The International Union of Sex Workers was established in 2000. We first arose as a small coalition to plan a demonstration through Soho, London’s Red Light District, on International Women's Day in March 2000. We paraded through the streets accompanied by a samba band.

Soon we had made many contacts with sex workers from different sectors, and begun publishing a regular bulletin, RESPECT! Our first issue featured an article by Rona, recipient of the Sexual Freedom Coalition's ‘Sex Worker of the Year’ award. Rona expressed pride in her work, and made a powerful case for social recognition and acceptance leading to unionisation of the whole industry.

We called ourselves The International Union of Sex Workers. We called ourselves a ‘union’ because we realised we were a collective of workers and a collective of workers is a union! We were very clear, from the beginning, that our main demands were the recognition of our work as legitimate work and the full range of labour rights. And we called ourselves ‘international’ because our industry has gone global and it seemed to make sense to organise on a global level too, if we were to respond to the issues and problems we face.

We started as a small group based in London, but after setting up a web page and electronic discussion list, become international. Nowadays, sex workers and allies from many different countries and regions of the world use the discussion list to discuss issues of interest to them and share information.

IUSW gains official unionisation in 2002

Although we called ourselves a union, we were not, to start with, recognised as such. In 2001 we began approaching existing unions to demand that we were accepted as their members. After many negative responses, we approached the GMB, British General Union, and one of the strongest in the UK. Our strategy was to build on common ground: we knew the GMB had started to organise workers in sweatshops and we made them see that the arguments to organise such workers could be the same arguments to organise sex workers.

Thus, in March 2002 we finally became part of a fully recognised union. This means that we achieved what had seemed to be impossible, only two years after our first campaign. We are now recognised by the TUC (Trades Union Congress). We have established one major basic labour right to all sex workers in the UK – the right to join and be represented by an officially recognised trade union.