Forced Prostitution and Urban Legends

The unemployment statistics coming out of Germany today were grim:  more than 5 million unemployed – the highest level ever for postwar Germany.

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) — German unemployment jumped to the
highest since World War II in January as new rules added welfare
recipients to the jobless register, clouding the outlook for
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in elections this month.         

The number of people out of work rose by 227,000 to 4.71
million in seasonally adjusted terms, boosted by 230,000 people
formerly on social welfare, the Nuremberg-based Federal Labor
Agency said today. The adjusted unemployment rate rose to 11.4
percent, a seven-year high, while the unadjusted jobless total
passed 5 million for the first time since the war.

Under the  Hartz IV reforms  unemployment benefits are restricted and  unemployed workers will be placed in available jobs through job centers.  The UK Telegaph wrote about an unemployed 25 year- old waitress in Berlin who risks losing her benefits because she refused to work at as a sex worker in a local brothel.

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.

This article has caused a stir in the conservative press. One headline screams: "Their Government at work…Woman told to work in Brothel or else!" One writer in Texas gives full vent to his anti-German opnions:

This is so morally repugnant, I don’t know where to begin. The root of
the problem is that Germany has quickly defined prostitution as "just a
job." Obviously it isn’t; personal objections to becoming a whore are,
needless to say, quite well-grounded. And to put a person in the place
of selling their body to the street or going without unemployment
benefits is, also needless to say, utterly monstrous. It’s far beyond
what is tolerable in a civilized nation.

Neither is the German
government’s excuse tenable — I don’t think anyone has difficulty
confusing bars and brothels. Alas, government bureaucrats are known for
their unfeeling stupidity. I’m just glad to live in a country where
there are far fewer of them (albeit a number still far too large).

My favorite headline: A Whoreable Turn of Events.

Of course, the story would be outrageous — if it were true.   Via Snopes we learn that the Telegraph got the story from a taz article.  We know that that TAZ is highly critical of the HAartz IV reforms, and the gist of the article is that because  prostitution has been legal in Germany since 2002 there is theoretically nothing preventing  the government from referring unemployed Germans to work in a ‘legal’ business.  But the director the central job center in Hamburg denies that this would ever happen:

"Es gibt ja noch Sitte und Anstand." Daher werde nicht in Bordelle
vermittelt. "Derartige Betriebe wenden sich nicht an die Agentur", so
Börnsen, "die haben andere Kanäle."

But don’t hold your breath waiting for a retraction from the Telegraph; the story  is an ideal fit for the anti-European slant of that paper and others,