' If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits.'

[Liberty Belle]

'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'

By Clare Chapman

(Filed: 30/01/2005)

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.


Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. . . The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. . .

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/30/wgerm30.xml

[sasquatch]

1. Deutchland Forever!!

:D

[okieinpain]

2. well now that's some crazy shit. i can't believe anybody would

be stupid enough to try and make someone have sex for hire.

[AliciaKeyedUp]

11. They do it all the time, called slavery

It just seems Germany now supports it.

[dmr]

3. This paragraph says quite a bit, don't you think?

Miss Garweg believes that pressure on job centres to meet employment targets will soon result in them using their powers to cut the benefits of women who refuse jobs providing sexual services.

The whole thing raises my blood pressure.

[0rganism]

4. probably the best reason I've ever read for keeping prostitution illegal

The morality shit doesn't fly with me, but forced sex labor? There's something supremely unwholesome about that.

[aquart]

5. Are they making MEN take jobs in the sex industry?

Government sponsored prostitution. Not a wee bit sexist, is it?

[pop goes the weasel]

14. it's not the sex that's the problem

It's the forced labor. Forcing people to take jobs they don't want under conditions that are unacceptable is called slavery. What is immoral here is the slavery. Why is it that no one cares about slavery until sex is involved? Get rid of slavery and we also get rid of forced sex work. Get rid of legal sex work, and slavery still remains, and so does forced sex work.

[98geoduck]

6. I wonder what Bill O'Reilly is thinking about all of this?

[forgethell]

7. see this thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3027326&mesg_id=3027326&page=

[Conservativesux]

8. DUPE

[Art_from_Ark]

9. This "news" is from the Tele-crap

Britain's answer to the New York Post.

Is there any reliable source for this "news"?

[They_LIHOP]

12. EXACTLY...

People, people, people.

C'mon now.

If something SOUNDS this much like RW propaganda bullshit (and tell me this DOESN'T?) I expect my friends at DU to have the good sense to DOUBT it at least before they go popping off about 'slavery' and the like. Even if it IS a 'foreign' paper, do not forget that the VRWC has VAST tentacles!

I know NOTHIGN about Germany, but I'll tell you this: I do know the Telegraph, and they are in neck-deep with people in high American places: like the Trilateral Commission and the CFR...

Do the names Hollinger, Conrad Black, or Richard Perle ring any bells?

[bin.dare]

15. the Taipei Times reported it as inadvertent mistake ...

"A Berlin job center unwittingly offered an unemployed woman work in a brothel. "The advert just said they were looking for someone to work in a massage parlour, we weren't to know it was a brothel," said a spokesman for the government-run agency in Berlin's central Mitte district on Thursday."

the tele-crap made a whole story out of a mistake.

[Robert Oak]

10. talk about getting screwed

Check it out, she is an IT professional...
Germany, esp. Siemens, has been firing people and outsourcing to India.

(Doing the same for their US offices also).

I watched a program (love the title) "managing India" on MSNBC on the weekend and they were doing Siemens. It was incredible...while
Siemens is busy giving the shaft to German engineers...their VP e said the most important quality in an employee is loyalty.

Now look at this, a trained IT professional is being forced to
have sex to continue to have food clothing and shelter.

That's about a sick as it gets. Rape I believe is a crime...

but magically now it's a job?

[sniffa]

13. how can you have pudding

if you don't eat your meat!?