This year, the Strategies for Massage Parlor Workers’ Rights project, in collaboration with the Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP), continued to examine ways to build worker power and leadership among migrant Asian massage parlor workers, sex workers, and care workers in the greater Seattle area.
In 2024–25, we deepened our ongoing work analyzing and studying the labor dispatch practices that bring massage workers to the Seattle region. Labor dispatch models, where workers from a temporary employment agency are dispatched for a period of time to an employer, create precarious conditions for workers, often void of any workplace protections, benefits, or job security. These gig labor systems lead to riskier working conditions, forcing workers to choose between their safety and survival, leading gig and dispatched workers to organize their own care and safety nets amongst themselves, outside the systems designed to exclude them.
Massage Parlor Outreach Project members and organizers. Photo credit/ MPOP.
Massage, too, can be considered a form of gendered gig labor. This year we have been able to study the various strategies that other gig workers who do not enjoy the typical benefits of National Labor Relations Act protections have been able to use to organize—we learned from Strippers Are Workers, a dancer-led organization that fights to empower the dancers of Washington state; from Familias Unidos por la Justicia, an independent farm worker union of Indigenous families; and also from Doulas For All, a Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous and People of Color–led coalition organizing toward Medicaid reimbursements for birth doulas. The creativity of these worker organizers inspires us to develop new ways and strategies for building worker power outside of traditional unionization attempts. These attempts are even more necessary now, given the attacks that immigrant workers face in the current political climate.
UW students and interns have been instrumental in advancing the organizing efforts. Students have enhanced worker outreach by creating Mandarin-language videos to inform workers about immigration and labor related news. They have also bolstered community engagement through communications that reshape narratives about Asian migrant massage workers, countering mainstream perspectives steeped in stigma and victimization.
By bringing together community-based research and action, this project will continue to build worker power through organizing and leadership development.