Over the past year, the Strategies for Massage Parlor Workers’ Rights project has experienced huge strides in connecting students, faculty, staff, and the larger UW research community to the Seattle region’s mostly unlicensed Asian immigrant massage workers.
Deepening collaborative research practices that began in 2022–2023, this project, led by Massage Parlor Outreach Project in collaboration with the UWCHR, and supported by a partnership with Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs, conducts community-based research on how state laws and other regulations impact the living and working conditions of Asian migrant workers in the greater Seattle area. For the past two years, UW students supported by UWCHR have played a key role in empowering workers to become researchers in their own right.
As part of this collaboration, MPOP launched a cohort-model worker political education series to introduce workers to topics around systemic oppression and its impacts on their experiences as migrant workers. Our student interns shaped the series, creating presentations and workshops on intersectionality and power, Asian American and Pacific Islander histories, and solidarity with Black organizing, as well as political contextualization on homelessness. Workers engaged in reflection activities to better understand how their positionalities determine the ease or difficulty with which they navigate social systems. The series included a tour of the Wing Luke Museum to connect workers with the history of early migrant struggles and experiences in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. Our undergraduate interns, Katherine Chen and Kimmy Chen, worked with faculty, MPOP organizers, and the workers to establish working translations of US political vernaculars and terms like “intersectionality.” By co-creating a shared research lexicon in Chinese, students learned about how context-specific language for human rights can be shared in ways that empower rather than marginalize the “target” language and “distant” community.
For the past two years, UW students supported by UWCHR have played a key role in empowering workers to become researchers in their own right.
Our research project’s main focus this year has been to share the results of our detailed regional study of how various cities in King County treat unlicensed massage work in their city code. Our student interns learned about the variable ways that immigrant massage work is managed and made “illegal” by these codes, at times as a public health ordinance, in other instances as a violation of business licensing, or even as part of an “anti-trafficking” city effort. Presenting these findings in Chinese after months of practicing, our student interns empowered workers to reflect on how licensure is both a barrier to and a mechanism for migrant workers’ rights. Likewise, students learned about the profound importance of advanced fluency in a culturally specific language for gaining workers’ confidence in our research findings.
These workshops have resulted in a substantial increase in worker-led organizing with MPOP volunteers and worker leadership around licensing research. Through surveying, presentations, and focus groups, our team identified a need for greater language access in testing and obtaining massage licensure. Workers attended presentations about different legislative options for language access from other states. Focus groups were conducted to provide workers with a report back on our investigation into licensing laws and get feedback from workers. Most recently, the licensing team has rolled out a three-part Know Your Rights training to equip workers with their rights during raids and police encounters. A worker core team was established to consult on organizing direction and initiating a legislative campaign.
At the end of April, we worked with MPOP to hold a week-long series of events centering the experiences of visiting organizers from Taiwan and China. Workers were invited as panelists for two events, sharing their stories on migration and migrant organizing. Workers shared their experiences of displacement and exploitation and learned about the human rights violations experienced by migrant workers (mostly from Southeast Asia) in Taiwan and rural workers in China. These connections and comparisons helped migrant workers understand the structural mechanisms of their marginalization in the United States.
As MPOP continued to conduct monthly outreach, mutual aid needs cropped up, including post-raid response and supporting workers who had experienced hardships such as robberies or a neighborhood fire. In the beginning of 2024, UWCHR students helped conduct four additional oral histories.
With the enormous increase in worker programming emerged the need for centering language justice. This, too, has been an outgrowth of the involvement of multilingual UW students in our outreach and research efforts; their skills have helped bridge divides but have also helped the organization think more sustainably about language justice. While we continue with trial and error with expanding language access, we’ve received feedback from a worker leader about feeling more integrated within MPOP, the English-dominant community around them, and our research team.
This update is featured in UWCHR’s 2023-2024 Annual Report.
