Massage Therapists Rubbed the Wrong Way by Firing After They Fought to Unionize

And now, both women are gone — the result of their 2022 unionization bid to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which didn’t go over well with that new owner.

According to Olcott and Pacheco, the massage studio went downhill under Dan Demolli, who purchased the Elements Massage on East Hampden and several other locations around Denver and Colorado Springs through DM Breathe LLC, according to his LinkedIn page. To protect themselves and other workers, they started the push to join Local 7 in June 2022. By August, they were fired.

Olcott started working as a massage therapist in 2010, after getting an associate of occupational science degree in massage therapy from the now-closed Boulder College of Massage Therapy. After that she took a break to have a child, she went back to work in 2013, signing on at Elements a few months after it opened. By 2017, she’d been joined by Pacheco, and the two were lead massage therapists there.

When the studio went under corporate ownership, they had high hopes for their future. “We did really [well] under corporate,” Pacheco recalls. “We grew…we had a good team.”

Adds Olcott: “We had a manager who we had a really good working relationship with. All of us brought different ideas and lenses and skill sets to the table, and we were able to maximize each other’s strengths really well.”

Then in March 2020, COVID hit, and everything changed. It “shut us down — shut the entire industry down,” Pacheco remembers.

By the time the women could finally return to work that summer, the studio had been purchased by Demolli. “He had a lot of exciting ideas,” Olcott says. “We thought we had an ally.”

But they soon thought again. According to Olcott and Pacheco, Demolli began tearing apart his other studios and firing members of his management team. In March 2021, the manager of the East Hampden location was let go without any explanation.

“He refused to give us any reasons for why he fired her,” Olcott says, adding that things at the studio went downhill quickly after that.

“It was very disruptive [for us] because we already had….a very functional leadership team in place,” Olcott says. “The person who replaced [the old manager] was more [of a] micro-manager. They were forcing in their ideas without even taking the time to see how our studio was working as a baseline.”

Soon that new manager was fired, and the replacement disappeared, too. “We went through a revolving door of managers,” Olcott recalls.

Meanwhile, they had other questions about Demolli’s business practices and the massage franchise in general.

“Back before 2000, most massage therapists either worked in hospitality settings — like spas or hotels, cruise ships, things like that — or they were independent contractors; they had their own business where they built up their own clientele,” Olcott explains. “So the lion’s share of massage therapists were independent contractors…and a contractor is paid by the task.

“All the ancillary duties that go along with performing a massage — cleaning and maintaining your equipment, writing client notes, doing intake — those are assumed to be included in the task of performing a massage,” she adds.

Elements Massage and Massage Envy, two of the biggest massage brands in the country, both opened in the early 2000s and became major players in the national sector later that decade. As more massage therapists hired on at franchise locations, “all of a sudden, there was this boom of massage therapists who were W-2 employees,” Olcott says.

But many workers were still “under that kind of legacy independent-contractor mindset,” she adds.

According to Olcott and Pacheco, massage therapists would perform non-massage tasks for the franchise but would only be paid for the time they spent performing a massage. Stephanie Rodriguez, founder and CEO of the United States Organization of Licensed Massage Therapists (USOLMT) — a national group that lobbies for and provides professional development resources to MTs — backs up their claim.

“All of the franchises pretty much do this,” Rodriguez says, referring to the pay-per-massage wage structure. “I don’t know of any franchises that don’t do that.”

Olcott and Pacheco say that workers at the East Hampden Elements were paid either minimum wage or per massage, depending on which amount was higher over the course of a two-week pay period.

A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment would not say whether the pay situation Olcott and Pacheco encountered during their time at Elements was illegal. But the spokesperson did refer to the CDLE’s Interpretive Notice & Formal Opinion (INFO) #20B, a guideline policy that states: “Pay of at Least Minimum Wage is Required for All Time Worked, Not Just on Average by Week.”

The policy explains that “borrowing compensation…owed for one set of hours…to rectify compensation below the minimum…for a second set…regardless of whether the average of paid and unpaid…time exceeds the minimum” is prohibited.

Olcott and Pacheco began to research Colorado employee rights and “realized that there were a lot of things that we legally should have been paid for that we were not being paid for,” Olcott says. They decided to file complaints with the CDLE in May 2022. Those complaints are still pending, according to CDLE officials.

With no word back from the state about their wage complaints — and with workplace issues continuing — Olcott and Pacheco started looking into accounts of employees unionizing at places like Amazon and Starbucks, and they soon floated the idea of doing it themselves.

The tipping point came in late June 2022, when Demolli’s DM Breathe LLC hosted an employee appreciation event for all of the studios under his ownership. During the party, someone from the regional level of management in the LLC approached an employee whom Olcott describes as “a very comfortably out gay man” and “jokingly called [him] a homosexual slur,” she says. The worker later wrote up an incident report and filed it with human resources.

She and Pacheco contacted Jimena Peterson, an organizer with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, and began the process of petitioning for a union election. On August 5, when Olcott arrived at work, she was fired. Two days later, Pacheco was let go.

Still, the two continued their unionization efforts, and eventually held a vote with their former co-workers last October. The employees voted unanimously to join Local 7.

According to Peterson, “Workers are [legally] protected the moment that they start talking about unionization.” After Olcott and Pacheco were fired, Local 7 attorneys immediately submitted an official “charge” — or work allegation — to the National Labor Relations Board,” she says.

According to the NLRB website, charges such as these are “investigated by Board agents.” If they are found to have merit, “the agency issues a complaint.”

In Olcott and Pacheco’s case, a complaint was issued on March 6 by Paula S. Sawyer, the regional director of the NLRB’s region 27, which includes Denver.

That complaint “alleges” that Demolli and the Elements Massage on East Hampden has violated the National Labor Relations Act by discouraging employees from discussing wage complaints and unionization, and by firing Olcott and Pacheco. The complaint claims that Demolli fired the pair because of their discussion of “wage and hour claims,” and also because of their “advocating for a coworker with regard to the coworker’s potential sexual harassment claim.” The employer discouraged “membership in a labor organization,” it adds.

According to Kayla Blado, a spokesperson for the NLRB, if Demolli and the union don’t agree to a settlement, the hearing with an NLRB administrative law judge will start on October 24. “The ALJ can order make-whole remedies after the hearing concludes,” she notes.

“While I do not agree with the allegations that have been levied against me, I cannot address the allegations in detail at this time,” Demolli tells Westword. “The NLRB has a formal process in which to deal with employee and/or union accusations, and the company is following that process.”

According to the Elements Massage corporate office: “Studios are independently owned and operated and the Elements Massage brand does not comment on disputes between franchisees and their employees, nor does it provide requirements on compensation practices for studio employees.”

Meanwhile, Demolli has another problem: According to Denver’s Department of Excise & Licenses, the franchise location is out of compliance with the licensing requirement the city put in place for massage businesses on July 1, 2022. Spokesman Eric Escudero says the business received a warning for the licensing violation on October 25 and has since received three fines totaling $1,649, which have not yet been paid.

That’s just one of the reasons that Olcott and Pacheco say they may not be interested in the unusual settlement offer they’ve received from Demolli’s attorneys: If they forget about back pay for the time since they were fired, he will give them ownership of the franchise location.

“I don’t know if we could bring it back,” Pacheco says.

Since she was fired by Demolli, she has opened her own business, and Olcott has gotten a job at a massage location called The NOW, where she says she gets paid a base wage for her entire shift, plus “an additional layer of pay for my active massages.”

Their mission is not over, however.

“I’ve been making sure the word is getting out,” Olcott concludes. “If we can inspire other people to take a look at their workplace and say, ‘Hey, I don’t want to quit. I want to make where I’m at a better place,’ that would be really awesome, too.”