Sex Workers Just Got Something This Industry Rarely Gives Them: A Seat at the Table

By Lila Monroe | Staff Writer, Only Fans Insider Magazine

There are press releases that land in my inbox and feel exactly like press releases. A new platform feature launches, somebody receives an award nomination, a creator signs with an agency, or someone announces an appearance at a convention. I spend a lot of my working life trying to figure out which of those announcements actually tells us something larger about the industry and which ones are simply news for the day.

Then there are stories that make me stop because something underneath the announcement feels much bigger than the announcement itself. On August 19, The Rub PR sent us news that the Nevada State AFL-CIO had adopted a resolution supporting the right of sex workers and erotic service providers to organize and collectively bargain. According to the release, the resolution passed unanimously during the organization's 70th Constitutional Convention, held August 16 through 18 at the Flamingo Las Vegas.

I think the institutional language actually makes what happened sound considerably less extraordinary than it is. One of the most established institutions in the American labor movement just formally recognized that sex workers belong in the labor conversation and deserve the right to organize around their working conditions. That isn't merely an acknowledgment of sex work; it is an acknowledgment of labor.

The resolution also defines erotic service providers broadly enough to include strippers, full-service sex workers, phone-sex operators, adult film performers, webcam performers and online content creators. That last category is why I think everyone who reads Only Fans Insider should pay attention to what happened in Las Vegas, even if you've never worked in a brothel and never intend to. This story may have started with workers in Nevada, but the questions it raises reach directly into the creator economy.

Sex Work Is Work. The Complicated Part Is What Comes Next.

The resolution was co-drafted by Maxine Doogan, president of the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education and Research Project in San Francisco, and Jupiter Jetson, chief steward of United Brothel Workers. It was introduced by Marc Ellis, president of Communications Workers of America Local 9413 and a vice president of the Nevada AFL-CIO. According to the release, Ellis summarized the argument simply: "Sex work is work, and these workers deserve to be treated as such."

What matters to me isn't simply that somebody said those words. Sex workers, advocates and researchers have been making versions of that argument for decades, often while being ignored by the institutions that routinely discuss workers' rights in other industries. What matters here is where those words were said, who endorsed them and what institution is now standing behind them.

The AFL-CIO is not an adult-industry advocacy organization. It is America's largest federation of labor unions, and its reason for existing is rooted in workers collectively exercising power over wages, benefits and working conditions. When an institution like that recognizes sex workers within the broader labor conversation, it shifts the question from whether their work is respectable enough to acknowledge toward whether the people performing that work deserve the same fundamental protections we debate in every other labor sector.

That doesn't mean the legal questions suddenly become simple. The National Labor Relations Act protects many private-sector employees who organize around wages and working conditions, but independent contractors generally do not receive the same protections under the NLRA. If the phrase "independent contractor" sounds familiar to anyone reading this from inside the creator economy, it should.

Models, performers, cam creators, freelancers, influencers, dancers and online content creators frequently work somewhere outside the traditional employer-employee relationship. That independence can provide genuine freedom, and plenty of people deliberately choose this kind of work because they value control over their schedules, clients, content and income. But independence can also become a very convenient word when a company wants access to someone's labor without accepting many of the responsibilities traditionally attached to employing the person performing it.

That tension is sitting directly underneath what happened in Nevada. The more I researched the history surrounding this resolution, the more I realized that this isn't merely a story about sex workers asking organized labor to recognize them. It is part of a much larger question about what worker power looks like in industries where the people generating the economic value are increasingly classified as independent businesses unto themselves.

Earlier this year, workers at Sheri's Ranch in Pahrump launched United Brothel Workers with Communications Workers of America Local 9413. Their organizing effort has included concerns surrounding contracts, fees, working conditions, safety and collective bargaining. Reporting surrounding the dispute has also highlighted questions about independent-contractor agreements and the control of workers' names, likenesses and intellectual property.

Think about that from the perspective of a digital creator. Your image, your name, your likeness, your content and the audience associated with those things aren't side issues anymore. For a modern creator, those assets can represent the business itself, which means contractual control over them can potentially affect someone's earning ability long after a particular working relationship ends.

United Brothel Workers has also alleged retaliation connected with the organizing effort, including the termination of organizers Jupiter Jetson and Paloma Karr. Those allegations exist within an ongoing labor dispute, and I don't think it would be responsible to present contested claims as settled findings. What matters for the larger conversation is that workers who previously negotiated largely as individuals began attempting to exercise power collectively.

That is the part that fascinates me. The adult economy has become incredibly sophisticated at teaching individuals how to monetize themselves, but it remains remarkably underdeveloped when those individuals need collective leverage. We have spent years celebrating independence without spending nearly enough time discussing what happens when independence leaves someone standing alone against a much larger company.

This History Is Older Than OnlyFans

One of the people quoted in the resolution announcement is Dr. Barb Brents, professor emerita of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has spent decades researching sexual commerce, sex work, Nevada's legal brothel industry and the political economy surrounding sexuality. Her work is important because it asks us to examine sex work not simply through the lens of sexuality, morality or controversy, but also through the much more ordinary lens of labor.

Brents points to a history between sex workers and organized labor in Nevada stretching back more than a century, including the mining communities around Goldfield and Ely. That historical connection matters because it disrupts the idea that sex-worker organizing is some strange new phenomenon created by subscription platforms and social media. People performing erotic labor have been navigating questions about money, power, working conditions and collective action for far longer than the phrase "creator economy" has existed.

The modern history provides some equally interesting examples. In the 1990s, dancers at San Francisco's Lusty Lady organized the Exotic Dancers Union and affiliated with SEIU Local 790. Their effort became one of the best-known examples of workers inside an adult business using conventional labor organizing to address their working conditions.

Decades later, workers at Star Garden in North Hollywood began organizing after dancers raised concerns involving compensation, safety, harassment and workplace protections. Actors' Equity Association, the century-old union better known for representing actors and stage managers, agreed to represent them. After a lengthy organizing campaign, ballots were counted in 2023 and the result was 17-0 in favor of union representation.

That victory didn't magically solve every problem. The dancers later staged an unfair-labor-practice strike while contract negotiations continued, demonstrating that winning recognition is not the same thing as winning every workplace fight. I actually think that distinction makes the story more important because unionization isn't a fairy-tale ending; it is infrastructure that gives workers a mechanism through which they can continue negotiating.

The point isn't that workers suddenly get everything they want. The point is that there is finally a fight they don't necessarily have to wage alone. When I look at the adult creator economy after nearly a year of conversations, research and personal relationships with the people inside it, that word keeps coming back to me: alone.

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We Built Independence Without Building Collective Power

The creator economy has sold independence extraordinarily well. Be your own boss, own your schedule, create what you want, build your audience, monetize yourself and work from anywhere. There is genuine freedom in that promise, and I don't want to diminish it because I have met women for whom creator platforms provided economic opportunities and personal autonomy they weren't finding anywhere else.

But independence has a darker twin that we don't discuss nearly enough, and that is isolation. When your social account disappears, you fight alone; when your agency doesn't pay you correctly, you fight alone; when your content is stolen, you fight alone. When a platform changes its terms, a payment processor freezes money, someone impersonates you, or an agency contract contains language you don't understand, the burden almost always falls back onto the individual creator to figure out what happens next.

There is no creator HR department waiting to help. There is usually no shop steward, collective bargaining agreement, professional licensing body or universally recognized standards organization. Sometimes there isn't even a telephone number, and the person whose income has just been disrupted is reduced to submitting a support ticket and hoping someone eventually answers.

That is an absolutely bizarre labor environment when you think about how much money now moves through the creator economy. We have spent years developing better paywalls, chat systems, recommendation engines, analytics, AI tools, affiliate programs and payment flows. We have become very good at building technology around the transaction while remaining surprisingly bad at building institutions around the human being generating it.

That is why the Nevada resolution deserves attention far beyond Nevada. It is asking a fundamentally different question from most of the creator-economy conversations I cover. Instead of asking how a worker can make more money, it asks what rights and protections that worker should have while making it.

Those are profoundly different conversations. The first treats the person primarily as an economic unit whose performance can be optimized. The second acknowledges that economic activity is being generated by a human being who can be overworked, exploited, underpaid, pressured, misled or placed in unsafe conditions.

I've noticed that our industry loves the word "creator." It sounds entrepreneurial, modern, independent and aspirational, and it brings to mind laptops, ring lights, social audiences, brand partnerships and people building businesses from anywhere in the world. The word "worker" sounds considerably less glamorous because it immediately introduces questions about labor.

Labor introduces working conditions, and working conditions introduce responsibilities. Once you start talking about responsibilities, you inevitably arrive at uncomfortable questions about who benefits economically from somebody else's work and what obligations come with that benefit. That may be one reason the creator economy has been so comfortable celebrating entrepreneurship while remaining much quieter about labor.

OnlyFans doesn't generate enormous economic activity because its payment infrastructure is particularly charismatic. Fans aren't opening their wallets because they have developed an emotional attachment to subscription-processing technology. Creators generate the attraction, content, conversation and relationships that make the marketplace economically valuable.

The same basic reality exists across Fansly, Fanvue, cam platforms, agencies, studios, clubs and countless companies surrounding this economy. Without people willing to create, perform, communicate, market themselves and maintain relationships with paying audiences, most of the infrastructure becomes considerably less valuable. Yet the language surrounding the creator economy frequently places almost every risk and responsibility on the individual creator.

If you're not succeeding, post more. If engagement falls, optimize your content, and if you're exhausted, automate your workload or outsource your messages. If you're shadowbanned, build another account, and if the platform changes its policies or your income suddenly disappears, diversify and rebuild somewhere else.

At some point, independence can become an incredibly elegant way of transferring almost every form of business risk onto the person doing the work. That doesn't mean every creator should be classified as an employee, nor does it mean every creator wants a union. It does mean we should stop pretending that individual entrepreneurship eliminates the need for collective institutions.

Online Creators Belong in This Conversation

The portion of the Nevada resolution I hope doesn't get overlooked is its explicit inclusion of online content creators within the broader definition of sex workers and erotic service providers. The distinction between physical and digital erotic labor has become increasingly porous. One person might shoot studio content on Monday, cam on Tuesday, produce subscription content Wednesday, dance during the weekend and manage several social accounts every day in between.

What exactly is her occupation? The most accurate answer might simply be all of it, because modern creators increasingly operate across multiple forms of labor and monetization at the same time. Their workplace might be a studio one day, their bedroom the next, a nightclub that weekend and a platform headquartered thousands of miles away every other hour of the week.

That creates enormous complications for labor law because traditional employment systems weren't designed around this reality. Nevada itself has legal criteria surrounding independent-contractor status, while federal labor protections generally distinguish employees from independent contractors in important ways. The modern creator economy is evolving faster than many of the institutions originally designed to determine who owes what to whom.

So perhaps the more interesting question for the next decade isn't whether every creator should join a traditional union. The question is what collective power looks like when millions of people generating enormous amounts of economic activity aren't conventional employees. That conversation could include unions, professional associations, creator cooperatives, standardized contracts, portable benefits, legal-defense organizations, independent dispute systems and new forms of legislation.

I don't pretend to know exactly what that structure should look like. I am increasingly convinced, however, that the answer cannot continue to be every creator for herself. That isn't an ecosystem; it's a marketplace, and those two things are very different.

The Infrastructure Conversation We've Been Missing

Joseph Haecker, our Editor-in-Chief, talks constantly about the adult creator economy's failure to build an actual community around the people who created it. He tends to describe this as an infrastructure problem, while I tend to think about it through the people I talk to and the experiences they describe. The longer I cover this space, though, the more those two perspectives keep arriving at the same conclusion.

A mature industry has infrastructure beyond companies that make money. It develops professional organizations, standards, worker advocacy, legal resources, education, independent research, dispute resolution, professional development, career mobility and institutions capable of challenging powerful companies. The adult creator economy has fragments of these things, but they remain scattered and remarkably weak compared with the financial infrastructure surrounding creator monetization.

That imbalance matters because the companies with the greatest resources are frequently platforms whose financial incentives aren't necessarily identical to the long-term interests of the people creating the content. A platform can sincerely want creators to succeed while still making decisions based primarily on its own growth, risk, investors, payment relationships or eventual exit strategy. Those interests will sometimes overlap with creators' interests, but we shouldn't pretend they always will.

That is exactly why independent institutions matter. It is part of why Only Fans Insider recently created the Agency Trust Index after repeatedly receiving one question from creators: "Do you know a good agency?" We realized that pretending we could personally certify every agency operating in this enormous and constantly changing industry would be irresponsible, so we created a place where creators themselves can begin documenting their experiences.

That project is tiny compared with what organized labor can potentially accomplish, but philosophically it comes from the same place. Information creates leverage, transparency creates leverage and organization creates leverage. Isolation does the opposite because a person who believes she is the only one experiencing a problem has far less power than ten, fifty or five hundred people documenting the same experience together.

What happened at the Nevada AFL-CIO convention represents another piece of that infrastructure beginning to form. Importantly, it isn't infrastructure being designed around sex workers while everyone else decides what is best for them. Sex workers themselves helped draft the resolution, organize the workplace campaigns and articulate the rights they believe they need.

That distinction matters to me. There is a long and ugly history of people discussing what sex workers supposedly need without actually listening to the people doing the work. If this industry is going to build better institutions, the people whose bodies, labor, brands and livelihoods are affected should be helping design them.

A Resolution Isn't a Revolution

I also don't want to overstate what happened in Las Vegas. The Nevada AFL-CIO passing a resolution does not suddenly give every sex worker a union, transform independent contractors into employees or eliminate exploitative contracts. It doesn't automatically create health insurance, stop wage theft, prevent harassment, settle the dispute at Sheri's Ranch or resolve America's enormous legal and political disagreements surrounding sex work.

A resolution is ultimately a statement of institutional position. But institutional positions matter because they help determine who gets invited into rooms where power is exercised and whose concerns are considered legitimate. Recognition can be the beginning of infrastructure even when it isn't the infrastructure itself.

Until very recently, sex workers could easily be treated as a category outside the respectable labor conversation. The Nevada State AFL-CIO has now formally said that they belong inside that conversation and that they deserve the right to organize and collectively bargain for fair wages, safer conditions, dignity and labor protections. That is movement, even if it is only one step.

Movements also tend to look very small before history decides they were significant. The Lusty Lady could have looked like a local dispute, Star Garden could have looked like another local dispute, and a group of courtesans organizing at a brothel in Pahrump could easily be dismissed as another niche story. Then suddenly the language of those fights begins appearing in a resolution receiving unanimous support from a state labor federation.

That is how infrastructure gets built. One institution recognizes another, one group of workers learns from another, and one precedent makes the next conversation slightly less impossible. Eventually, ideas that once sounded radical can begin to sound almost embarrassingly obvious.

What Does This Industry Owe the People Who Built It?

I've spent a lot of time this year asking what the creator economy owes creators. I don't mean only what platforms are legally required to provide or what someone technically accepted when they clicked a box agreeing to a Terms of Service document. I'm asking what an industry morally and economically owes the people whose labor created enormous value for everyone surrounding them.

That question makes people uncomfortable because it interferes with the clean mythology of entrepreneurship. Creators chose this work, creators are independent, creators can leave and creators can move to another platform. Those statements can all be true without eliminating the need for standards, protections and accountability.

A construction worker chooses construction, a nurse chooses nursing, an actor chooses acting and a journalist chooses journalism. None of those decisions eliminates conversations about safety, compensation, contracts, harassment or bargaining power. I don't understand why sexuality should somehow cause those questions to disappear.

That is the question sitting underneath this resolution, and I think the entire adult creator economy should be asking it. The next generation of creator infrastructure shouldn't only make it easier for somebody to monetize herself. It should also make it harder for somebody else to exploit her.

Those are not the same objective. For most of the creator economy's short history, we have been spectacularly focused on the first and embarrassingly weak on the second. Nevada may have just given us a glimpse of what beginning to correct that imbalance looks like.

A courtesan at Sheri's Ranch, a dancer at Star Garden, a webcam performer working from her apartment and an OnlyFans creator answering messages at two in the morning may appear to occupy completely different worlds. Their workplaces, customers and business models can look radically different. Underneath all of those differences, however, is a human being exchanging labor for income while other people and companies somewhere in the economic chain also benefit from that labor.

That person deserves a voice, and sometimes an individual voice is enough. Sometimes it isn't, particularly when the person on the other side of the table has substantially more money, information, lawyers, technology or institutional power. Collective power exists because history has repeatedly demonstrated that individual workers don't always enter negotiations on equal footing.

Maybe that is why the most important word in this entire announcement isn't "sex." The word that matters most might be workers, because once an industry begins genuinely seeing the people generating its economic value as workers, it becomes much harder to pretend that the only thing it owes them is a platform on which to work.

For an industry that talks endlessly about empowering creators, perhaps it's time we started asking what empowerment actually looks like when something goes wrong. A monetization button is useful, but so is a fair contract, a safe workplace, a transparent dispute process, access to legal resources and the ability to stand beside other people facing the same problem. Real empowerment isn't simply the freedom to earn money on your own.

Sometimes it is the power to say we instead of me.

— Lila Monroe

Staff Writer, Only Fans Insider Magazine | Brooklyn, New York

Representation is nice. Infrastructure changes lives.