Text by Catarina Simão

Like an orgy, it only works if there’s a lot of us”. The scene is set: an abundance of bodies overspilling with political determination, conjuring radical horizons of safety, dignity and joy. Lace and latex, manifestos and poems, hustle and bustle round the clock, sleeping and resting and eating your greens. Having the cake and eating it too. Amongst many intricate futurities devised by sex workers – in poetry, politics and dreams.

Formerly known as United Strippers of the World, United Sex Workers (USW) is a worker-led union branch organizing for the decriminalization of sex work in the UK and fighting for dignified working conditions for all sex workers, such as annual paid leave, sick pay, the right to unionize and to a living wage. The poster dates back to USW’s early days in 2018 and is a visual representation of a broader campaign urging for sex worker unionizing tied to the Women’s Strike of the same year. United Sex Workers is part of the United Voices of the World umbrella structure, a grassroots trade union representing a variety of marginalized labour forces, especially migrant, racialized, and precarious workers in the UK. The USW has been responsible for revolutionary wins in the sex work industry, one of which being the legal victory in 2020 that, in conjunction with sex worker advocacy group Decrim Now, won strip dancers the official worker status in London strip clubs Browns and Horns. This victory has radically improved sex worker’s access to basic labour rights and replaced the previous “independent contractor” status that contributed to exploitative and threatening working conditions.

Sex workers’ rights are a feminist issue, despite a long history of marginalization of sex worker’s struggles within feminist movements. The conditions under which sex workers have long survived (and many didn’t) testify to the deathly violence of institutional racism, heteronormativity, border control, illegality regimes, misogyny, police violence and overall dispossession by the patriarchal systems that endorse the ruination of sex worker’s worlds. Amidst this exposure, sex workers have continuously created their own spaces for love, joy, mourning, organizing and resisting by erecting complex solidarity networks from the ground up, making sure no one gets left behind.

As Amber Dawn writes, “every time a sex worker is written about in an institutional form, a poem dies”. This poster is evidence to an alive poem: to the sensual breath of orgies and to the transformative power of collective organizing against oppression.

(Poster designer: Sophie Monks @tifkadesign)