforcing a moralistic term that often undercuts sex workers' ability to rely upon management of their own choosing or to even have lovers. At the same time, it should be noted that "the State" was fully complicit with the shift toward sex in the clubs; although the private booths that facilitated sex were already illegal, and although the protesting dancers' central demand was to have these booths removed, the City never took action against the booths, deciding instead to effectively decriminalize prostitution within the clubs. "The State" in this case was completely in league with the clubs, with the mayor having acted as a lawyer for club management a number of years earlier. Furthermore, the strip clubs/brothels represent a significant component of the tourist industry, whereas the protesting dancers represent no one politically important (and indeed, they lost this political struggle, badly). The haphazard decriminalization that resulted required that certain basic facts could not be openly acknowledged, and, most specifically, management never made condoms readily available on the premises. While moralism remains an important theme in US politics, obviously, it's not the only dynamic governing various branches of the government. 

But in returning to the main theme here of unionization and majority rule of the workers, I don't believe that this principle of collective self-management offers a utopic possibility that would signify the end of politics. I merely hold open this possibility as a critique of the way things are done in contemporary capitalist society, and also as a critique showing the limitations of "individual rights" (or "sexual rights") as a rhetoric for understanding social justice. Of course I support individual rights, generally speaking, but I do not think this approach is sufficient in and of itself, and there are definitely cases - such as the instance under discussion here - in which I believe an absolutist belief in individual rights will lead us astray from a full understanding as to the issues involved and from a more just approach. 

 Oy! So much writin'! :)