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and now welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with Cups Today from Papaganda,

grit TV, RT America, drug reporter HCLU, and dance average.

Let's start off in an unexpected place. The Oregon State Legislature.

Hello committee on the business and labor for the 15th of September 2014.

Hey, welcome all back. It doesn't seem like very long that we've been here, but before we go...

This year, the State Committee on Business and Labor is taking on policy that relates to a line of

work that affects thousands of people and millions of dollars, but that few legislatures

bother to regulate, except for banning it. Sex work. Usually conversations about sex work

get mired in a couple thorny issues. Is it good or bad? Is it empowering to women or not?

But the term sex work encompasses a lot of jobs, which means people who are all sex workers

have wildly different experiences, incomes, backgrounds, and perspectives. It's not all good,

it's not all bad. Sex work refers to all people who provide sexual services for pay,

people who make pornography, webcam performers, erotic dancers, escorts, sexual surrogates who

have sex with clients as part of therapy. Some people choose the line of work and are proud of it.

It's part of their identity. Others are forced into it by economic circumstance or physical coercion.

Some kinds of sex work, of course, are legal in the United States, like making pornography.

Some are legal but heavily regulated, like strip clubs. And some, like having sex for money,

are illegal in most all of the United States. This illegality creates an alternate economy for sex

...