In)Decent Work: Sex and the ILO

194 (In)Decent Work:

Sex and the ILO

Eileen Boris and Magaly Rodríguez García

By tracing sex work as it weaves in and out of the actions taken by the International Labour Organization (ILO) from its foundation in 1919 to the present, this article complicates the narrative the ILO tells about itself as well as about the place of what it judged to be prostitution in the making of the larger global labor standards regime. Given the many sections within its permanent secretariat, the International Labour Office, as well as its position as an arena serving diverse stakeholders from nation-states, trade unions, employer associations, and, increasingly, women’s organizations and NGOs, the ILO offers a long-twentiethcentury history of the tension between intimate labor and the quest for decent work. Thus, this analysis connects to broader discussions of global labor regulation and its relationship to the international political economy. It provides, furthermore, the first contextualized analysis of sex and the ILO over its entire history.

Introduction

In the late 1990s, Lin Lean Lim, a development economist specializing in gender at the Geneva-based International Labour Office (hereafter referred to as the Office), traveled to Washington, DC, to refute the charge by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women that the ILO had called for the legalization of prostitution.1 Lim’s edited book, The Sex Sector, had won the Nike Award, given by feminist sexologist writer Shere Hite, at the 1998 Frankfurt Book Fair. In accepting the prize, Lim reiterated that “recognition of prostitution as an economic sector” was not the same as endorsing legalization. The ILO had insisted that “it is for countries themselves to decide on the legal stance to adopt.” Indeed, the book explained, “The question of legalization is thorny because the human rights concerns are difficult to disentangle from concerns over morality, criminality and public health threats. Many of these concerns would stretch the ILO’s jurisdiction beyond its current mandate.”2 Lim later would spearhead initiatives on Better Work for Women. Her attributing the sex sector to macroeconomics, migration, and uneven gender and generational power reflected new trends in feminist research. Her denial that sex work was part of the ILO’s institutional portfolio repeated a nearly century-old mantra.

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 194–221.

This article problematizes that denial by the international organization that for the last century has defined what is work and who is a worker. Precisely because the ILO produces the most authoritative information about the world of work, its findings have set the terms for national as well as international debates. Yet ILO information is not neutral, as we show in analyzing its engagement with sex work. In excluding commercialized sex from the rules of global labor standards even when staff like Lim were able to frame it as an economic process, the ILO has allowed nations to at best ignore and at worst punish those who earn their living in the sex sector. By tracing sex work as it weaves in and out of ILO actions over the last century, we more than complicate the narrative that the ILO tells about itself. The place of prostitution in the making of the larger global labor standards regime tells us much about who is deserving of “decent work,” with real implications for those who ply this trade.

Here we map the ragged contours of worker protection, criminalization, and moralism that has characterized ILO deliberation over sex work. For us, the ILO offers a way to trace continuities and shifts in discourse as well as to parse forces informing policy deliberations on a global scale. The ILO never saw itself as a leader on the question of sex work and considered sex trafficking to be “of a criminal character” and the responsibility of other international agencies.3 Prostitution and additional forms of commercialized sex, it insisted, belonged to the criminal underside of global exchange rather than to labor relations, its domain.

In unraveling this claim, we use ILO history to provide a long-twentieth-century perspective on the tension between intimate labor and the quest for decent work, that is, employment regulated by wage, hour, health and safety, and other standards. Encouraged by the ILO’s own Centennial Project, researchers over the last decade have mined its archives to produce histories on a range of topics—for example, child labor—including big questions related to globalization, colonialism, the Cold War, and development. Historians debate the ILO’s relative impact, consider the role of various countries in its deliberations, and place this specialized agency of the United Nations in relation to other international entities. As part of the transnational turn in women and gender history, the ILO has become an arena for analyzing forces shaping women’s work and the resulting uneven and unequal trends in gender equity.4 While each of us has considered sex work in our previous research, this article provides the first contextualized analysis of commercial sex and the ILO over its entire history. It does so in relation to the growing scholarship on both trafficking and commodified sex and the role played by international organizations in setting normative frameworks.5

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the ILO addressed the world of work as a norms-setting body that brought together delegates from governments, workers, and employers at an annual International Labour Conference to pass treaty-like conventions. Precisely because of its unique tripartite organization (representing states, organized workers, and employer groups), it offers a unique vantage point missing from the scholarly conversation on sexual labors that, with the notable exception of international treaties, concerns political and social history within nations. With many branches within the Office (its policy and research component), the ILO was never a unified entity, so NGOs and individual activists from various perspectives found supporters within its ranks. Contestations within the ILO reveal disjunctures between scientific expertise, institutional interests, and global power among member states.

Generating knowledge about what counts as work and who is a worker, the ILO for most of its history has privileged industrial employment and the formal sector. In this regard, commercial sex appeared as an evil, very different from “respectable work.” That this designation had cracks from the start illuminates the challenges sex as work posed for conventional dichotomies between productive and reproductive labor. Sex work, like domestic work, stood outside the ILO’s tripartite negotiations between governments, employer organizations, and trade unions even though it often involved the crossing of borders or international markets, another criterion for ILO action. That understanding hasn’t kept the ILO from becoming embroiled in debates over “sexual slavery” pushed by antiprostitution forces, known as abolitionists in the interwar years and neo-abolitionists later in the twentieth century.

Our analysis focuses on three distinct periods. During the first, from 1919 through the founding of the United Nations after the Second World War, the ILO developed its views on women’s labor, sexually transmitted diseases, and prostitution. The linking of labor migration, sexual danger, and trafficking reflected a protective stance toward women workers, whose unorganized status required legal regulation to combat low wages and unhealthful conditions.6 The ILO expressed the dominant gender ideology, which viewed women’s employment as a failure of male breadwinning. Meanwhile, the problem of the social welfare of seafarers in ports sparked resistance to ILO instruments by both moral reformers and feminists. With the founding of the United Nations, when other agencies became responsible for migration, the ILO responded to measures on commercial sex initiated elsewhere.

During the second period, after the World Employment Conference of 1976, the ILO investigated the status of women in developing countries. The migration of rural women to cities and a growing tourist sex trade became

an area of conflict between ILO feminist development experts and more cautious members of the organization. Two ILO studies, Pasuk Phongpaichit’s From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses (1982) and Lin Lean Lim’s The Sex Sector (1998), not only illuminate the impact of structural development and modernization on gendered social relations but also exemplify struggles within the ILO over the place of sex in analyzing women’s labor. Moreover, they represent an intellectual shift within the ILO generated by a bottomup approach to commercial sex in Asia, which paralleled the nascent labor view of prostitution in the West.

Finally, beginning at the end of the twentieth century, as the organization appeared more willing to expand its understanding of work and workers, sex work returned to the ILO agenda through questions of HIV/AIDS, child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, the implicit definition of prostitution as disreputable work still contradicted the efforts of some of the ILO’s own experts on women, development, and occupational health to address sexual industries and to improve the conditions under which sex workers struggle for dignity and a decent living.

Fighting the Evil

Soon after their founding, the League of Nations and the ILO indirectly addressed the issue of prostitution. States perceived commercial sex to be under their jurisdiction, but both organizations recognized the practice as transcending borders. Prostitution belonged to campaigns against alleged international criminal networks, forced movements of people, and the global spread of bacteria and viruses.7 In this context, the ILO considered prostitution a by-product of women’s emigrating without men in search of work.8 During a period when legal-equality feminists battled the ILO’s laborite supporters of women-only protective legislation, protection framed ILO responses to commercial sex.

Each organization could cite authority in its founding documents to tackle social evils. Article 23c of the Covenant of the League of Nations entrusted the organization with monitoring international agreements on trafficking in women and children, while the preamble of the ILO’s constitution charged it with protecting workers against disease and establishing protective labor standards. The League also agreed on the creation of a technical committee to specifically tackle health concerns, founding the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) in 1921. To monitor prewar international treaties, the League that year established the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, which included a representative from the ILO.9

These Geneva-based organizations focused on venereal disease. They continued efforts that had begun at the end of the nineteenth century, when medical authorities, police, voluntary organizations, and others agreed that the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) called for an international response. A healthy labor force and army were crucial to protecting nation-states and to guaranteeing the realization of imperialist projects, but women selling sex, it was believed, spread contagion and thus required containment.10 The experience of the First World War and the increased mobility of people further propelled local, national, and international action against STDs.11

Under the leadership of Director-General Albert Thomas, a French socialist, the ILO created its own medical division. It focused initially on sailors, whose “nomadic” and “promiscuous” life made them particularly vulnerable to infection.12 After the Genoa maritime conference of 1920, the ILO attempted to promote itself as one of the key players in an international network for the treatment and prevention of STDs among seamen.13 It surveyed treatment centers in ports and harbors and sponsored the 1924 International Agreement Respecting Facilities to be given to Merchant Seamen for the Treatment of Venereal Diseases. This agreement guaranteed free treatment to all merchant seamen or watermen without distinction, and the ILO issued an individual but anonymous health card that enabled the patient to continue treatment in the next port of call.14 Director-General Thomas deflected pleas by moral reformers, such as the British Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, to abolish prostitution by referring the issue to the Maritime Commission, essentially tabling such requests.15

Although the ILO had initially focused on medical treatment and the prevention of STDs, in the late 1920s its discourse became more moralistic. The organization allied itself with religious condemnation of sex outside marriage and notions of bodily control and privacy. This shift probably developed as a result of increased cooperation with the Union Internationale contre le Péril Vénérien (UIPV) [International Union against Venereal Danger] and the League’s Traffic Committee. Established in 1923, the UIPV was made up of state representatives, various specialist (eugenicist) societies, and technical representatives from the LNHO, the International Council of Women, and the ILO.16

In the early 1930s, the UIPV sought to balance its medical approach with that of social hygiene, a perspective that emphasized the cleansing of “deviant” behaviors. Its proposals served as a basis for the 1936 Seamen’s Welfare in Ports Recommendation (No. 48), in which the ILO suggested, among other things, the regulation of the sale of alcohol, the prohibition of the entry into dock and harbor areas of “undesirable persons,” the supervision of persons visiting ships, and an “energetic repression” of soliciting

and enticing in districts frequented by seamen.17 Opposition by both moral reformers and feminists led the ILO to retreat from proposed articles that would have impacted women; one called for the regulation, rather than abolition, of prostitution, and the other would restrict women from working in “public houses” near the docks. The ILO dropped the first, and the second turned into a plank barring the employment of minors, a gender-neutral formulation that, if carried out, would have impacted mostly young women.18

The ILO also saw the extension of labor standards to migrant workers as central to its mission, with women constituting a particularly vulnerable group. The presence of women activists at ILO deliberations ensured that the mostly male delegates could not ignore the trafficking of immigrant women. These women spoke in the name of organized womanhood. Thus, in 1922 Uruguayan feminist Dr. Paulina Luisi, a delegate to both the conference and the League’s Traffic Committee, shaped how the ILO would compile statistical data requested by the International Emigration Commission.She insisted that data be collected by intervals of age in order to better capture the exposure of young women to what moral reformers saw as the dangers of travel.19

Labor feminist Margaret Bondfield argued for protections of emigrant women. In 1926 she represented British workers as a delegate to the ILO Committee on the Simplification of Inspectors on Emigrant Ships. The League’s Traffic Committee had asked the ILO to gather data on “arrangements” prior to departure, during the voyage, and upon arrival, especially for obtaining employment. It also wanted information on “treatment of undesirables,” by which it meant procurers and women selling sex.20 Bondfield called for female supervisors on such vessels to protect women and children traveling alone from “any dangers or temptations arising out of the traffic in women and children,” an idea that stressed both the alleged moral superiority of women and the potential threat coming from men.21 The final instrument was a nonbinding recommendation rather than part of a treaty-like convention, but the League judged any recognition of its position “a success.”22

Over the years, the League’s Traffic Committee requested ILO action. As early as 1923 it bid the ILO to consider how governments could warn women and children “against the risk of accepting” work in “theatrical engagements” abroad that might lead to moral turpitude.23 The ILO, it argued, should go further and recommend that individual nations police the working conditions of theaters and other amusement sites. The League’s Traffic Committee urged the ILO to establish supervisory regulations including reasonableness of hours and “conditions of contact,” so as to subvert any “attempt by . . . management . . . to induce the girls to lead immoral lives.”24 The ILO in turn involved professional organizations of artists to oversee

regulation of such employment. Fear that night work bred immorality already justified a protective convention limiting hours for women—Night Work (Women) Convention, 1919 (No. 4). Another specific response to these demands was the 1932 Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Convention (No. 33), which set a minimum age for occupations they judged to be morally as well as physically dangerous, including work in establishments serving alcohol.25

By the 1930s, the League’s experts had finalized their inquiries into international trafficking in women and children.26 They concluded that the state regulation system, which registered and monitored sex workers, and the prevalence of intermediaries or procurers were among the main causes of global trafficking and prostitution.27 This finding led the League’s Traffic Committee to call for the abolition of the regulation system, which, it argued, maintained women in “a position of terrible slavery.”28 With the crisis of the worldwide depression, its meetings more consistently addressed the relationship between women’s low wages, unemployment, and commercial sex. Members considered the best means to rehabilitate women newly prohibited from working in licensed brothels and to “prevent . . . immorality.”29

While the committee’s membership was fairly stable during its interwar life, the attending ILO staff specialists on migration were replaced by specialists on women and social welfare. Among the new participants was Marguerite Thibert, the French socialist and feminist who, beginning in 1933 led the ILO’s Section on Conditions of Employment of Women and Children.30 Thibert seemed more determined to tackle the problems faced by working women, but her conclusions on prostitution resembled those of abolitionists inside and outside the League. At a 1934 meeting of the League’s Traffic Committee, the representative of the International Union of Catholic Women’s Leagues reported findings “that unemployment, and even the inadequacy of women’s earnings, constituted one of the factors of prostitution.”Nevertheless, this representative believed that “the replies of prostitutes were often merely pretexts”; many of them simply “refused to work.” While the Polish delegate emphasized that unemployment “constituted a serious danger” for young women, Thibert argued that her attempt to study the subject had floundered on inadequate statistics.31

All participants in these debates rejected seeing commercial sex as work. They defined work in narrow terms, meaning industrial labor and activities unrelated to reproduction and sexuality. They also understood work as something positive that would keep men and women at a safe distance from an immoral life. Since the nineteenth century, voluntary associations had established nonprofit employment bureaus and rescue homes offering training and workrooms to women.32 Although certain forms of employment (such as domestic service or jobs in bars, dance halls, and other

public places) “may cause moral danger,” the ILO concluded that a lack of occupation was no less risky. As noted in the ILO’s chapter for a 1939 study by the Advisory Committee on Social Questions, which replaced the League’s Traffic Committee in 1938, the idea was to provide “protection by means of work.”33 However, attention to working conditions was necessary. Wages and the status of some occupations needed improvement to protect women against the “temptation to find a way out by taking up a shameful but profitable trade.”34 Within the ILO, Thibert attempted to improve domestic work, but she admitted that progress on redefining household labor as worthy was slow.35

The League intended to make work seem attractive to women, but it needed to be monitored. They applauded the efforts of voluntary organizations that sought cooperation with ministries of labor and private employment agencies to obtain working permits for foreign girls which included “moral guarantees” clauses for jobs abroad.36 The ILO too promoted itself as a crucial partner in the task of supervising female labor. It called for monitoring employment agencies, with the goal of abolishing fee-charging; regulating workplace conditions; and protecting nonwork time. Since spare time stood outside the employer-employee relationship, the ILO would bypass that issue. Instead, in 1939 it lauded recreation activities organized by charitable associations and political parties, as well as German, Italian, and Soviet tourist services. These initiatives, it explained, went beyond recreation in aiming to teach “young persons of both sexes to live in normal, healthy friendship.”37

Health concerns remained a priority, which explains the ILO’s repeated call for increased cooperation between the League’s Advisory Social Questions Committee and the LNHO. In addition, UIPV leader J. A. Cavaillon favored coordinated action between the Geneva specialized organizations, contributing a chapter on the reduction of demand to the League’s study on prevention of prostitution—a Swedish model avant la lettre [before the letter].38 In the immediate postwar period, the ILO joined hands with the LNHO’s successor, the World Health Organization (WHO). As the role played by private associations diminished, the ILO-WHO campaigns against STDs became more technical and based purely on medical grounds.39 ILO staff requested best practices from merchant seamen and shipping officials, but contact with the UIPV declined after the Second World War. At the end of the 1950s, ILO recommended WHO as a more appropriate liaison for action on venereal disease.40

A New Understanding of Commercial Sex

The ILO’s early views on prostitution were neither static nor monolithic. It appears that at midcentury the ILO continued to consider prostitution only indirectly. It participated, for example, in joint ILO-WHO committees on the hygiene of seafarers and on occupational health. At the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), it never objected to resolutions calling for the abolition of trafficking and prostitution. From its origins in 1946, the CSW asked the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for “strong measures to put down traffic in women and children,” prevention of “clandestine prostitution” by making “it no longer necessary for women to earn money by these means,” and rehabilitation of women who sold sex so that they could “return to normal life without discrimination” through education and work.41 ECOSOC, however, built upon a 1938 draft of the League of Nations that lacked a human rights framework. The 1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others criminalized sex work, including managing or financing a brothel, and thus continued to conflate trafficking with prostitution. Socialist countries called for prevention through economic improvement, while claiming to have eliminated the practice.42

During the early postwar years, the ILO and the entire UN system addressed equal rights and development. These foci led to UN declarations and conventions on political, civil, and social rights and ILO instruments on equal remuneration and nondiscrimination. The migrant worker still appeared as a male breadwinner, but his family deserved equal access to social services, including maternity protection. In the midst of the Cold War and decolonization, contending forces sought to paint the other as oppressive to their citizenry, with the Soviet Union and its allies castigating the United States for race and sex discrimination and the United States pointing to forced labor in the Soviet Union. Both sides sought to score points with the nonaligned nations of the so-called Third World. Worker, mother, and citizen would describe women on both sides of what the Western bloc called the “Iron Curtain,” but support for formal as opposed to substantive equality shifted depending on political alignments at the United Nations and the ILO—institutions where the United States gradually lost its hegemony after the entry of former colonial states.43

UN discussions on commercialized sex retained “slavery” and “traffic in persons” frameworks. In 1959, the UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs produced a report equating trafficking with prostitution (so both were considered to be one and the same thing). ECOSOC requested that the International Criminal Police Organization work with the United Nations “to eliminate all practices resembling slavery,” including com-

mercial sex. Two years later, it initiated a working group on the question. These initiatives occurred amid renewed feminist debates about prostitution in relation to sex discrimination, bodily autonomy, and patriarchy. Feminists clashed over commercial sex at the 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year in Mexico City, whose official document requested governments “to take measures to prevent the forced prostitution of women and girls.” There the representative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked other UN units, including the ILO, to address “the traffic in women” as “the most painful aspect of sexism.” Like an earlier generation of legal-equality feminists, antitrafficking activists sought legitimatization through international forums. They pushed for UN-sponsored studies that could justify ECOSOC requests that governments develop programs of action against prostitution.44

In this environment, the ILO focused on living and working conditions. Sex returned to its agenda in 1976, when the World Employment Conference devoted special attention to rural women in developing countries.45 The ILO was part of a broad ideological turn which not only prioritized fitting women into existing development schemes but also advocated for doing more to aid them by using economic developments in the Global South to improve the status of women. Led by women within the UN system, proponents of women in development advocated for legal equality, property holding, credit, voting, and civil rights. But such proposals did not necessarily reduce poverty, because they ignored larger structural factors. Thus competing paradigms—women and development and then the postmodernist-influenced gender and development—questioned the sexual division of labor and the gendered discourse of development itself to account for the private as well as the public, including power within the household, marriage, and sexuality.46

In the late 1970s, the Programme on Rural Women brought a feminist postcolonial perspective to the ILO, situating the position of women in terms of larger socioeconomic conditions. In commissioning ethnographies about subsistence and informal sector workers, the program shifted the meaning of productive labor to include those previously dismissed as nonworkers. It supported research on young women as masseuses in the sex trade of Bangkok undertaken by Pasuk Phongpaichit, a Thai economist with a PhD from Cambridge University. This was perhaps the first time a branch of the ILO described commercial sex as a form of work. Significantly, the idea of prostitution as work entered the ILO via its connections to Asia, where survival strategies ruptured norms of proper womanhood and narrow definitions of work.47 In a preface to Phongpaichit’s preliminary 1980 working paper, “Rural Women of Thailand: From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses,” Dharam Ghai, chief of the Rural Employment Policies Branch,

praised the investigation on Thai masseuses as “an important contribution to understanding a highly publicised but under-researched dimension of women’s work.”48

The establishment of US military bases in Thailand in the mid-1960s had expanded “go-go” bars and the phenomenon of “hired wives”—many of them migrating from rural areas—for American servicemen.49 Phongpaichit analyzed this growing sector through in-depth interviews with fifty masseuses and conducted field trips to the girls’ villages of origin. She focused on the reasons for their migration, the impact on their families, the women’s experiences in sex work, and the advantages of undertaking the trade in massage parlors. The women worked in “an environment often safer and more comfortable than other forms of organized prostitution,” without pimps.50 Unlike previous studies on prostitution produced in Geneva, Phongpaichit’s stressed the economic motives of the women involved and the negative impact of the Thai market economy on rural households. The wide income gap between urban and rural landscapes provided the setting for migration. About the interviewed Thai masseuses Phongpaichit concluded:

They were engaging in an entrepreneurial move designed to sustain the family units of a rural economy which was coming under increasing pressure. . . . The returns available in this particular business, rather than in other business accessible to an unskilled and uneducated person, had a powerful effect on their choices.

Our survey clearly showed that the girls felt they were making a perfectly rational decision within the context of their particular social and economic situation.51

Fears of both adverse publicity and objections by the Thai and US governments delayed publication of the preliminary paper for two years. Top ILO officials were nervous about its content. According to one disapproving official R. S. Kirman, “The sensitive nature of the subject could lead to trouble.” He cited reactions to a UNESCO study twenty years earlier “on the harlots of the Lebanon,” that critics brought up to disparage “the Organisation (waste of tax-payers’ money, etc., etc.).” Given that the subject was “on the fringe of the ILO’s competence,” he felt that publishing it wasn’t worth the possible pushback from the Thai government.52 Another commentator, Assistant Director-General Ali Taqi thought the conclusion would generate reaction from “an alert US Government official and probably the Employers’ group,” not for its portrayal of commercial sex but for its critique of Thai development policy “under the tutelage of the United States.” That reaction, however, could not “be a decisive one,” he claimed; “otherwise the ILO would never publish anything not palatable to particular

governments.” While there would be attention from the popular press, no one could be sure of its tone. The ILO might even be praised for its “courage to study a sensitive problem.”53

In calling the work “informative and insightful” and “original and pioneering,” Ghai defended his feminist staff, which had lobbied for the study’s release. But he agreed that parts of it required redrafting, as was typical for any manuscript.54 Director-General Francis Blanchard, a Frenchborn international civil servant, “took a personal interest in this matter,” approving publication after the manuscript was revised on the basis of his comments to remove “sensitive or offensive” passages. No official signed the preface of Phongpaichit’s study, which appeared under the name of the division and thus was to insulate the ILO from its findings.55

The ILO released the report in part because the original working paper had generated much press, including the publication of an unauthorized condensed version by the Southeast Asia Resource Center in Berkeley, California.56 It did not want to appear to be hiding anything. Nonetheless, removed from the published version were detailed passages that blamed “the flesh trade” on Chinese merchants, Thai generals, the US military, and German travel agents. Added to the conclusion was a gesture to moral reform, a line on the presence of “organisations dedicated to refurbishing the moral character of the massage girls, and also a number of more sensible institutions which try to help them out of trouble.” Nonetheless, Phongpaichit retained her overall economic analysis, which saw a solution only “in a massive change in the distribution of income between city and country, and in a fundamental shift in Thailand’s orientation to the international economy.”57

In subsequent decades, the blooming of sex tourism and the fear of the spread of HIV infection strengthened the ILO’s interest in commercial sex. In the 1990s, Lim, then ILO Senior Specialist on Women Workers’ Questions for Asia and the Pacific, further antagonized neo-abolitionists within the prostitution debate. It is not clear whether or to what extent the sex workers’ movement that started to take shape in the late 1970s influenced Lim. Yet her edited collection shows many commonalities not only with the research conducted by Phongpaichit but also with conclusions drawn by activists and scholars who called for the redefinition of commercial sex as work.58 The Office knew enough to have the work peer reviewed by prominent scholar activist Priscilla Alexander, who confirmed that the ILO was “the appropriate agency to work on trying to ameliorate the conditions within which prostitutes work.” Alexander noted that “the contributors found that sex workers generally have better working conditions than other workers.”59

ILO officials mostly embraced Lim’s project, but since it dealt with a “controversial subject,” numerous departments within the Office subjected

it to intense scrutiny. Institutional caution delayed publication for a year. Some feared damage to the ILO’s reputation since the data resulted from unreliable statistics given by NGOs “which have a vested interest in exaggeration.” Skeptics questioned which ILO “objectives are furthered by the manuscript” and what policy implications derived from its findings. Senior management and the publications division argued over inclusion of the chapter on child prostitution, but they ultimately agreed that such “sections . . . effectively complement our work on the preparation of a new convention prohibiting the most intolerable forms of child labour.” As with Phongpaichit’s book, they debated whether someone should sign a preface to confirm institutional acceptance of the findings. As the Deputy DirectorGeneral for External Relations in a thoroughly self-aware explanation put it, the publication needed “to contain a clarification of the ILO’s position (i.e., non-position) on the issue of whether prostitution should in and of itself be legalized and why the ILO is willing to publish a book on working conditions . . . in particular countries.” Not wanting to signal too much approval, the then Director-General, Michael Hansenne, opted for no signature even though two senior officials had offered their names for the preface to underscore the gender and geographical diversity of the organization.60

The collection examined the social and economic factors that had influenced the growth of the sex industry in four Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand). In emphasizing the economic basis of commercial sex, the essays stressed material and nonmaterial advantages gained by young, uneducated (migrant) women: higher wages, flexibility, and increased mobility.61 The various authors argued that since prostitution had developed into a full-blown industry employing millions of people worldwide, it should be recognized as an economic sector. Such official recognition implied maintenance of records and statistics, which in turn would facilitate the preparation of development plans and government budgets, as well as allow for accurate assessments of sectorial health impact and general working conditions. The study clearly distinguished between adult and child prostitution, the latter judged a human rights violation and an intolerable form of labor to be eradicated, a position embodied in the 1999 ILO convention, Worst Forms of Child Labour (No. 182).62

Adult prostitution was another matter. In introducing the book, Lim acknowledged the “wide range of circumstances of those in prostitution.” She divided adults engaged in the sex trade into three categories: those making “a relatively ‘free’ personal choice . . . as their right to sexual liberation”; those participating in response to “economic pressures or because there are no better-paying alternatives”; and those “overtly pressured by third parties in the form of deception, violence and/or debt bondage.” Hence, in the case of adults “it may be possible to make a distinction between

‘voluntary’ prostitution and prostitution through coercion.” Implicit in her analysis was a harsh criticism of the neo-abolitionist approach. “Many current studies,” she wrote, “highlight the pathetic stories of individual prostitutes, especially of women and children deceived or coerced into the sector. Such an approach tends to sensationalize the issues and to evoke moralistic, rather than practical, responses.”63 This stance generated controversy, leading the ILO to engage in damage control. Lim developed a standard reply to set the record straight, which even the Director-General vetted.64 Constant bombardment took a toll; to one member of management, she tendered an apology “for the problems I have caused the Office.” By August 1999, some six months after publication, she did not “want to talk to any more reporters.”65

Not all responses were hostile. Lim won support from feminists who viewed prostitution as a form of work and from some sex worker organizations, including the International Committee for Prostitutes Rights, the Network of Sex Worker Projects, and the Dutch Rode Draad (Red Thread). The European Network for HIV/STD Prevention in Prostitution took exception to calls for all feminists to oppose the ILO; its proposals included decriminalization and safe working conditions. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission found the study “excellent and thoughtprovoking,” in keeping with a “commitment to sexual autonomy.” This commission addressed sex work from the perspective of “protection from exploitation.” Speaking to other opponents of trafficking, the Foundation Against Trafficking in Women explained, “A great deal of NGOs working in the field support the ILO report, its conclusions and its nuanced approach,” especially for laying the basis for including sex workers in international labor standards.66

By contrast, the neo-abolitionist camp rebuked Lim. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women generated a petition campaign against the ILO’s alleged “view that the prostitution of women must now be regarded as an economic asset for national development in Third World countries.”67 The Norwegian paper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) said that it would engage with the Geneva organization when the ILO leadership “is satisfied that its own children or grand-children have secured a good job in a brothel and are satisfied with having to work only eight hours a day.”68 While this and other journalistic distortions of Lim’s work could be dismissed, hundreds of Norwegian union women, along with feminists, antitrafficking NGOs, and religious women from Kenya, Sweden, Thailand, the United States, Venezuela, and elsewhere, could not. They petitioned the ILO’s Director-General and the UN Secretary-General to treat prostitution as a “deprivation of women’s human rights.”69 Radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys, then a reader in Political Science at the University of Melbourne, sought to

disabuse the ILO on the efficacy of legalization. “Prostitution is not just a ‘service industry’ that creates some difficult problems of regulation,” she argued, “it is a practice of violence based upon women’s subordination.”70

In an essay issued by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women shortly after the publication of Lim’s collection, US radical feminist Janice Raymond castigated the ILO. It had “become the latest and most questionable group urging acceptance of the sex industry,” because legalization of the sex sector necessarily implied a “recognition of prostitution and related forms of sexual entertainment as sex work.”71 Raymond, who taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, selected passages from the book to criticize Lim’s alleged call for the recognition of prostitution as “a legal occupation.”72 Lim provided a more nuanced stance, writing: “In the case of adults, prostitution could be viewed as a matter of personal choice and a form of work, in which case the policy issues are mainly concerned with whether prostitution should be recognized as a legal occupation with protection under labour law and social security and health regulations.”73 However, she reminded her audience, the ILO refrained from making recommendations because it respected the authority of national governments to forge their own policies.74

The most serious challenge came from the United States. In March 1999, “New Right” Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, chair of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, found in the book ammunition for his crusade to eliminate UN funding and take the United States out of the ILO. On advice from a Republican insider, the ILO Washington office mobilized employer and worker supporters to lobby both political parties in favor of the Geneva organization. Helms ended up withdrawing his threatening amendment, but later that year he negotiated reduced UN funding as the condition for confirmation of a new US ambassador to the UN.75 The subsequent question-and-answer sheet prepared by Lim in response to such detractors represented a retreat. It claimed, “The ILO does not regard prostitution—even if voluntarily entered into by adults—as decent work. ”76

Repression Versus Protection

Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS prevention offered a new entry point into the debate on commercial sex in the 1980s.77 While the ILO still proffered national responsibility as its official position, focusing on questions of health proved more pragmatic. Late in that decade, the ILO held a joint consultation with the WHO on AIDS and the workplace. Due to the typically slow bureaucratic pace the organization took towards controversial subjects, ILO did not establish the Programme on HIV/AIDS (ILO/AIDS) until late 2000.78 This program has focused on the factors that enhance the risks of

HIV infection, including barriers to treatment. The 99th International Labour Conference in 2010 adopted Recommendation No. 200—Recommendation concerning HIV and AIDS and the World of Work, 2010—with the aim of strengthening national policies and programs to combat the pandemic.79

The ILC’s Committee on HIV/AIDS debated whether this recommendation would apply to sex workers. A Dutch government member proposed directly naming the list of covered workers and services.80 It would be difficult to develop effective programs if this important target group remained unrecognized. The worker representative from Switzerland supported the addition, but governments were divided. The French government tellingly “could not support the amendment, since sex workers were not a legal category of workers.” In the end, the committee saw an explicit reference to sex workers as unnecessary since they fell under references to both “all sectors of economic activity, including the private and public sectors and the formal and informal economies” and “all workers working under all forms or arrangements, and at all workplaces.”81

Sex worker organizations hailed the passage of Recommendation No. 200 as a step forward. As activists from the Global Network of Sex Work Projects noted, discussions around HIV showed that the ILO was approaching prostitution as a question of labor. 82 The ILO’s Occupational Health and Safety Branch stressed that the recommendation “reaches out to all workers,” while highlighting its community-based initiatives to train sex workers.83 The use of the term sex worker instead of prostitute in policy papers and communications on its HIV programs underscored a workerist frame.

Richard Howard, a former senior specialist on HIV and AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region, described the ILO’s approach after the promulgation of the recommendation as “an intermediary strategy for addressing the working conditions and improved HIV prevention, treatment and services for sex workers.”84 Emphasizing the vulnerabilities of sex workers, the ILO/AIDS program thus aimed at “reducing stigma and discrimination, promoting economic empowerment of women and men and addressing gender dimensions.”85 Rather than launching an international convention on sex work, the program has promoted “decent work” in the sex industry by reducing stigmatization and discrimination.86

By century’s end, the issue of trafficking and underage or forced prostitution had returned to the agendas of national governments and international organizations. Pressures from post-Cold War globalization as well as a growing tourist trade threatened increased child labor, motivating the ILO to approve the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention in June 1999. The ILO asked the international community to combat the offering of children for prostitution and the production of pornography on a global scale.87 It had already taken up the issue of forced sexual labor through

the question of reparations for Japanese use of “comfort women” for their troops prior to and during World War II. When the Osaka Fu Special English Teachers’ Union asked for appropriate compensations, the ILO’s Committee of Experts ruled that Japan’s system of military sexual slavery violated the Forced Labour Convention (No. 29) of 1930. But the committee did not have the power to order relief.88

For the twenty-first century, the ILO created the Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour. Like earlier instruments (such as the 1904 Paris Agreement and the UN 1949 convention), this very act increased the conceptual confusion in international law that conflates human trafficking with commercial sex.89 According to a 2014 study for the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, such international law provisions establish a thin line between prostitution and trafficking.90 Article 2(1) of the ILO’s 1930 convention defines forced or compulsory labor as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”91 On its website, the ILO expanded this definition to include “new forms of forced labour that have emerged in recent decades, such as ‘human trafficking’, also called ‘modern slavery’, to shed light on working and living conditions contrary to human dignity.”92 However, modern slavery has no juridical definition, and human trafficking, in legal terms, constitutes not a form of (labor) exploitation but a process.93

This broad interpretation of forced labor reifies the binary victim/ perpetrator without accounting for the fluidity and complexity of labor relationships in the global sex industry.94 It negates the agency of sex workers motivated by their own circumstances rather than by “trafficker enticement.”95 It also simplifies labor arrangements, which often result in both progress and subjugation, improving workers’ economic opportunities, while submitting them to exploitative working conditions.96 Akin to analyses and international tools to combat trafficking during the early twentieth century, the ILO pronouncements on forced labor currently stress dangers presented to women and girls, establishing a dichotomy between forced sexual exploitation and forced labor exploitation.97 Indeed, the ILO has relied on the research of antitrafficking activist Siddharth Kara, who promotes the criminalization of clients, the destruction of the economic basis of the industry that produces “sex slaves,” and the establishment of “community vigilance committees” to rescue trafficked women and girls.98

Such neo-abolitionist activists deploy the popular language of “antislavery” to cast commercial sex as gender-based violence. So do public authorities that present themselves as defenders of human rights to justify stringent migration policies and to arbitrarily remove people or businesses

deemed undesirable. It is therefore doubtful that the ILO campaigns against forced labor, modern slavery, and human trafficking will boost the efforts of ILO/AIDS to improve the working and living conditions of local and migrant sex workers. The larger political context—in which international organizations confront prostitution scandals and public discussions on sexual violence and harassment ignore sex workers—has strengthened neoabolitionist views of male predators and female victims.99 Amid this din, the ILO’s health branch quietly has pursued its activities without insisting on the formal recognition of commercial sex as a form of work.

Conclusion: The ILO as a Battleground

“The subject of prostitution has always been controversial,” wrote Lim.100 In 2003 the ILO legal department, JUR (Judicial), asserted, “Prostitution has never been considered as employment or occupation.”101 It recommended statistical definitions, however, that included “hostesses” and “escorts,” often euphemisms for women selling sex, under the classification of service workers.102 One hundred years after its founding, the ILO still shies away from discussing prostitution.103 Instead of taking a clear and unified stance on the issue, it has opted for decentralization and the development of programs aimed at tackling problems linked to commercial sex: STDs and trafficking. When it comes to health and forced labor, the ILO has become a battleground for competing views on commercial sex. It maintains the separation of legal and health remedies that have stood in tension for most of the last century.

The ILO’s health branch has been more inclined than other units to take a pragmatic approach. Since the 1950s, and particularly following the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, its programs have focused on treatment and prevention rather than on the morality of sex work. Learning from the controversy over Lim’s The Sex Sector, the ILO/AIDS staff has adopted a gradual strategy to address sexual labor. Instead of proposing measures that could be interpreted as a call for the legalization of prostitution, they have concentrated—particularly in the Global South—on the development of national HIV/AIDS workplace legislation and policies, the expansion of social protection for people affected by HIV and AIDS, and the reduction of workers’ vulnerability to HIV through economic empowerment. Whether this strategy will lead to the integration of sex workers into national trade unions in more countries than is now the case, and whether such recognition will translate into the decriminalization or legalization of sex work, will depend on two factors: the strength of the neo-abolitionist movement and, more importantly, the resilience of sex worker organizations.

Sex workers speak in many voices despite the growth of the sex worker movement in the twenty-first century. While the best-organized groups lobby for legalization, others advocate for decriminalization.104 Some social organizations active in the Global North stress the risks of legalization for migrant sex workers who lack residency permits.105 That some foreign sex workers seeking legal protection appropriate human trafficking discourse also discredits the claims of activists and scholars who stress the difference between forced and voluntary prostitution.106 Furthermore, persistent stigmatization results in sex workers’ continued hesitance to become involved in public campaigns or to provide firsthand testimonies that would support comprehensive analyses of prostitution. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated new vulnerabilities for sex workers who face exposure to disease or loss of income. Those who have migrated to virtual platforms enter an unregulated realm and often reduced wages.107 These thorny issues make the development of a unified sex worker movement difficult.

We write in hopes of creating a fuller understanding of intimate labor as work worthy of inclusion in global standards. As with domestic work, success will depend on a strong workers’ movement supported by ILO staff, trade unions, and NGOs who have access and power within the convention-making process. But the formal transformation of prostitution from “indecent” to “decent” work will remain utopian as long as limited understandings of cisgender and trans* peoples’ movements into and within the sex industry persist and policymakers embrace conceptions of labor that treat the sale of sexual services as a moral aberration. More broadly speaking, an inclusive global labor regime will require a reversal of stubborn top-down legalist approaches and readiness to include the voices of the people concerned, whose ideas of respectability and well-being depend on their living conditions and previous working experiences in the global capitalist economy.

Notes

Eileen Boris would like to acknowledge the aid of ILO archivists and Manuela Tomei, Director of the ILO Conditions of Work and Equality Department, for access to materials.

1This article reworks material from Magaly Rodríguez García, “The ILO and the Oldest Non-Profession,” in The Life Work of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden, eds. Ulbe Bosma and Karin Hofmeester (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 90–114; and Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 17–52, 122–154.

2Lin Lean Lim, email message to Eileen Boris, Mar. 14, 2018; Janice G. Raymond, “Legitimating Prostitution as Sex Work: UN Labour Organization (ILO) Calls for Recognition of Sex Industry,” Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, July 1999, www.catwinternational.org/Home/Article/61-legitimating-prostitution-as-sexwork-un-labour-organization-ilo-calls-for-recognition-of-the-sex-industry; “ILO Report on the Sex Sector Receives Prestigious Publishing Prize at Frankfurt Book Fair,” ILO, Oct. 10, 1998, http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/ news/WCMS_007999/lang--en/index.htm; Lin Lean Lim, ed., The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Geneva: ILO, 1998). 3“Report on the Traffic in Women and Children,” memo on the International Emigration Commission, L/12/2/5 1921, ILO Archives, Geneva (hereafter ILOA). 4Isabelle Lespinet-Morel and Vincent Viet, eds., L’Organisation international du travail: Origine, développement, avenir (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011); Sandrine Kott and Joëlle Droux, eds., Globalizing Social Rights: The International Labour Organization and Beyond (New York: Palgrave, 2013); Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to the Present (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Marcel van der Linden, “The International Labor Organization, 1919–2019: An Appraisal,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16, no. 2 (May 2019): 11–41. 5Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Stephen Legg, “‘The Life of Individuals as well as of Nations’: International Law and the League of Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Governmentalities,” Leiden Journal of International Law 25, no. 3 (2012): 647–64. 6Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 7Magaly Rodríguez García, Davide Rodogno, and Liat Kozma, “Introduction,” in The League of Nations’ Work on Social Issues: Visions, Endeavours and Experiments, ed. Rodríguez García, Rodogno, and Kozma (Geneva: United Nations Publications, 2016), 13–28. 8Boris, Making the Woman Worker, 17–52. 9Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” in “Mediating Labour: Worldwide Labour Intermediation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” eds. Ulbe Bosma, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Aditya Sarkar, special issue, International Review of Social History 57, no. 20 (2012): 97–128; Jessica R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionists in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (2010): 90–113. 10Thaddeus Blanchette and Cristiana Schettini, “Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro: Police Management without Regulation,” in Rodríguez García, Heerma van Voss, and van Nederveen Meerkerk, Selling Sex in the City, 490–516; Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Philippe Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution

in Colonial Hong Kong,” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 229–48; Yvonne Svanström, Policing Public Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm, 1812–1880 (Stockholm: Atlas Akademi, 2000). 11Josep L. Barona, Health Policies in Interwar Europe: A Transnational Perspective (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019); Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017). 12La protection de la santé des marins contre les maladies vénériennes, Etudes et documents, Series P. (Marins), no. 2 (Geneva: Bureau international du travail, 1926), 1–2. Magaly Rodríguez García thanks Liat Kozma for this source. 13Paul Weindling, “The Politics of International Co-ordination to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 1900–1980s,” in AIDS and Contemporary History, ed. Virginia Berridge and Philip Strong (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 93–107. 14The Agreement of Brussels, 1924, Respecting Facilities to be Given to Merchant Seamen for the Treatment of Venereal Diseases (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1958), http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/37448/WHO_TRS_150.pdf. 15Albert Thomas to The Secretary, The Association for Moral & Social Hygiene, Apr. 9, 1921, and draft of same reply, both in D 280/7, 1921, ILOA. 16Weindling, “Politics of International Co-ordination,” 9; Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17Recommandation (no. 48) sur les conditions de séjour des marins dans les ports, 1936, www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/fr/f?p=1000:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID,P12100_LANG_CODE:312386,en:NO; “Annex: Report presented by the Sub-commission sur les conditions de séjour des marins dans les port,” by J. Havelock Wilson and T. Salveson, Venereal Diseases: Correspondence respecting Treatment of sailors in port, League of Nations Archives, Geneva (hereafter LNA), 8A/8227/1525. 18See various letters in D 613/800/3 1929, such as those from Medical Women’s Federation, and letters in D613/800/13 1929, such as those from the International Alliance of Women, ILOA; International Labour Conference (ILC), Promotion of Seamen’s Welfare in Ports, Second Discussion, Report III (Geneva: ILO, 1931). 19Legislative Measures adopted in different countries, Report of the International Labour Office, Dec. 1923, 2–3; Emigration Commission of the International Labour Organisation, Resolutions, 1922, both in L 12/5 1925, ILOA; Dr. Luisi, and discussion, ILC, Proceedings, Fourth Session, 1922 (Geneva, 1922), 236–41, 599. 20For Bondfield’s speaking for women’s organizations, see ILC, Proceedings, Eighth Session, vol. 1, 1926 (Geneva: ILO, 1926): 215. See also League of Nations, “Resolutions Adopted by the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children,” L/12/2/6 1923, ILOA. 21ILC, Proceedings, Eighth Session, 215, 385. See also Judith Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (1982): 542–74.

22League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (hereafter “Committee”), “Immigration,” Minutes of the Sixth Session, Geneva, 1927, 28, LNA, C.338.M.113.1927.IV. 23Julia Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 62, no. 1 (2017): 37–65; Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market in South America,” in special issue, International Review of Social History 57, S.20 (2012): 129–60. 24“Report on the Liaison Officer with the International Labour Office for the Year 1929,” 116, Appendix B in League of Nations, Committee, Minutes, Geneva, 1930, LNA, C.246.M.121.1930.IV; Mr. Johnston, on question of fee-charging agencies, in League of Nations, Traffic in Women and Children Committee, Minutes, Geneva, 1931, 37, LNA, C.401.M.163.1931.IV. 25Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Convention (C33), 1932, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100 :P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312178:NO.

26Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children (in 2 parts), Geneva, Committee, 1927; Report to the Council, Geneva: League of Nations, 1932. 27Magaly Rodríguez García, “La Société des Nations face à la traite des femmes et au travail sexuel à l’échelle mondiale,” Le Mouvement Social 241 (2012): 105–125. 28Committee, Minutes of the Ninth Session, Eighth Meeting, Geneva, Apr. 5, 1930, 49, LNA, C.246M.121.1930.IV. 29Miss Whitton, Canadian representative, Committee, Minutes of the Fifteenth Session, Fifth Meeting, Geneva, Apr. 22, 1936, 10, LNA, CTFE/15th Session/PV.5. 30Françoise Thébaud, Une traversée du siècle: Marguerite Thibert, femme engagée et fonctionnaire internationale (Paris: Belin, 2017). 31Committee, Minutes of the Thirteen Session, Second Meeting, Geneva, 4 April 1934, 16–27, 26–27, LNA CTFE/13th Session/PV (Revised). 32Committee, Minutes of the Fourteenth Session, Third Meeting, Geneva, May 3, 1935, 7, LNA, CTFE/14th Session/PV.3. 33“‘The moral protection of young women,’ drawn up by the International Labour Office,” in Prevention of Prostitution: A Study of Preventive Measures, Especially Those which Affect Minors (Geneva: League of Nations Advisory Committee on Social Questions, May 15, 1939), 60–61, LNA, CQS/A/19(a). 34Committee, Minutes of the Fifteenth Session, Fifth Meeting, April 22, 1936, 4, LNA, CTFE/15th Session/PV.5. 35Committee, Minutes of the Fifteenth Session, Fifth Meeting, April 22, 1936, 4, LNA, CTFE/15th Session/PV.5. 36Committee, Minutes of the Third Session, Geneva, April 7–11, 1924, 83, LNA, C.217.M.71.1924.IV.

37“‘Moral protection of young women,’” 60–61, 70–73. 38J. A. Cavaillon, “Reduction of Demand,” in Prevention of prostitution, LNA, CQS/A/19(c). On the “Swedish model,” see Daniela Danna, “Client-Only Criminalization in the City of Stockholm: A Local Research of the Application of the ‘Swedish Model’ of Prostitution Policy,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 9, no. 1 (2012): 80–93. 39Weindling, “Politics of International Co-ordination,” 102. 40For example, letters in MA 56-0, Jacket 1, 1/1942 to 2/1942, with one letter from 1955; file NGO 311, Jacket 1, 10/1955 to 8/1962, ILOA. 41Report of the Sub-Commission on the Status of Women to the Commission on Human Rights, Papers of the US Women’s Bureau, International Division General Records, 1919–1952, Folder “UNESCO-Commission on the Status of Women, 1946,” Box 22, RG86, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. 42“Coordination of the Commission on the Status of Women with other Commissions of the United Nations in respect of economic and social problems,” 1–2, 1947, attached to memo from R. W. Cox to Chief, Women’s and Children’s Bureau, ESC 1004-11 Jacket 2, ILOA. See first reports of the UN Commission on the Status of Women and ILO commentary in the ESC-1004-11 series; “Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others,” https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/trafficinpersons. aspx; Sonja Dolinsek and Philippa Hetherington, “Socialist Internationalism and Decolonizing Moralities in the UN Anti-Trafficking Regime, 1947–1954,” Journal of the History of International Law 21, no. 2 (2019): 212–38. 43Eileen Boris and Jill Jensen, “The International Labour Organization and the Gender of Economic Rights,” in The Routledge History of Human Rights, ed. Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal (New York: Routledge, 2020), 259–280. 44Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Division of Human Rights and Peace, UNESCO, Final Report, International Meeting of Experts on the social and cultural causes of prostitution and strategies for the struggle against procuring and sexual exploitation of women, Madrid, Spain, Mar. 18-21, 1986, SHS–85/ CONF.608/14, Paris, Dec. 30, 1986, 2–3. 45“Activities of the ILO, 1976. Report of the Director-General (Part 2),” ILO, Geneva, 1977, 68–69, http://www.ilo.org/public/portugue/region/eurpro/lisbon/ pdf/09383_1977_63_part2.pdf. 46Eva M. Rathgeber, “WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice,” Journal of Developing Areas 24, no. 4 (July 1990): 489–502; Devaki Jain, Women, Development, and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Avronne S. Fraser and Irene Tinker, eds., Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development (New York: Feminist Press, 2004); Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (London: Verso, 1994).

47For fruitful integration of postcolonial perspectives, see Natasha Klocker, “Struggling with Child Domestic Work: What Can a Postcolonial Perspective Offer?,” Children’s Geographies 12, no. 4 (2014): 464–78. 48Pasuk Phongpaichit, “Rural Women of Thailand: From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses,” ILO, World Employment Programme Research Working Paper, Nov. 1980, iii, www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1980/80B09_876_engl. pdf?gathStatIcon=true. 49Leslie Ann Jeffrey, Sex and Borders: Gender, National Identity and Prostitution Policy in Thailand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007). 50Phongpaichit, “Rural Women of Thailand,” 1. 51Phongpaichit, “Rural Women of Thailand,” 141–142. 52Minute sheets, D. Ghai to Mr. Payró, Mar. 26, 1981, in WEP-4-04-24-1-158-9, Jacket 1, ILOA. 53Minute sheets, R. S. Kirkman to Mr. Payró, Mar. 6, 1981, and To CABINET (Mr. Ahmad) from A. Taqi, Aug. 21, 1981, referring to Minutes, Aug. 20, 1981, both in WEP-4-04-24-1-158-9, Jacket 1, ILOA. 54Ghai to Payró, Mar. 26, 1981; Minute Sheet, Zubeida Ahmad to Ghai, Oct. 3, 1980; and Martha F. Loutfi to Mrs. Ahmad and Mr. Ghai, Oct. 3, 1980, all in WEP4-04-24-1-158-9, Jacket 1, ILOA. 55Minute Sheets, J. P. Martin to Director-General, Jan. 15, 1981; Martin to Mr. Payró, Jan. 15, 1981; and Martin to Director-General, Dec. 21, 1981, all in WEP-404-24-1-158-9, Jacket 1, ILOA. 56Minute Sheets, Kyril Tidmarsh, PRESSE, to Mr. Trémeaud, Oct. 20, 1981; Martha Winnacker to M. Loufti, Oct. 25, 1981; Loufti to Rachel Grossman, Oct. 20, 1981; and Grossman to Loutfi, Nov. 16, 1981, all in WEP-4-04-24-1-158-9, Jacket 1, ILOA. 57Cf. Phongpaichit, “Rural Women of Thailand,” 4–30, 134–145, with Pasuk Phongpaichit, From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses (Geneva: ILO, 1982), 1–6, 71–76, quotation on 76. 58Lim, quoted in Maya Kaneko, “ILO author offers a realistic approach to Asian prostitution,” Japan Times International, 6–31, Jan. 2000, clipping in PS 630-1007, Jacket 1, ILOA; Frédérique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (London: Women’s Press, 1987); Gail Pheterson, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores (Seattle: Seal Press, 1989). 59Loutfi, email message to Hagen, April 22, 1997, PS 630-1007, Jacket 1, ILOA. 60“Minute Sheet” discussions: A. Taqi to PUBLNS, April 1, 1997; M. Arteta to Sengenberger and Lim, June 9, 1997; K. Hagen to Taqi and D. Freedman, Sept. 18, 1997; Taqi to Freedman, Oct. 16, 1997; Freedman to CABINET, Hagen, Taqi, Dec. 16, 1997; A. Quédraogo to Freedman, Jan. 5, 199[8]; F. Röselaers to Hagen, Jan. 20, 1998; and Hagen to Röselaers, Feb. 13, 1998, all in PS 630-1007, Jacket 1, ILOA.

61Lim, Sex Sector.

62Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182), https://www.ilo. org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C182. 63Lin Lean Lim, “The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia,” in Lim, Sex Sector, 2–3.

64Gerry Rodgers, email message to Lim, July 28, 1999, EMP 69, Jacket 4, ILOA. 65Lim, email message to Rodgers, July 23, 1999, and sticky note attached to email thread from Lim, July 19, 1999, both in EMP 69, Jacket 4, ILOA. 66Laura María Augustín and Jo Weldon, “The Sex Sector: A Victory for Diversity,” Global Reproductive Rights Newsletter 66/67 (2003): 31–34, http://www.nswp. org/sites/nswp.org/files/The%20Sex%20Sector%20-%20%20A%20Victory%20 for%20Diversity.pdf. Roelof Haveman to Lim, Aug. 20, 1998, WN 17-2-3, Jacket 1, ILOA. Lim to Ms. Overs, attached to Christine Elstob, email message to Washington. AO Freeman, Dec. 18, 1998; and Barbara Stolterfoht to Lim, Dec. 8, 1998, both in EMP 69, Jacket 2, ILOA. Judith Kivington, coordinator, to Women’s Front of Norway and the Norwegian Trade Union, April 21, 1999, copy to Michael Hansenne and others; Scott Long to Lim, Mar. 6, 1999; and STV@stv,nl, email message to multiple recipients of list, Feb. 25, 1999, all in EMP 69, Jacket 3, ILOA. Red Thread to Hansenne, Feb. 24,1999, with attachment signed by Carol Jenkins, EMP 69, Jacket 4, ILOA. 67Mary Lucille Sullivan to Michael Hansenne, September 22, 1998, EMP 69, Jacket 1, ILOA. 68Kari Tapiola, email message to HQ.PRESSE.barton, Aug. 22, 1998, WN 172-3, Jacket 1, ILOA. 69For example, Lim reply to Björling and Strandberg, September 20, 1998, WN 17-2-3, Jacket 1, ILOA. Sullivan to Hansenne, September 22, 1998; Lim, email message to Washington.AO, August 28, 1998, on “Venezuela NGO attack”; Jane Zhang to Lim, Minute, December 21, 1998; Marrhild Folkvord for NTL to Michael Hansenne, November 23, 1989; Sisterhood is Global Institute, email message to HQ.GWIA and others, Feb. 18, 1999; and Action Alert: Trafficking South East Asian Women, letter from Antoninah Njau to Michael Hansenne, Feb. 22, 1999, all in EMP 69, Jacket 1, ILOA. Clare Nolan to Juan Somavia, Mar. 22, 1999, EMP 69, Jacket 3, ILOA. 70Sheila Jeffreys, email message to HQ.GWIA and others, Mar. 2, 1999, EMP 69, Jacket 3, ILOA. 71Raymond, “Legitimating Prostitution as Sex Work.” See also Janice G. Raymond, Not A Choice, Not A Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013). 72Raymond, “Legitimating Prostitution as Sex Work,” point 7 of section “Arguments and Answers.” 73Lim, “Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia,” 2.

74“ILO Report on the Sex Sector Receives Prestigious Prize.” 75Frans Roselaers, email message to A. O. Freeman, Hagen, December 17, 1998, Jacket 2; Christine Elstob to A. O. Freeman, December 18, 1998, EMP 69, Jacket 2, ILOA. Mary Covington, email message to Tony Freeman, Mar. 26, 1999; Tony Freeman to Somavia, CABINET, Mar. 26, 1999; and Covington to Lim, April 14, 1999, all in EMP 69, Jacket 3, ILOA. Helms may have become aware of the book from an article in a conservative political magazine. See Tony Freeman to Rans Roselaers, December 15, 1998, enclosing copy of Oliver Starr Jr., “Prostitution at the UN,” Weekly Standard, December 21, 1998, EMP 69, Jacket 2, ILOA; Philip Shenon, “Departing Foreign Aid Chief Says Cuts Are Dangerous,” New York Times, July 6, 1999. 76Lim revision of text of Tony Freeman, “Questions and Answers relating to the ILO Report,” July 23, 1999, 4, EMP 69, Jacket 4, ILOA. 77Dorothea Hoehtker (ILO), email conversation with Magaly Rodríguez García, Jan. 2017. 78Michel Pigenet, “Le VIH-Sida, nouveau terrain d’intervention syndicale dans les transports internationaux,” Le Mouvement Social 241, no. 4 (2012): 185–203. 79“ILOAIDS’ History,” ILO, http://www.ilo.org/aids/Aboutus/WCMS_ DOC_AIDS_ABO_BCK_EN/lang--en/index.htm. 80Recommendation concerning HIV and AIDS and the World of Work, 2010 (No. 200) (Geneva: ILO, 2010), 3, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_protect/—protrav/—ilo_aids/documents/normativeinstrument/wcms_142706.pdf. 81Fifth item on the agenda: HIV/AIDS and the world of work, Report of the Committee on HIV/AIDS, ILC, 99th Session, Geneva, 20–27 June 2010, http://www. nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/ILO%20Report%20of%20the%20Committee%20 on%20HIV%20AIDS.pdf. 82“A Labour Rights Approach to HIV and Sex Work,” http://www.nswp. org/news/labour-rights-approach-hiv-and-sex-work. 83“HIV and work: Getting to Zero through the world of work,” http://www. ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_protect/@protrav/@ilo_aids/documents/ genericdocument/wcms_185717.pdf.

84“IAC Washington/Kolkata joint session: The Oldest Profession: is Sex Work, Work?,” XIX International Aids Conference, 22–27 July 2012, last accessed 2018, http://www.nswp.org/news/iac-washingtonkolkata-joint-session-the-oldestprofession-sex-work-work.

85“HIV and work: Getting to Zero through the world of work.” 86“Viet Nam’s Sex Industry—A Labour Rights Perspective,” ILO Country Office for Viet Nam, September 16, 2016, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—asia/—ro-bangkok/—ilo-hanoi/documents/publication/wcms_524918.pdf.

87“Eliminating the worst forms of child labour: A report of the ILO Caribbean meeting on the worst forms of child labour, Kingston, Jamaica, 6–7, December, 1999,” https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—americas/—ro-lima/—sroport_of_spain/documents/projectdocumentation/wcms_308204.pdf.

88“Observation (CEACR)–adopted 1996, published 85th ILC session (1997): Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29)–Japan (Ratification: 1932),” NORMLEX, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:13100:0::NO:13100:P13100_COMMENT_ID:2152098.

89Magaly Rodríguez García, “On the Legal Boundaries of Coerced Labor,” in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 11–29. 90Erika Schulze, Sexual Exploitation and Prostitution and its Impact on Gender Equality (Brussels: European Parliament, Jan. 2014), 16, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2014/493040/IPOL-FEMM_ET(2014)493040_ EN.pdf.

91Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), ILO, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/ normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C029.

92“What is forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking,” ILO, http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/definition/lang--en/index.htm.

93Human trafficking only came to be defined in the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children,” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/ProtocolTraffickingInPersons.aspx. See Rodríguez García, “On the Legal Boundaries of Coerced Labor.” 94Kimberly Kay Hoang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, introduction to Human Trafficking Reconsidered: Rethinking the Problem, Envisioning New Solutions, ed. Kimberly Kay Hoang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (New York: IDEBATE Press, 2014), 1–18. 95Ronald Weitzer, “New Directions in Research on Human Trafficking,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 653, no. 6 (2014): 6–24, 16. 96Nicola Mai, “‘Too Much Suffering’: Understanding the Interplay between Migration, Bounded Exploitation and Trafficking through Nigerian Sex Workers’ Experiences,” Sociological Research Online 21, no. 4 (2016), https://doi.org/0.5153/ sro.4158; Kay Hoang and Salazar Parreñas, “Introduction,” 7–9. 97Eileen Boris and Heather Berg, “Protecting Virtue, Erasing Labor: Historical Responses to Trafficking,” in Hoang and Salazar Parreñas, Human Trafficking Reconsidered, 19–29. In 2014 the ILC approved the Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, and the Forced Labour (Supplementary Measures) Recommendation (No. 203). 98Siddharth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour (Geneva: ILO, 2014), http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_ norm/—declaration/documents/publication/wcms_243391.pdf.

99“Haiti shuts down Oxfam GB over prostitution scandal,” Guardian, June 14, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/haiti-shuts-downoxfam-gb-over-prostitution-scandal; Samantha Cooney, “‘They Don’t Want to Include Women Like Me.’ Sex Workers Say They’re Being Left Out of the #Me Too Movement,” Time, Feb. 13, 2018, http://time.com/5104951/sex-workers-me-toomovement/. See also: Eilís Ward and Gillian Wylie, “Conclusion: Carceral feminism, the state and the sex worker in a globalised era. Whose power?,” in Feminism, Prostitution and the State: The Politics of Neo-Abolitionism, ed. Ward and Wylie (London: Routledge, 2017), 155–60. 100Lim, The Sex Sector, v.

101Guido Raimondi to GENDER, Minute Sheet, May 30, 2003, EMP 69, Jacket 4, ILOA. 102Kari Tapiola, Introductory Statement, UNI Europa Commerce, May 16, 2003, EMP 69, Jacket 4, ILOA. 103Richard Howard, skype conversation with Magaly Rodríguez García, Jan. 12, 2017.

104Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (London: Verso, 2018). 105This view is supported, for example, by Boysproject, a NGO active in Antwerp that offers socio-medical support to male and transgender sex workers (many of them of non-European origin). 106Mai, “‘Too Much Suffering.’” 107International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, “Covid-19 shines a red light on sex workers’ lack of protection in Europe,” Open Democracy, April 22, 2020 at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/ covid-19-shines-a-red-light-on-sex-workers-lack-of-protection-in-europe/, last accessed July 1, 2021.