Red Canary Song

About the Organization:

Red Canary Song is a grassroots organization of Asian and migrant sex workers and massage workers, organizing transnationally. Our work is in the tradition of sex worker mutual aid, and we center base-building with migrant massage workers through a labor rights, migrant justice, and PIC abolitionist framework. We believe that the full decriminalization of sex work is necessary for the safety and survival of massage workers and trafficking survivors.

The Issue:

Red Canary Song is a collective of migrant massage workers, sex workers, and allies of the Asian Diaspora. As Asian women and non-binary folk, we are targeted by the hypersexualization of our identities and the violence that ensues due to racism and systemic oppression. Workers are silenced by the overwhelming anti-trafficking media and moralist crusade to rescue workers who live/work in conditions that are suited to economic survival. Our community is in constant threat of surveillance and raids from policing and other systems of oppression (through housing and public health violations, licensure and the policing of immigration)

In the past five years, while arrests for prostitution have decreased following nationwide interest in decriminalizing sex work, the arrest of Asian massage workers for unlicensed massage have increased. In New York City, more than 90 percent of those arrested under these statutes are Asian women. The majority of those arrested are noncitizens and have detrimental impacts on social, emotional, and economic livelihood.

The Solution:

In March 2021 the Manhattan DA’s office announced that it would no longer prosecute people charged on counts of prostitution, and closed over 1,000 open prostitution-related cases. Despite growing nationwide support of the decriminalization of sex work, migrant massage workers have paradoxically become ensnared in the escalation of the racialized policing of sex and low wage work. These arrests often turn to new policing and prosecutorial codes–rather than be arrested for prostitution, migrant massage workers are often arrested for unlicensed massage, following a wave of new massage licensure bills that have been introduced in the past decade.

Rather than a raid and rescue approach, which has proven to endorse the surveillance and criminalization of sex work, we focus on labor organizing and basebuilding as a way to build migrant massage and sex worker power. In response to the ongoing criminalization of our community, we engage in peer outreach and community mutual aid for impacted workers that involves cash assistance, grocery delivery, legal aid and access to healthcare. We shape public narratives around massage work and sex work by centering workers’ life stories and experiences, as told through our Oral History Project, documentary films, art events, and other worker-led programming. Furthermore, we prioritize colllaborations with migrant massage worker organizations throughout North America–as evidenced in a recent co-authored report “Unlicensed.”

In 2021, the NY ACLU found our outreach work and research so compelling that it partnered with us to introduce the Massage License Decriminalization Act A 1112 (sponsored by Senator Julia Salazar and House Rep Jessica Gonzalez Rohas) the nation’s first law to decriminalize migrant massage work.

Our key goals for the coming years are to get funding to sustain our current services and to push for massage license decriminalization in NY to remove criminal penalties for practicing unlicensed massage and to prevent law enforcement from seizing massage workers’ money and other personal property as well as the Decriminalizing Sex Work Bill / Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act (SVSTA).

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.