The Dark Side of Modeling: Trafficking and Abuse
Modeling is often portrayed as a job which accrues wealth, fame, and prosperity. The popular reality television show America’s Next Top Model and glamor magazine covers do nothing to dissuade this argument. However, the modeling industry’s weak labor laws and the nature of its international recruitment create corruption.
While the industry is often attacked for eating disorders and alcohol abuse, its problems go far beyond that. Sexual harassment, stolen wages, and indentured slavery define the modeling industry. A lack of labor laws and disproportionate regulation in the modeling industry leads to disenfranchised models and imbalanced power dynamics between agents, fashion brands, and models.
Weak Labor Laws
The industry’s labor laws are as thin as its models. Unlike other creative industries, models have no union and no restrictions against child workers. Agencies and fashion brands bypass these basic labor rights by refusing to make their models employees.
Models work for their agencies as ‘independent contractors.’ Models are not ‘employees.’ This means that models have no guaranteed salary and no health insurance. This also means that agencies do not have to adhere to minimum wage laws.
A nineteen-year-old model for Major Model Management said, “I worked three shows at New York Fashion Week last fall. I haven’t been paid. But I guess it’s fine, I was only supposed to be paid $450 anyway.”
The average model wage for a year, as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was $26,000 a year, only slightly above the poverty level for a single person.
Some agencies bypass signing up for the ‘employment agency license’ by calling themselves ‘model managers’ instead of ‘model agents.’ They do this to bypass regulations, extra business processing fees, and taxes.
To contrast, other creative workers such as actors have unions. These unions create protections such as mandatory breaks, scheduled payments, health insurance, and overtime wages. Union rules for actors say that their agents can only charge ten percent commissions as opposed to the sometimes fifty percent and sixty percent charged by model agencies.
The Model Alliance, a labor advocacy group for models, has had little success in its attempt to unionize the industry. Because models are independent contractors, they lack basic legislative rights that would make the transition to a union easier.
Why Wage Matters
To some, $26,000 sounds like a decent amount of money to stand in front of a camera or walk down a runway. One could argue that wage is based on talent, and only the top five percent of models should be paid.
And perhaps it would be fine if a model made $26,000 a year and could make another salary as a waitress, a bartender, or a shop clerk. However, the ages of an average model make that impossible.
According to a survey done by the Model Alliance, 54.7% of models begin working between the ages of 13-16 years old. And more than half of these child models reported that their parents rarely or never accompanied them to castings.
Ashley Mears, a sociologist who went undercover as a model, wrote about the wage abuses in her book, Pricing Beauty.
“ 20 percent of the models on the agency’s books were in debt to the agency. Foreign models, in particular, seem to exist in a kind of indentured servitude, she writes, often owing as much as $10,000 to their agencies for visas, flights, and test shoots, all before they even go on their first casting call.”
Many child models are recruited from Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Norway before they have completed their education. They come to America without their parents and with little money. Children have less ability to fight for adequate wages, and they have little legal recourse to fight high commissions or overdue paychecks. As many are foreigners, the children have little legal recourse without American citizenship.
In 2012, The Council of Fashion Designers of America asked designers not to use child models in New York Fashion Week. However, Marc Jacobs used two girls who were only 14 and 15. In response, Jacobs told the New York Times,
“I do the show the way I think it should be. If their parents are willing to let them do a show, I don’t see any reason that it should be me who tells them that they can’t.”
Sex Trafficking
Models receive little pay and often find themselves in foreign cities with no idea how to procure housing. When agencies make contracts with agents, they make several stipulations.
First, they ‘project’ a salary, usually around $75,000. Then, they stipulate ‘model startup fees.’ These include the cost of the model apartment, the cost of international flight, and food. Any wages that the model would receive, then go to these costs.
And in the worst case, when models can’t make money and agencies need extra cash, some turn to a side business: Sex trafficking.
Margaret S. Archer in “Trafficking in Human Beings” interprets the UN protocol to prevent trafficking as “implicitly illegal migration if ‘fraud’ and ‘deception’ are incorporated into the meaning of ‘coercion.’”
Several sources report that Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier, who reportedly molested up to 40 underage girls, received his victims from Jean Luc Brunel, former owner of MC2 Model Management. Epstein reportedly bought a 12-year-old French girl and a 14-year-old Yugoslavian girl to give him massages and ‘birthday presents.’
“[Brunel] also allegedly received $1 million from Epstein in 2005 when he founded MC2….Whether the money was a secret investment in MC2, or a payment for Brunel’s services as a procurer, is unknown.”
“These same civil complaints allege that young girls from South America, Europe, and the former Soviet republics, few of whom spoke English, were recruited for Esptein’s sexual pleasure. According to a former bookkeeper, a number of the girls worked for MC2, the modeling agency owned by Jean Luc Brunel, a longtime acquaintance and frequent guest of Epstein’s.”
“Brunel, along with numerous young models, was a frequent passenger on Epstein’s private jet, according to flight manifests. The agency owner also allegedly received $1 million from Epstein in 2005, when he founded MC2 with his partner, Jeffrey Fuller; although Fuller and Brunel denied any such payment from the billionaire pervert in 2007, when rumors started swirling, Sarnoff got confirmation from a former bookkeeper at the agency. Whether the money was a secret investment in MC2, or a payment for Brunel’s services as a procurer, is unknown. Brunel also visited Epstein in jail.”
— HTTP://JEZEBEL.COM/5603638/MEET-THE-MODELING-AGENT-WHO-TRAFFICKED-UNDERAGE-GIRLS-FOR-SEX
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