Maggie Fannon

My research aims to explore sex work as potentially decent work and, through the lens of Marxist-feminist theory, to consider the possibilities and limitations of using labour law to achieve this. I place sex workers’ calls for labour rights in the context of a so-called ‘crisis’ of labour law, as an increasing body of non-standard workers labour outside the scope of the law’s protection. I suggest that the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda may offer an alternative to traditional labour law that has the power to improve sex workers’ material conditions. By learning from sex workers and activists through empirical research, I hope to consider the extent to which a Decent Sex Work framework could affect the changes that workers in the UK sex industry want to see, whilst engaging with the limitations imposed upon the legal form by the social context of gendered and racialised capitalism.