Ashley Mears: recommendation

Transcript context

…Why don’t they just pay the women to go to the clubs? As you know, in economics it’s typically assumed a cash payment is more efficient than free tuna rolls. What stops that from happening? I was always asking this of the women. I would say, “Why don’t we just band together and agree to show up at the club together, and then we’ll each get paid a hundred dollars as opposed to going through all of these efforts of the promoter controlling us and mobilizing us, and then he gets paid a thousand dollars? ” And the answer was always, “No, I don’t want it to be work. I want it to be fun. This is leisure, not labor.” And there’s all of these efforts that are expended to make it look like it’s not work, although it is. The women are performing really valuable labor to the club, and lots of profits are being made off of them, but they don’t want to think about it in terms of work. Occasionally some promoters, if they’re running low on girls or they’re in a desperate situation for the night, they’ll call a girl and offer her, say, $40 or $80 to come out as paid. And this is looked down on by the other women as being an act of desperation. It’s going to ruin the fun of the night because you have to be there as opposed to wanting to be there. But that seems like a funny norm. Occasionally I’m paid, say, to give talks. I can assure you that does not take away from the fun of what I do. Couldn’t the young women all just drop this norm, and they would get paid and be better off? Aren’t they laboring under some kind of false consciousness here? It’s a degrading experience in some ways, right? The loud music. So why not, on the money side, get the better outcome?…

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