Kathy Willens/AP Photo
Demonstrators call for sex workers to unite during a May Day rally in front of 40 Wall Street, a Trump-owned property, May 1, 2019, in New York.
In the 1980s, when feature films dominated porn and the internet was still a long way from taking over the industry, porn stars tried to unionize. It was the era of sex icons like Amber Lynn, and the group of adult performers already had a name in mind for their union: the Pink Ladies.
A lack of organization caused the union effort to languish. But four decades later, as the pandemic upended working conditions nationwide, the porn industry was ripe for another try—and this time, it succeeded. In May, a group of adult performers—which includes porn actors, webcam performers, strippers, and models on OnlyFans—drafted union bylaws and received word from the Department of Labor that the Adult Performance Artists Guild (APAG) was officially a federally recognized union.
For the performers, it was nothing short of a triumph.
APAG currently has around 1,100 registered sex workers signed on to the union. Due to the pandemic, the group has temporarily waived dues for its members. Yet even when the union does require dues, Alana Evans, the union’s president, says they will always remain extremely low because of performers’ all-too-common financial constraints. Since 2016, APAG had been a chapter of the International Entertainment Adult Union, but decided to officially separate after disputes over the organization’s direction.
Sex industry work has changed dramatically since the ’80s. For one, the internet turned the industry inside out. With high-quality phone cameras and at-home computers, anyone could upload pornography. The internet revolution also led the porn industry to extreme economic consolidation. One Canadian parent company, MindGeek, controls the vast majority of production and distribution, including the most popular site in the United States, Pornhub. The consolidation meant huge profits for its executives. Meanwhile, going up against such behemoths, performers lost negotiating power.
More recently, sites like OnlyFans roiled the industry yet again. The online site, where users subscribe to gain access to photos and videos too salacious for Instagram, allows performers to act as their own producers, agents, and directors. The platform also revolutionized the industry financially, giving performers 80 percent commission on their earnings, a figure substantially higher than online performers had ever earned before. As Jacob Bernstein argued in The New York Times in 2019, the site has “changed sex work forever.”
In May, a group of adult performers received word from the Department of Labor that the APAG was officially a federally recognized union.
Jennifer Allbaugh, who is better known as “Ruby” in the industry, and who is now the union’s vice president, puts it more bluntly: “Porn has become America’s side hustle.” In her view, stagnant wages directly contributed to a spike in amateur porn production. “Couples realized that they could monetize their private life,” she told me over the phone.
Last week, however, OnlyFans announced that it will begin blocking sexually explicit content starting in October, citing pressure from investors. As the adult film industry looks ahead to another seismic change, APAG hopes to usher workers through relatively unscathed. Union leaders have already begun directing content creators to other platforms.
According to Allbaugh, APAG is in constant negotiations with companies such as MindGeek and OnlyFans to win higher pay, safe working conditions, and more benefits for performers. Given the diffuse industry, the union has focused on separate bargaining agreements with various platforms and production companies. But it could also opt to follow the model pioneered by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has won state-level bills of rights for its workers that mandate regular rest breaks and restrictions on overtime, and is lobbying for national legislation as well.
As the adult performance industry splintered in dozens of different directions, longtime workers in the industry felt it was finally time to formalize their rights. Over the past several months—a time that has been dubbed both “Hot Girl Summer” and “Hot Union Summer”—adult performers have become union spark plugs.
Allbaugh argues adult performers are everywhere, including in her small Ohio hometown. The mother of two little children proudly calls herself a “PTA mom.” Having worked in “every facet of the industry,” Allbaugh says she wants to ensure a thriving, healthy industry for its workers, regardless of how new platforms and technologies change the way that the workers can be seen.
“I want the adult industry to reflect healthiness,” she said. “Sexuality can be wholesome, believe it or not. The only time it gets unwholesome is when people make it that way.”
Performers routinely have difficulty opening bank accounts and renting or buying homes.
Crusades against sex industry work, however, are nothing new. The United States has a historically fraught relationship with women who monetize sex, supporting the industry under special (usually, wartime) conditions, and both shunning and scorning its workers at other times.
During World War II, the U.S. military temporarily viewed prostitution as a great morale booster for tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of soldiers en route to Europe or the Pacific. As federal officials turned a blind eye to brothels, native Hawaiian women profited from the newfound job opportunity. In some cases, the women earned 20 times more than the average woman in the territory at the time.
Soon, the women were earning enough to move into the most rarefied neighborhood in Honolulu, the upscale shores of Waikiki. That’s when the U.S. government cracked down. Local officials couldn’t allow sex workers to ply their trade (at least, visibly) in the midst of the grande bourgeoisie.
Today, adult performers face similar discrimination when it comes to their finances. In June, the American Civil Liberties Union joined 22 other civil rights organizations in demanding that PayPal and Venmo allow sex workers to get paid through their apps.
“Using financial intermediaries such as PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo can make or break one’s ability to work or survive in our increasingly virtual society,” LaLa Holston-Zannell, a trans justice campaign manager for the ACLU, wrote in a report. “In spite of this, platforms like PayPal and Venmo continue to boot sex workers and other users off their platforms with little due process.”
Evans, the president of the newly formed adult performers union, says these financial services only scratch the surface of the discrimination sex industry workers face. Performers routinely have difficulty opening bank accounts and renting or buying homes. On her podcast, model and former porn star Lana Rhoades says that she was subject to intense questioning when buying her current home in Los Angeles. And she’s one of the most successful porn actors of all time, with some sources reporting she’s worth over $20 million.
Like workers in other industries, adult performers have seized the pandemic upheaval to negotiate better working conditions and higher pay. Although Pornhub has constructed a friendly public image for itself (even supplying Boston with snowplows during a blizzard), the same reservoir of goodwill has not translated to how many Americans treat adult performers.
One of APAG’s first demands, and one of the union’s first national campaigns, is to add “occupation” to the list of identities in the Civil Rights Act that employers and companies cannot discriminate against. Evans told me that industry representatives have already met with staffers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on this issue. Such outreach notwithstanding, sex industry workers are understandably skeptical when it comes to government regulation of the industry. It’s never clear how the next administration will legislate, and when policymakers have drafted legislation, it often misses the mark—sometimes by a lot.
Like workers in other industries, adult performers have seized the pandemic upheaval to negotiate better working conditions and higher pay.
In recent years, for instance, a few nonprofits have emerged as major crusaders against “sex trafficking.” But porn actors and other adult performers say that often, such groups’ activism spills into opposing all sex industry work. One such organization is Exodus Cry, which received a publicity bump from Nicholas Kristof’s exposé of the prevalence of child pornography on Pornhub. The piece had a spine-chilling headline: “The Children of Pornhub.” Kristof’s article took up the entire front page of The New York Times’ Sunday Review section last December.
Although the problems detailed in Kristof’s piece are horrifying and warrant reform, adult performers told me that the aftershocks of the op-ed didn’t address the root of the problem. Instead, it prompted proposals for haphazard national legislation that punished the workers, not the multibillion-dollar company at fault: MindGeek.
APAG’s founders say they’re committed to promoting consensual sex only. One of the union’s flagship projects is an “on-set stewards program,” in which former industry workers apply to be present on film production sets, where they look out for the performers’ safety and best interests. The union also drafted a performer consent checklist, which workers can download online and use on sets. With the checklist, porn workers can indicate exactly what they are willing to do in front of a camera.
And even before COVID, the union’s organizers were focused on negotiating health insurance for adult performers. Evans says that President Biden’s program, which increased insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, enabled hundreds of workers to become insured.
Can the fledgling union transform the industry? With the advent of OnlyFans, Allbaugh, the union’s vice president, estimates that there are around four million adult performers in the United States. She says that uniting these workers could transform adult films, securing the sort of “healthy and thriving” industry for which she’s always hoped.
