A Wednesday night visit to the West 46th Street spa supported both the guidebooks and the women’s accounts. Face down on a massage table, a reporter found it hard to even notice whose hands were at work.
But when asked in Spanish, the masseuse said her name was Rosa, she was 19 and from Ecuador, and she had lived and worked there for a year and a half, seven days a week, for $300. That day, she had started at 10 a.m., and said she might finish at 2 a.m.
“It’s hard,” she said.—Women Complain of Hellish Life at Upscale Spa, by Nina Bernstein, NYT