Season 2 episode 10 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Elio. They organise with SWARM (a UK-based collective founded and led by sex workers who believe in self-determination, solidarity and co-operation) and are a branch organiser for United Voices of the World (UVW, a grassroots trade union of low paid, migrant & precarious workers and we fight the bosses for dignity and respect through direct action on the streets and through the courts!).

“Our focus is less on convincing the outside world that sex workers deserve dignity, and [more on] providing dignity to sex workers”

“Urgency will never end…but what might end is your capacity to be able to respond”

- Elio

Show notes, links

SWARM: community building, community resourcing

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Swedish Model (aka The Nordic Model)

New Resource: 'How We Ran A Mutual Aid Fund'

UVW sex worker organising: helping to organise sex workers as workers

The United Sex Workers branch of UVW

Strippers union United Voices of the World (UVW) wins landmark legal victory proving strippers are ‘workers’, not independent contractors

Decriminalised Futures: popular education, arts

Their Lady of the Night School

The Decrim Futures archive includes both recording from their 2019 conference, and also videos from the "We can build a different world" event

The Decriminalised Futures exhibition at the ICA in London, running from 15 Feb to 22 May 2022

Some other projects:

Decrim Now, a campaign group pushing for the full decriminalisation of sex work

The Dialtone Project, giving old phones you don't need to the sex workers who do

Volunteering with the English Collective of Prostitutes

You can buy a copy of the acclaimed Revolting Prostitutes book

And finally, the most succint "political outlooks on sex work" meme out there:

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there's always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Transcript

ALI

This is Resist Renew,

KATHERINE

the UK based podcast about social movements,

SAMI

what we're fighting for, why and how it all happens.

ALI

The hosts of the show are

KATHERINE

Me, Kat.

SAMI

Me, Sami,

ALI

and me, Ali.

SAMI

I'm recording this now, baby!

ALI

Shit, it's a podcast!

SAMI

So, welcome everybody to the resist renew podcast, where we are joined here today by Elio. Do you want to say a little hello before I introduce you, Elio?

ELIO

a little Hello. Hello. Sorry, that was really… Hello! That's a big hello. Oh, it's multiple hellos of different sizes, shapes and sizes.

SAMI

Lots of variety: people can pick their favourite. Elio is a person who organises with SWARM, which is a UK based collective founded by sex workers who believe in self determination, solidarity and cooperation, and is also branch organiser with United Voices of the World, which is a grassroots trade union of low paid migrant and precarious workers that fight the bosses for dignity and respect, through direct action, on the streets and through the courts, which is a sentence from the website that I just really wanted to read out; and is also involved in other groups and things! And was also giving us some very helpful advice for our muscles and physical bodies before we started the recording. So thank you for that.

So, let's get into the let's get into the chat. Elio, what is that political contexts that like sex workers, and the groups that you're linked in with are organising within like in the UK today?

ELIO

So I think the main context that's the most important to think about in terms of the impact it has on sex workers is the legal context. So currently, in the UK, specifically, I'm speaking about England and Wales really is, sex work is not is partially criminalised.

So selling the act of selling sex and buying sex, for the most part is you're allowed to do it, it's legal, it's fine. No one's gonna stop you from doing it. But a lot of the, I guess, the infrastructure around those things is criminalised. So, brothel keeping, which can you know, range from someone who owns a building and they have lots of people that work there and you don't have to give them a percentage to work there or could be just two workers working together for safety in the most part, you know, so you're not working alone, that counts as ‘brothel keeping’ and it's criminalised.

There's laws around ‘control for gain’ which are criminalised, which is you know, meant to stop like, what is kind of understood as the ‘evil pimp’, with the workers that they're exploiting, and they're ‘controlling them for gain’; but often ends up affecting people like if a sex worker has a flat and they have a cleaner, or if they have a security guard or if they have a driver. Or if they have a partner whose rent they're paying. All of these things kind of are criminalised under the laws affecting sex workers in the UK.

So I think for most sex worker organisations and groups, the things that they're really concerned with on there kind of the, in terms of an organising or political activity is around those laws and how they affect affect sex workers in a day to day way. And so that's why the kind of key movement for sex workers is the movement for full decriminalisation: the removal of any criminal laws relating to the sex industry or to sex workers.

Which just you know, give the addendum isn't mean that like, exploitation is suddenly like, ‘Let's go!’ Or like that rape is suddenly like, you know, legal; or like that violence towards sex workers is fine. It just says that for most sex workers, their day to day lives at work are going to be better if you remove the laws that criminalise their labour, and their work practices.

So yeah, I don't know, I think for me, that's the main political context and sort of the broader, the broader scheme of things. And then I think in like a kind of more like, talking about the left or something-level, it's, the political context is trying to like, over the last, I don't know, few years? SWARM have, like, SWARM who are group I'm involved in, I think we said that the beginning, you know, have been around for over 10 years now. And over that time, you've seen a shift in like, I wasn't involved 10 years ago, but you've seen a shift in how people think about and talk about sex work and sex workers on the left, and there used to be an increased level of hostility. And now you're seeing that sex workers are welcomed into more political groups, understood as being part of movements, often understood as being like at the sharp end of like, a lot of criminalization and a lot of laws and the ways in which sex workers are impacted is, you know, a bit of a ‘canary in the coal mine’ as people like to say, of how other groups and other networks and other people are going to be affected.

And so there's a I think, a lot stronger connection to sex work and to sex workers, as being movements to like, organise around. So I think in terms of the political context that sex workers are organising in, that's really key: this like shifting attitude towards recognising sex workers as comrades rather than as like, ‘victims out in the cold who kind of we try and ignore because it's a complicated issue.’ Yeah, and that's my answer.

SAMI

That's a solid answer. I like it.

And so it sounds, so I think, what's what's coming across to me in that is that, like, sex work is like the like the sex worker struggle, I guess, for want of a better way of phrasing it, is like really embedded, and like linked to a lot of the other struggles that like the left is more recognised as organising within.

And, and so like, I think part of the reason (this is my take, and maybe not necessarily that useful) but like, part of the reason that I think there has been a lot of like a larger increase in sex worker solidarity on like ‘the left’, I think it's partly to do with the work that like SWARM and its previous instantiation, or whatever of like, Sex Workers Open University did in terms of like, doing a lot of like, link building with a lot of other groups.

But I think is also because people are like seeing sex work as like, in a really practical sense, just linked in with other struggles, like I do a lot of stuff around like immigration raids, and it's hard to talk about immigration rates without like thinking about like, like high profile immigration raids on brothels, because like, it's just so often one of the most visible aspects of like, immigration enforcement. And I think that's true of loads of stuff. Like if you work on homelessness, if you're work on drug use, if you work on migration, if you work on whatever. Like, there's just such clear links with, like, the struggles that like sex workers are living within, and so much of that is linked to criminalisation.

ELIO

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's partly why I'm, like sex work organising, or politics of solidarity with sex workers is, you know, really the, the frame through which I operate a lot. Because if you look at that, you see how it connects to all of the things; and like, I'm not saying that, you know, organising around housing rights doesn't mean you like, they have to think about migration, or you have to think about gender, you have to think about work and stuff, like, you know. I think any issue of this kind can lead you to see all those connections between different things.

But for me, sex work, sex worker organising is such a, as a central site for the ways in which so much of that stuff all connects up. And it's why it's so important to organise on those issues, or to centre sex workers of, you know, various different experiences in the kind of organising or politics that you do. Because if you establish better conditions for sex workers in the world, then that will like, you know,