Our Values

We believe:

• Massage parlor work is a form of gendered caring labor, and may or may not involve sex work.

• All workers should have the right to dignified workplaces safe from physical, sexual, emotional harassment or violence.

• Criminalization of sex work endangers Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as well as queer and trans folks, including Asian massage parlor workers. We reject the criminalization of sex work.

• State violence is the largest threat that immigrant workers encounter, in the form of police and immigration law enforcement. The police do not keep our immigrant communities safe.

• We organize with a transnational framework and seek to understand the conditions that drive our community members to migrate to the U.S. to work in massage parlor and care industries.

• We believe in worker organizing through building collective workers’ power and community support.

• Relationships and trust are the crux of our outreach and organizing work.

• We resist the gentrification of Chinatown/ID. Gentrification endangers the safety of our Asian/Asian American communities, including massage parlor workers.

• We reject the rescue narrative that assumes that the police and non profits that partner with police can bring safety to our Asian/Asian American communities through raids and surveillance.

We recognize that we are working and living on indigenous Duwamish and Coast Salish lands. Our organizing is inspired by the resilience and traditions of radical Black, Indigenous and People of Color resistance and struggles for autonomy and sovereignty in this country. We are committed to addressing the ways in which our communities are complicit in white supremacy and settler colonialism and aim to build meaningful solidarity through our common struggles.

Our Story

MPOP was founded in 2018 as a grassroots organization conducting direct outreach to Asian migrant massage workers in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District (CID). After the Seattle Police Department raided 11 massage parlors in King County in 2019, with many similar raids across the U.S., MPOP renewed efforts distributing resources through outreach as a response to support migrant workers. What began as a small formation focused on supporting massage workers has grown into a neighborhood-rooted worker organization serving immigrant working-class communities across industries. Through consistent outreach, we expanded from massage businesses to regularly visiting restaurant and food service workplaces.

As our organization expanded, we established the CID Worker Center in 2023 to fit our evolving needs. Since then, we have hosted a diverse array of programs and activities ranging from facilitation training with our cohort of worker leaders and strategists, to immigration Know Your Rights trainings, to workshops on employment laws for Chinese workers in the CID. In this moment where the rights of immigrant workers are being attacked, our proximity to the community as a smaller and trusted grassroots organization allows us to be responsive to emerging crises and adapt to the political climate. We move quickly and intentionally with our programming and services, so that workers' immediate needs are seen to.

Today, MPOP is an established and trusted part of the CID’s organizing ecosystem. Because Chinese immigrant workers are highly transient and often shift between massage, restaurant, and other service sector jobs, employment law education delivered in one workplace often reaches workers across multiple sectors. Our engagement with workers in this industry is essential. Our presence is woven into the daily rhythm of the neighborhood, where our outreach, safety programs, and multilingual resources are recognized as vital sources of stability and solidarity.