I have several bank accounts and so far have not been discriminated against, but I do know it happens. I never take direct payments or cashapp, always go through legit sites with payroll payments.
I would totally get a vanilla job though if forced to be an employee.
Yeah so what I was told was that.. basically - The banks know that we're doing sex work. They obviously know where the $$$ comes from. But they sorta just let it fly under the radar - unless you ping their early warnings systems. They allow this because obviously if chase bank decided to close all the accounts of EVERY onlyfans model say - they'd lose so much money. They're not stupid about that.
But because of all the reasons we know banks discriminate against us, when we DO flag in their systems - we get our accounts shut down at a much higher rate than someone who is not a sex worker who may flag in their system. This is sometimes due to an individual human that has bias, OR it can be because of a banks policies on paper - chase for example explicitly forbids this.
So my point with this is:
1) Independent contractors of ALL types are more likely to flag banks early warnings systems and come under scrutiny.
2) IF a person is being investigated due to the early warnings systems, and they are a sex worker they are FAR more likely to lose their account than any other type of independent contractor.
So if being an independent contractor puts us at risk of scrutiny from the banks and when we are scrutinized it puts our bank accounts at more risk.. then thats possibly an argument for why it might be better to be an employee.
I'm farrrr from an expert on this - its all very much new to me and I've just been deep diving on this subject for the last few months for a research project and its all swimming around in my head lol.
Interestingly I did some research on NZ banking rules recently because NZ is one of the only countries with *close* to full decrim of sex work, and has been that way for 20 years. (Some people say full decrim, some say its not because you cannot get say - a migrant work visa for sex work)
NZ basically is one of the more progressive countries with its attitudes to sex work. And i was surprised to find, that banks in NZ are almost all discriminatory too. by the laws there they can't discriminate based on someone's JOB but they CAN refuse to lend or offer services to certain industries and sex industries are usually included in this.
But anyway that's not exactly relevant to the original topic, or anything to do with independent contractors. I digress..sorry!
**Editing to add - I'm not really sure if I'm in favor of being an employee vs an independent contractor at all, I feel like I don't know enough. I just sorta thought it was an interesting point because up until I interviewed this guy, I didn't realize that banks would look closer in general at independent contractors.
If anyone is interested about the topic of de-banking and financial discrimination the FSC report is really digestible and interesting (sobering) read
www.redbanklegal.com
