German Government Forces Women Into Prostitution To Keep Benefits

Sydney Morning Herald | January 31 2005

Australians are used to the idea of working for the dole, but the Germans have taken it a step further.

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

Prostitution was legalised in Germany two years ago and brothel owners - who must pay tax and employee health insurance - were granted access to official databases of job seekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, 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 she realise 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 or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month, to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest level since reunification in 1990.

The Government considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

Ms Garweg said women who had worked in call centres had been offered jobs on telephone sex lines. At one employment centre in the city of Gotha, a 23-year-old woman was told she had to attend an interview for a job as a nude model.

Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits. "Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" she asked.

Australia's Minister for Workplace Participation, Peter Dutton, said: "It would be ridiculous for that to happen here ... it's against the code of conduct for job network members ... to place any advertisements of this nature on websites or offer them to candidates. There are also very strong screening facilities to ensure this wouldn't happen."