Today, M+AD steps outside its comfort zone by publishing a jobseekers ad (scroll down) for a new Whangarei business – one which the Herald last week described as “an ethical brothel”.
The Bach owner Antonia Murphy told the newspaper that Winz, TradeMe and Facebook were blocking her efforts to find sex workers from the ranks of the unemployed.
“A quick look at the Northland Winz board shows most are only entry-level jobs, within a few pennies of the minimum wage,” she told reporter Corazon Miller in Herald.
$180 per hour – plus childcare
“I am offering 11 times the entry-level salary for cleaners, call centre staff and kitchen workers,” she says. That’s around $180 per hour.
“Is it morally better to sell 40-plus hours of your time at a tedious job, to earn the same money you can make in three hours doing sex work? I think that’s a decision every woman can and should make herself.”
The Bach also offers childcare for its workers, and flexible hours.
It’s hard not to sympathise with Winz (and TradeMe and Facebook) who are caught between a rock and a hard place. They must live with sensitive political masters – and judgmental members of the public.
Shameless M+AD self-promotion?
Yep. But our main focus in publishing the ad is the principle that if a product or service is legal – and prostitution is certainly legal in NZ – it should be eligible for Winz assistance in finding workers on the same basis that every other legitimate business is.
And let’s note that she is not seeking help in advertising for clients – her ad drive is directed at offering well-paid work to unemployed women and mothers who need jobs.
Murphy (who calls herself Madame in her emails) seemed to us like a thoroughly welcome addition to the NZ business landscape. She comes across as open and clean. (When did you last encounter a brothel owner prepared to pose smilingly in front of her shop?)
She has digital talents too, admitting to “some skills” with Photoshop; and she designed and wrote the ad we’re running herself.
M+AD encountered only one slightly jarring note in preparing this story, when Directory Assistance connected us in error to the somewhat irate owner of a Whangarei Basin craft store of the same name.
Both Bach owners said they’d been besieged by calls since the Herald published the piece on Friday, prominently, on P2.
- More about her here: www.antoniamurphy.com/bio
- www.bachgirls.com
- Murphy is also a writer and author:
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