'Work As A Prostitute Or Risk Losing Benefits'

Update: It turns out that this story may not be true. Snopes has the details. Thanks to Sheelzebub for providing the update in comments.

From Snopes:

Origins:   A news story about a 25-year-old German woman who faced cuts to her unemployment benefits for turning down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel was carried by a variety of English-language news sources in January 2005. It has struck a chord in many readers as an example of liberal morality and bureaucracy run amok: if prostitution is legalized (as it was in Germany back in 2002), this story suggests, then society has conferred its approval upon that trade, and prostitution can therefore be proffered to (and even foisted upon) women as a valid choice of employment.

We remain skeptical about the literal truth of the version reported in the English press, however, because the issue seems to have received scant attention in the German press (at least that we can find). Most German-language sources on this topic point to an 18 December 2004 article from the Berlin newspaper Tageszeitung, which (as far as our rusty command of German allows us to discern) does not report that women in Germany must accept employment in brothels or face cuts in their unemployment benefits. The article merely presents that concept as a technical possibility under current law — it does not cite any actual cases of women losing their benefits over this issue, and it quotes representatives from employment agencies as saying that while it might be legally permissible to reduce unemployment benefits to women who have declined to accept employment as prostitutes, they (the agencies) would not actually do that.

We suspect this is another case where, like a game of "telephone," a story has been garbled as it has passed from one news source to the next, and somewhere in the rewriting and translating process what was originally discussed as a mere hypothetical possibility has now been reported as a factual occurrence.

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Some bloggers have already written about Germany requiring people to work as prostitutes or lose their unemployment benefits. I just read this story about an unemployed IT professional who is facing benefits cuts for refusing to work as a prostitute.

"A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services" at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year."

I wonder what kind of outcry there will be when an unemployed man is required to work as a prostitute or lose his unemployment benefits?