Out with unfair wages!
Something I have been wrestling with lately is the reality that the majority of “employment” opportunities for massage therapists in Quebec (I put employment in brackets, because it is most often job offers where we are hired as private contractors, and thus are not offered any benefits of being employees) are seriously underpaid where the owner of the place keeps usually 60-70% of the payment, in exchange for the space to work, profiting off the inaccessibility of affordable spaces for workers, profiting off our physical, energetic and emotional labour, for an amount of money that does not balance out the exhaustion.
I don’t understand why it is acceptable in 2025 to offer 40$\hour to a massage therapist, who is sacrificing their body in order to do the work. The amount of work required to make a decent amount of money at this rate would be soul crushing, 40$\hour for another job that can be done 40 hours per week would be totally decent! But doing 40 hours of massage is physically unattainable for most, unrealistic, and would result in burn out, injury. (I think 40 hours of office work is also crazy but that’s another conversation). All this plus the insecurity of being self employed. That’s a shitty deal!
The reality about massage is that in order to have a career with longevity and to offer ourselves in good health to our clients, it is important that we remain healthy, energized, empowered. That we are not overworked in order to make sense of the low wage per hour, that we are treated fairly and compensated accordingly to the hard work we do.
Even as independent contractors, the abusive capitalist dynamic is repeated to us where bosses capitalize on our hard work, reaping the benefits as we toil away. The grand majority of opportunities offer little to us in return.
I hope to see a future where massage therapists are offered fair and just wages in their places of work (and all workers of course) we help heal people and we deserve to be cherished in return.
Until then, consider tipping generously when receiving massage at a spa, or try finding someone private practice who you can go to and know they are getting all of that money for their hard work.
