A high court in the southern city of Seville has ruled that the owner of a so-called alternative club must make social security payments for 12 women who worked there as prostitutes.
The decision last week by a regional court in Andalusia is part of a nationwide struggle to define the status of prostitution, which is neither prohibited nor regulated under Spanish law.
Catalonia's regional government has already begun to regulate brothels and clubs. In Madrid, prostitutes marched through the streets with picket signs last summer demanding labor rights.
In the majority opinion in the Seville case, the justices said that the women observed a regular timetable and rented space for their belongings and that they received a share of drink sales, which constituted an employment relationship, and were thus entitled to a contract with employer-paid social security benefits.
But the national association representing 300 such roadside clubs objects to such a concept, said the association's lawyer, Jose Luis Roberto. The clubs operate as hotels featuring shows or other entertainment, renting rooms to the women to entertain clients, he said.
He considers the prostitutes hotel guests and freelance agents who "capture clients" for the businesses as though they were marketing consultants.
"With all due respect to the justices, the court is asking business owners to become the pimps of these ladies," Roberto said.
Women's groups who defend prostitutes' rights have welcomed the verdict, but with reservations. They complain that it grants the women the right to social security payments as alternative waitresses, not sex workers. They advocate open regulation of the sex trade.
Some 300,000 women are engaged in prostitution in Spain, generating annual business worth over US$22 billion, said Roberto, who cited preliminary studies by a parliamentary committee.
"Because of the legal void, the women are at the whim of the brothel and club owners," said Alicia Vano, president of Progressive Women of Andalusia, which in November formed a prostitutes' self-help unit run by former sex workers.
The legal status of prostitutes has been unclear in Spain since the restoration of democracy a quarter century ago, when Franco-era prohibitions were abolished. But the recent wave of immigration to Spain has thrust the murky issue into the spotlight.
Most prostitutes here are from South America, Africa and Eastern Europe and are "trying to pay off their huge debts to mafias who got them into the country illegally," said Cristina Garaizabal, spokeswoman for the Collective in Defense of Prostitutes' Rights.
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