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Massage parlour workers are struggling? Or are they?

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发表于 2020-7-10 04:08:27 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
Came across this article on Toronto Star. Want to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Personally, I do feel that while there might be some hardship, but overall these ladies are still earning and doing much better than most of us.
Furthermore, the cynic in me suspect that they are exaggerating about how much they are victimized.



‘Why am I being treated this way?’ Between the pandemic and city bylaws, massage parlour workers are struggling
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/07/09/why-am-i-being-treated-this-way-between-the-pandemic-and-city-bylaws-massage-parlour-workers-are-struggling.html


Being robbed left Yan traumatized. It was just before Christmas last year when a man peered into her Toronto massage parlour, pushed the unlocked door open, went in and throttled her. When he demanded money, she gave him the $180 in her wallet.


Since then, Yan says she has known only anxiety. It was not the first time she had been robbed, but circumstances since then — and city bylaws — have compounded Yan’s troubles.


Yan, not her real name, is one of about 2,500 mostly Asian workers in Toronto’s 400 massage and body rub parlours. She is what the city labels a holistic practitioner, or an unregistered massage therapist.


Forty such practitioners and workers in parlours, all women, have been robbed from December 2019 to March this year, says Elene Lam, executive director of Butterfly, a network to support Asian and migrant sex workers.


One reason their parlours get broken into is they are not allowed to lock the doors. A bylaw stipulates that they may lock doors if there’s a customer inside, “provided that whenever the doors are locked the time at which the doors will be unlocked shall be posted in a manner clearly visible from outside the holistic centre.”


Massage parlour workers have been unfairly targeted by bylaw enforcement officers for infractions such as locking doors, according to advocates who have appealed to the city to put an immediate end to "excessive, targeted inspections."


When asked for a rationale for asking workers to keep doors unlocked when there’s no client inside, a city spokesperson told the Star by email this week, “Regulations relating to locked doors in BRPs (body rub parlours) was enacted in 1975 to safeguard inspectors’ full and unencumbered access to inspect the establishment.”


On the calls to remove restrictions on locking doors, they said, “Staff will continue to review these and other provisions as part of the future report on BRPs and holistic centres.” The report detailing the review is not expected until 2021.


Meanwhile, Yan says not being allowed to lock the door “haunts me like a shadow.” It leaves her in a constant and heightened state of anxiety at work. Locking the door is a safety measure. “I can see outside the glass door and decide if it is safe to open it,” she says in Mandarin, through an interpreter.


Last week, Butterfly wrote a letter asking Toronto Mayor John Tory, city councillors and other agencies to put “an immediate end to racial profiling and discriminatory, excessive, targeted inspections and prosecution of holistic practitioners” by bylaw officers.


Through an access to information request to the city, Butterfly found that the number of investigations of holistic practitioners rose from 611 or 3.7 per cent of all investigations in 2013 to 2,585 or 19.3 per cent of all investigations in 2015. This data was published in a 2018 survey of holistic practitioners’ experiences with bylaw enforcement and police by four advocacy groups.


Some of the practitioners were charged with infractions such as: locking the door when they are alone or installing a camera for safety and privacy reasons, Lam says. In the first 10 months of 2017, there were 255 charges issued; the stated reason on 41 of them was “table mat not in a good repair.”


Many bylaws related to holistic centres and body rub parlours were created without consultations with the workers, says Lam, who is also spokesperson for the Coalition Against Abuse by Bylaw Enforcement.


“It’s not just police who should be defunded but also bylaw officers,” says Lam, referring to calls to reform police that have arisen amid protests in Canada and the U.S. over police violence and anti-Black racism.


Over the past three years, more than a dozen rights organizations have been meeting with various city agencies asking the city to prioritize worker safety and human and labour rights over excessive inspections and arbitrary prosecutions.


This year, the workers’ situation simply worsened. Many of them were already reeling from rising anti-Asian racism in January with the onset of COVID-19. Subsequent pandemic closures slashed their wages. Many of the workers are migrants or undocumented; without documentation they were unable to access government income supports like the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).


When Ontario moved to Phase 2 of the reopening late in June and the city’s public health department allowed a conditional reopening of these parlours on June 26, relief appeared to be in sight.


But even that reopening turned fraught. On July 1, even as many Canadians celebrated the day with pride, bylaw officers ticketed “multiple” parlours, advocates say.


“At a time when the city should be supporting businesses to reopen … these workers are being punished simply for doing their jobs, despite having received written permission to do so,” Butterfly says in its letter to the city.


Yan was one of those ticketed $880 that day. While one bylaw officer was writing her ticket, the other was conducting a search. “He was looking under the table, my belongings, my rest space.”


Failed to comply with declared emergency, the ticket says.


The city accepts this was an error. “In this particular case, the individual has already been contacted by MLS (Municipal Licensing and Standards) and advised of the error and that no further action will be taken,” the media spokesperson told the Star. “The city is continuing to review training for bylaw officers to ensure they have the latest information around emergency orders and bylaws” evolving in response to COVID-19.


But Butterfly’s letter to the city says there is more than one case and Lam wants the city to drop all erroneous tickets without requiring the workers to fill out any identifying forms.


The city spokesperson, however, says the city is only aware of a single case.


“To the best of the city’s knowledge, there was only one ticket issued in error,” the spokesperson said Thursday. “The city did not receive any further information from the complainant that would indicate other tickets issued in error.”


In its letter, Butterfly asks the city to immediately stop ticketing parlours for reopening, to stop charging workers when they lock doors and to ensure zero retaliation for workers who report abuse at the hands of bylaw officers.


This is the fourth time since January that Yan’s parlour has been raided. “They’re rude. They kick the door and come in. They use a torch (flashlight) to look at every corner, even in my vanity bag.”


“I feel angry,” says Yan, weeping over the phone. “Their attitude was so disrespectful. Canada is a place where people are treated with human rights. They did not treat me as human.”


Yan says she has Canadian citizenship which emboldens her just enough to speak out, albeit anonymously. Many others who are on work permits don’t. Even so, Yan didn’t go to the police after she was robbed. She faces language barriers and her many interactions with bylaw enforcers have broken her trust. In any case, she doesn’t understand why people like her are being singled out for such treatment.


“Why am I being treated this way? I’m not robbing anyone. I’m just surviving. I’m not harming society. I’m contributing to it.”




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发表于 2020-7-10 13:31:39 | 显示全部楼层
I'd believe maybe 10% of the contents of that article.

I consider myself an industry insider who has a pretty good view of things from the ground level.

Not only am I a hobbyist, but I also worked as a "white tag" driver for ladies of this trade for many years.

Let me tell you, if you saw what they post on their social media accounts (mostly on Wechat), all your sympathy would go straight out the window.

Their pictures usually show them eating at expensive restaurants, buying high end luxury bags & clothes, travelling, popping bottles (Hennessy appears to be a particularly popular brand), and generally living the good life.

On my rare occasions to classy Chinese restaurants like Fisherman's Wharf, or wandering around at Yorkdale / Holt Renfrew (me not buying anything but just killing time) I always run into some of these ladies splurging.

I'm not bitter or anything, but even as a university graduate with honours, with a decent day job and side hustle, I'm still not making nearly as much as they are.

Maybe in some third world countries, sex trade workers are truly victims, here in Canada (with the exception of some coerced underaged girls - which are usually found on Backpage/LeoList), sex trade workers voluntarily chose this field of work.

I don't look down on them for choose sex work. Work is work. But I do take exception to those who want to have their cake and eat it too.

Sympathy? Victims? LMFAO!

Looks, if it was so bad, these ladies could work as waitresses, or supermarket cashiers, or cleaning ladies, etc. Plenty of those jobs available (even to those without work permits - plenty of cash jobs around).

But no, menial labour is beneath them. Its too hard. The hours are too long. They are too good for it. Much easier to spread their legs and get paid the equivalent of a high end lawyer's hourly rates.

But I digress.

Coming back to the article's main topics.

First of all, robberies are real. They happen to restaurants and convenience stores too. The difference is that restaurants and convenience stores operate on extremely thin margins, and can ill afford a robbery. Even if insurance covers the loss, they get their pound of flesh right back by jacking up premiums immediately. Massage parlours on the other hand, despite their often shabby looking store front, earn tons of cash for very little operating expenses. Despite their pleas of helplessness, truth is that robberies are just a minor and routine cost of business that doesn't really bother them. If anything, they are more afraid of the robbers scaring their customers away.

Seriously, these ladies are mentally tough as nails. The helplessness is just an act.

I personally know a spa owner who has a couple of houses under her name. Oh, and did I mention FULLY PAID OFF? My buddy is her real estate agent.

This is no isolated case either. Another spa attendent that I drove around when she first got started quickly got her own car, a Honda Civic, before trading in for a BMW, and then later to a Porsche. All within roughly a year.

I even know one lady who bragged to her other ladies/colleagues that she got a sucker "supporting" her with an allowance without realizing that her net worth is at least 10x more than his.

I could list a whole bunch of other examples that I know first hand (NOT a "I heard from a friend of a friend..." story - these are people I actually know). Total ballers.

Then again, there are ladies that remain broke and stuck in the industry for years and even decades. They're the ones addicted to gambling and you will often spot them at casinos (usually Port Perry or the underground baccarat dens in Scarborough).

And some have pretty normal lives outside of their work. This lady I was looking at her Wechat shared pics, supported her son thru university (while still living quite comfortably herself). Another lady I introduced her financial advisor, her investment portfolio is 7 figures range.

My point is that these ladies are very well compensated for what they do, and robberies and bylaw fines are just a very minor business expense to them.

During good times, they rake in over 10Gs a week. Some popular ladies even get expensive gifts on top of it all. The owners do even better. Why do you think there's at least one (often more) spas in almost every plaza in the GTA?

Even during the worst times, when each lady might only get 1-2 customer a day, they are still doing better than your average salaried office worker.

Spas are such a huge cash cow that you never ever see any of them go out of business. When one owner earns enough to sell the spa and retire, its always snapped up immediately, usually by one of her attendents who know first hand how much money the business makes.

Some ladies of the trade that I'm pretty close friends with have confided that when it comes to LE, its not really the fine that bothers them, but the racist and bully attitudes they get.

As for other stuff the article mentions, the reporter is either completely clueless or willfully ignorant.

Cannot lock doors? Dude, anyone who goes to these spas know the inner door is always locked, and you have to ring a bell for them to open the door for you.

There were 255 charges laid in a year? I don't even know how many spas there are in Toronto, but triple digits is guaranteed. So what does that break down to, 1 or 2 charges on average per spa?

I don't support bully cops, and I'm definitely against racial profiling, but the sob stories I don't buy either.

"I'm just surviving"? Hey lady, you are doing wayyyy better than JUST surviving!


My final thoughts...
Man, these days the media will print any story that sounds intriguing without caring how authentic it is.
I remember the articles about Seeking Arrangement earlier. What a load of complete utter nonsense.
As much as I hate Trump, he's right about the media. FAKE NEWS!
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发表于 2020-7-10 14:36:33 | 显示全部楼层
just超齡 发表于 2020-7-10 13:31
I'd believe maybe 10% of the contents of that article.

I consider myself an industry insider who h ...

Mad respectz bro! You truly are knowledgeable and offered great insight.

While I don't know as much as you do, I can confirm that a lot of these sex workers make tons of money, while playing the victim card to the gullible media.

I've also heard certain service providers bitching about their supposed hardship, and actually have the audacity to ask for crowd funding. I guess its easy to feel like your struggling if you are used to making over a hundred bucks in half-hour and living like a one percenter and then suddenly can't afford that lifestyle anymore.

You already got a super high income profession that requires no education background, allows for flexible hours, easy to get hired, constant steady demand (they don't call it world's oldest profession for nothing), and is totally tax free. And you still demand respect, and complain that there's an element of risk?

Its just like how women in general have such power over men these days. They demand equality when it suits them, but they also want the privileges of being woman (the man pays for everything / default assumption of the man being at fault in any disputes / etc).

As johns, we KNOW sex workers hold most if not all the cards in this game. With the laws being what they are, its legal for them to sell but illegal for us to buy. So guess what if you ever get into a dispute with a sex worker? They can easily threaten or blackmail you. They can even say you tried to rape them.

The mainstream media is an absolute joke. Most of the time we don't realize what a huge load of crap masquerading as "news" they feed us on a consistent basis, until they cover a topic that we might actually be knowledgeable about. Then we realize how much bullshit, half-truths, and hearsay that they report as "honest coverage", while their "credible sources" are usually anonymous and usually is just some random guy who claims to be an industry insider.

Its about time Canada legalized the sex trade. Give equal protection for consumers and vendors. Right now the service providers are the ones who are pretty well protected while we johns are the ones who are vulnerable.
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发表于 2020-7-10 15:43:09 | 显示全部楼层
Here's my $0.02

"she gave him the $180 in her wallet"
Unless it was real early in the day, she probably had much more than $180.

"She is what the city labels a holistic practitioner, or an unregistered massage therapist."
Bullshit. They are not therapists, they are prostitutes. Everybody knows you don't go to these types of spas for a massage. They always push you for sexual services. If you go for anything less than bodyslide, they often get mad at you for being cheap and wasting their time.

"not being allowed to lock the door “haunts me like a shadow.”"
I've never been to a spa that didn't have the door locked. And I've been to many.

"these workers are being punished simply for doing their jobs"
I have no idea why spas are allowed to open even when other businesses still aren't.
Restaurants still aren't open for dine-in (patios excluded), but spas can open?
Its impossible to physically distance when you need to touch the customers, constantly.

"He was looking under the table, my belongings, my rest space."
Of course he was. He knows damn well like you do that you got condoms hidden somewhere.

"They use a torch (flashlight) to look at every corner, even in my vanity bag"
Yup, same answer as above.

"Yan didn’t go to the police after she was robbed"
Of course not. An investigation would mean not only you but the entire spa not being able to do business for at least a day. That's thousands of dollars of lost income. Versus just $180 for the robbery.
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发表于 2020-7-12 00:13:28 | 显示全部楼层
女人最会装可怜
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发表于 2020-7-13 01:00:12 | 显示全部楼层
Don't know if racial profiling is involved. Does anyone know if they are strictly targeting Asians?
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发表于 2020-7-16 10:22:09 | 显示全部楼层
I just want to say Thanks for the insights on this topic. At least we can find true infos on this forum where we live in a world of hypocrisy.
To the John's as me, never forget they make more $$ than the average us, there is no need to tip or show off your masculinity through$$. From the time you cross the door, it's just a show time for both parties. Enjoy your hunting! I will give more feedback from my recent experiences.
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发表于 2020-7-26 01:08:25 | 显示全部楼层
FireIce 发表于 2020-7-16 10:22
I just want to say Thanks for the insights on this topic. At least we can find true infos on this fo ...

agree with you bro. i'm struggling much more than they are.

even the old women make $120 for less than 1/2 hour of work. younger girls make much more.
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发表于 2020-7-27 23:44:59 | 显示全部楼层
FireIce 发表于 2020-7-16 10:22
I just want to say Thanks for the insights on this topic. At least we can find true infos on this fo ...

Well some guys are idiots, or maybe they just can't get a wife or girlfriend in real life, so they enjoy the "love" and "admiration" that MMs pretend to give them, and they will do anything to try to impress the MMs.
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发表于 2020-7-31 03:27:58 | 显示全部楼层
struggle个屁!!!这群大妈生活得可风光
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