/biz/ - Business & Finance

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>>18166694
>https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-03-27/red-lights-out-singapores-sex-industry-shuts-due-to-coronavirus
>SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Shortly after midnight on Friday, a young Asian sex worker dressed in a baggy cotton dress and slippers stepped out of a brothel in Singapore's deserted red light district and rolled a wheelie bin to the side of the street.
>Two hours earlier, Singapore's vibrant Geylang neighborhood was having a more typical night - clusters of men negotiating with chain-smoking pimps on the street as women in tight dresses tapped at phones inside neon-lit houses alongside.
>Singapore closed bars, nightclubs and cinemas from Friday until the end of April in an effort to contain a sharp rise in coronavirus cases.
>Although the announcement made no mention of the government-sanctioned brothels in Geylang, pimps and sex workers said they were passed the message that they too would need to close shop.
>"I got nice girls for you. Might be your last chance for a while," a grizzled pimp mumbled in the hours before midnight outside one of the dozens of brothels dotted along Geylang's streets, which are monitored by police security cameras.
>Singapore announced massive stimulus measures on Thursday to soften the economic shock from the coronavirus outbreak, including generous cash handouts for locals.
>But for the hundreds of low-income Asian migrant sex workers and nightclub entertainers in the wealthy city-state, there is huge uncertainty about their future.
>"I don't know how we'll survive," said one freelance sex worker, sitting on a plastic chair across the street from a brothel decorated with Chinese red lanterns, a nod to customers about the nationality of the women working inside.
>"We don't get looked after like people in other jobs."