News

By Ricky Rillera

NEW YORK — The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) has sued the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) on behalf of Red Canary Song, an advocacy organization composed of Asian and migrant massage workers and sex workers, for failure to respond to Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. The lawsuit was filed in the New York County Supreme Court.

The FOIL request seeks documents related to inspections and enforcement against massage parlors. These documents are key for the organization and the public to understand the city’s increasingly aggressive use of red tape and regulations to target workers in the past four years. The harassment includes ticketing, fines, and other enforcement actions unfairly targeting massage businesses.

“Since the pandemic hit, our members, most of whom are Asian or other migrant workers, have been unfairly targeted and harassed by the city,” said Lisa, the leader of Red Canary Song’s Chinese outreach team. She said she has worked for over a decade in massage businesses in Flushing and received multiple DOB citations in the past few years, which caused her thousands of dollars in remediation and jeopardized her ability to live and work.

“Our livelihoods are at stake here, and we demand accountability by this city agency that should be helping New Yorkers instead of hurting us with this racist form of policing,” said Lisa. She has requested that only her first be used, accusing the DOB of targeting her for her work in massage businesses.

“The Department of Buildings has pursued enforcement actions against Red Canary Song members for years, yet it alleges that it is ‘in no way’ involved in regulating massage parlors to avoid revealing its policies and practices,” said Jane Shim, director of AALDEF’s Stop Asian Hate project, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Lisa’s organization. “This makes the public’s right to know even more urgent—where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The government has a responsibility to be transparent to the people, and this is especially the case when residents feel targeted by the agencies that are supposed to be serving their needs.”

According to AALDEF, Professor Ellena Shih explained that massage licensing laws, like the regulations that incentivize the DOB to discriminatorily target workers like Lisa, betray their true intentions to curb human trafficking. Shih is the director of Brown University’s Human Trafficking Research Cluster at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, where she is conducting a now four-year-long research project in collaboration with Red Canary Song.

“Recent attempts to combat human trafficking at Asian massage businesses have unleashed a rash of discriminatory policing throughout North America,” said Shih, who is also an organizer for Red Canary Song. “Counterintuitively, anti-trafficking efforts make it more difficult for Asian migrant body workers to live and work safely, subjecting them to brutal economic instability and state violence.”

Referencing observations from the Brown University research, Shih added, “Most troubling is the recent dispersion of policing functions beyond police officers themselves, but to public health, licensure, and (in the case of this lawsuit) NYC’s Department of Buildings to enforce the policing of Asian body work.”

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Read the article here: https://www.philippinedailymirror.com/asian-and-migrant-massage-workers-sue-nyc-dept-of-buildings/