Nail Salons Mistreating their Workers

[SpeakNow]

I'm not sure which sub forum this belongs in, so I apologize if I posted it in the wrong place. Mods can feel free to move it if needed.

Anyway, I just read a horrible NYTimes article. Basically, the article discussed how nail salon owners mistreat their workers. Many manicurists, who are typically new immigrants with limited English proficiency, are paid less than $30 a day, with some not getting paid at all. On top of that, the workers live in cramped, filthy apartments and are taken every morning by van to the salon. This article is making me really rethink my love of manis and pedis.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/ny ... rrer=&_r=0

[Ave Maria]

I'm not sure if you're in New York or not, but things vary greatly. I used to go to a small town nail salon (nowhere near NYC) where the owner did everything herself or with the help of relatives (once she got bigger). It really depends on who is running the place, and, probably, on geography.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I'm wondering if we have the same issues here - Asian nail salons with mani-pedis for only $35 Can. are very common.

[mpheels]

I'm wondering if we have the same issues here - Asian nail salons with mani-pedis for only $35 Can. are very common.

My regular salon does $35 mani/pedi (and $10 eyebrows!), but the business is completely owner-operated. The shop is owned by three Vietnamese women (mom and two adult daughters), and they are the only three who work there most days. On weekends and during school breaks, one of their teenage (grand)daughters help out by running the desk.

[FakePigtails]

Did you all see the health article too?: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/nyreg ... w-nytmetro

Between the two I'm for once grateful for being not at all girly and never doing this stuff.

[SamE]

The salon I go to is run by a Vietnamese family. The little girls go to Catholic school with my kids. $18 for a gel manicure and $35 for a pedi. They are busy enough that they can't do walk -ins and it takes a week to get an appointment.

[FundieFarmer]

I never used to get manicures (did them myself) until I had to do them so often it was becoming problematic. Now I get gels.

When I read the first last night, I was horrified. The second made me feel guilty. I'm really not sure what I'm going to do moving forward. The salon here is very nice and is $20 for a "polish change" and $35+ for a mani or pedi, depending on the package. I always tip.

The article made me concerned enough that I thought about calling and asking them about it before realizing the answer probably wouldn't be honest if it weren't copacetic.

[Ave Maria]

I'm pretty shocked at hearing of salons where the techs aren't allowed to wear masks. Masks are standard everywhere I've gone.

I even had a facial from a girl wearing gloves and a mask once -- she was pregnant, and was worried about harming the baby. The massage part of that facial felt odd, to say the least, but I definitely didn't want to harm her/her baby.

[eightykatie]

It's a very interesting article. I've always been uncomfortable with pedicures - just the whole someone sitting at your feet, and inevitably they're a minority. While you're in a throne-like chair. Probably why I've only ever had three!

[SpeakNow]

Did you all see the health article too?: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/nyreg ... w-nytmetro

Between the two I'm for once grateful for being not at all girly and never doing this stuff.

I barely ever get my nails done, but I'm feeling guilty for all the times I did. Ugh

[tankgirl]

I wonder if this is area specific, as the couple salons I went to in Los Angeles and that area, all were owned typically by Vietnamese families, with their relatives working for them, often with them building up enough savings to go off and open their own salons in other areas. I followed one of the techs to three salons, the first was a cousins, the next her sisters, the final one was hers. All of the techs wore masks too.

I can imagine the chemicals are horrible with acrylics, but I mostly went for pedicures myself and gels. Reading that article is so sad. I am happy the techs wore at least masks and gloves at the shops I went too, but hate the thought of how bad it must be for the workers :(

[doggie]

The masks they wear would help with dust not fumes. You need a respirator with the eight cartridge to do the job. That would chase off customers

[sparkles]

Very distressing article but I can't say I'm at all surprised. I'm in metro New York and except for a salon in the city that I used to go to back in the 80s which was run and staffed by Russians, salons are always Asian, with what seems like a very high employee turnover. When I lived in Queens (80s and 90s), there was a house down the street that was like a rabbit warren—tiny little cubicles with cots—and the residents, both men and women, were picked up by vans every day. Most of them were probably workers like the ones in the article. It was creepy.

I occasionally go for pedis during warm weather (it's kind of a public service thing, since I wear flip flops in the summer and would rather my toes not look like they've been gnawed by rats). The women in the salons are like robots. They barely make eye contact, don't speak except to ask basic questions and honestly, as much as I like the pedis, the whole thing makes me uncomfortable because I'm just assuming the workers are getting a raw deal. So I tip very well—generally $8 for a $20 pedi—but even then, I don't know if the workers are allowed to keep their tips.

I hope this article helps shake things up.

Also, I know one of the salons mentioned in the article very well. I pass it daily but haven't ever gone in. It's a little hole in the wall that's changed hands about three times in the past few years.

[RosyDaisy]

This makes me glad I have never had professional manicures/pedicures. My mother was a beautician and taught me how to do them myself. I also never get my eyebrows waxed. I use the Conair version of the Personal Touch personal shaver.

[louisa05]

This makes me glad I have never had professional manicures/pedicures. My mother was a beautician and taught me how to do them myself. I also never get my eyebrows waxed. I use the Conair version of the Personal Touch personal shaver.

In my area, $30 is a cheap pedicure; I could not believe that something is more expensive in the Midwest than in NYC. That has to be a first, and, of course, there would be a nefarious reason. Most salons here are owned by Asians, but if you listen or ask, you will find it is a family business. I have not had a manicure for six years, but I think the combo then (for my wedding) was about $45 and the mani did not include anything but polishing, thus it was cheaper. I hate the way the salons cut and shape them, so I did that myself. The girl that did my pedi for my wedding was the owner's daughter and was also in college.

I get a pedicure once in the late spring and do my toes myself from then on and always do my own fingers (but rarely polish them). I actually prefer the Asian salons because they don't talk to you. I am an introvert and am paying for that service partly to relax. I don't find small talk relaxing. So that is not uncomfortable for everyone. Just saying.

I get my eyebrows done by my regular stylist who is a 60 year old white woman that runs her own business. Pretty sure she is not being exploited. She seems to be doing quite well, actually.

[ADoyle90815]

This makes me glad I have never had professional manicures/pedicures. My mother was a beautician and taught me how to do them myself. I also never get my eyebrows waxed. I use the Conair version of the Personal Touch personal shaver.

The only time I got a professional manicure was just before my brother's wedding as it was a birthday gift from my now SIL, and for a salon that also does hair. This was before gels became big, so it was really just a regular manicure. I'm glad that I would rather do my own nails at home, and I even have one of those home gel kits. Mostly, it's just pedicures I do because I do so many stuff with my hands that most manicures chip after a day. The gel stuff does last, but it ruins my nails so I have to give myself a break between those types of manicures. The last time I really did a gel manicure was before my cruise last June.

[Buzzard]

The times did a follow up to say that the governor was going to have salons audited to ensure that they were complying with wage laws.

A Gel mani/pedi can run you $70 in Atlanta but I honestly cant stand having gel on my hands. I get gel pedicures quarterly and they last for months. The same women have worked in the shop I go to for years and I'm not at all concerned that they are being taken advantage of.

[DGayle]

I never understood why people can't paint their nails themselves. Even gel kits with the lights aren't too expensive to buy.

I also can't stand either sitting in silence because someone and I can't communicate, nor can I stand making small talk with people I don't know.

And the couple times I've had mani/pedis done, I was asked to pay and tip about halfway through, and I knew the quality of the job would be based on how big of a tip, which I didn't like.

So I don't go to salons.

I was further turned off when I realized that those very, very low prices mean bad wages and the supplies probably aren't cleaned right.

[RosyDaisy]

I can't justify the expense (for myself). I have a manicure kit, cuticle oil, polish remover, and a few dollar store polishes. I only go to a salon for a haircut and color.

ETA: I will be changing salons when my SIL's fiancée opens her salon. We always have something to talk about!

[Trynn]

I've never gotten my nails done. I just don't care about those things. I'm glad I read this before ever having gotten them done. Now i can do my best, if I ever decide to go, to make sure the place is ethical.

I would never get a pedi. I can not STAND the idea of someone else touching my feet. Ew.

[Rescinded and Mended]

I don't get mani/pedis done that often, maybe a couple of times a year. The women that work at my local salon are pretty much all Asian, but I don't usually question their wages and how well they are treated because the treatments cost more and they often talk about their personal lives with their families.

There is one nail tech who works there who will freely talk about her past experiences with human trafficking. She was tricked by a man who guaranteed her a passport and promised to help her with citizenship when they were in Vietnam. As soon as she arrived in the U.S., she was forced into prostitution for two years before finally escaping.

I'm not sure how she came to be with the salon, since she never talks about that part of her story. But I hope she's there because she wants to be, and not because she's forced to be. :(

[19 cats and counting]

i rarely get my nails done (last time was for my sister's wedding). Frankly, I HATE spa days/salons/etc and just don't find the 'pampering' to be relaxing at all. The smell of salons (hair, nail, etc) has always given me headaches. (And I'm an introvert who loathes small talk).

I can do a DIY manicure but usually it's just clear glitter polish that I wear on my nails. I do my toes about once a week in the summer in some funky shade (right now I have a gunmetal silver/gray on).

[eri]

I've always considered manis and panis to be the most bourgeoisie, pretentious aspects of spa treatments.

[Evilbad]

I am not a super girly person, but I totally feel girly and I love having my nails done. I usually do them myself, but I just can't make them look as nice as they do at a salon. My attempts to do my own gel manicure were.......horrible.

I can't afford it very often, but I do love it when I do. I also do a terrible job at plucking my eyebrows so I have them waxed, lol.

[doggie]

makes you wonder

Facepalm The New York Times article on the treatment of Asian nail salon workers in New York was written to the same Journalistic standards as a Rolling Stone Magazine rape article

http://www.fark.com/go/8794573

In early May, a series of articles published in The New York Times purported to expose rampant labor abuses in New York City nail salons. Reporter Sarah Maslin Nir claimed to have interviewed more than 100 employees of such salons and found that manicurists working long shifts for as little as $10 per day was the norm. Public response was swift and emotional, sending the Internet-outrage-spiral into full force and even influencing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to pass emergency regulations for nail salons, which included a ramping up of state inspections. New Jersey is currently considering beefing up its regulation of nail salons, as well.

But as with so much high-profile message journalism recently, the Times article seems based on dubious facts and broad generalizations. In The New York Review of Books, Richard Bernstein challenges many of the claims on which Nir's narrative is based. A former Times journalist, Bernstein now owns two spas with his China-born wife, Zhongmei Li, and her sister Zhongqin Li.

"We were startled by the Times article’s Dickensian portrait of an industry in which workers 'spend their days holding hands with women of unimaginable affluence,' and retire at night to 'flophouses packed with bunk beds, or in fetid apartments shared by as many as a dozen strangers,'" writes Bernstein. "Its conclusion was not just that some salons or even many salons steal wages from their workers but that virtually all of them do."

One of the primary pieces of evidence Nir offered for this assertion is that "Asian-language newspapers are rife with classified ads listing manicurist jobs paying so little the daily wage can at first glance appear to be a typo." She claimed to have "confirmed with several workers" that an ad published in the city's two largest Chinese-language newspapers, Sing Tao Daily and World Journal, featured one Upper West Side nail salon paying workers just $10 per day.

Bernstein and his wife found this surprising, so they started combing through the employment ads in those papers themselves. What they found—looking at papers from two months before the Times expose was published to several days after—was a lowest rate of $70 per day plus tips, and many higher.

To test the Times’s assertion, my wife and I read every ad placed by nail salons in the papers cited in the article, Sing Tao Daily and World Journal. Among the roughly 220 ads posted in each paper in the days after the Times story appeared, none mentioned salaries even remotely close to the ad the Times described. This led me to wonder if embarrassed salon owners might have changed their ads in the short time since the Times exposed them, so we looked at issues of World Journal going back to March this year. We read literally thousands of Chinese-language ads, and we found not a single one fitting the description of the ads that the Times asserts the papers to be full of.

In fact, only a small number of the nail salon ads indicate a salary at all—most simply describe the job on offer and provide a phone number for an applicant to call. Among the few ads that do indicate a salary, the lowest we saw was $70 a day, and some ranged up to $110. Here is one typical example, which appeared in the World Journal on April 23, several weeks before the Times article was published:

QUEENS AREA NAILS

Seeking several large and small work experienced hands.

Base pay $120 plus tips and commissions.

Small work $70, plus tips and commissions.

Seeking part-time small and large work on weekends.

15 minutes two-way transport Flushing to Elmhurst provided.