The Price of Nice Nails

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/nyregion/at-nail-salons-in-nyc-manicurists-are-underpaid-and-unprotected.html

by potench • 11 years ago

100 66 11 years ago

danso• 11 years ago

Kind of off-topic, but recently there was a front-page post here on Vietnamese-Americans' dominance of the nail salon industry, which is what I think of when I think of the manicure business, too. Though come to think of it, in New York, I rarely saw any Vietnamese-owned salons:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32544343

glitch273• 11 years ago

Probably depends on which coast youre in. West coast and California is probably Vietnamese and east coast and new York is Korean.

bane• 11 years ago

Around D.C. it's a mix (same with Barbers)

It helps to have the 3rd highest concentration of Koreans in the U.S. and a large Vietnamese population in Northern Virginia. Go down one street and there's nothing but Vietnamese nail and hair businesses. Go down another and you'll find Koreans.

screwedup• 11 years ago

Probably because there aren't many Vietnamese-Americans in NY, at least compared to Texas and California.

zokier• 11 years ago

Somehow I was expecting to read about artisanal fasteners disrupting the industry. I suppose the actual article makes more sense.

clamprecht• 11 years ago

The worst thing has to be the fumes. Anytime I walk by a nail salon, I hold my breath. I can't imagine being in one all day, every day.

dba7dba5• 11 years ago

I was just in a Costco tire center. Man those guys at the cash register in the big room with tires are breathing in some nasty smell all day.

function_seven• 11 years ago

Sorry, but you're wrong :) The smell of tire shops is awesome.

(But then again, I also like the smell of poorly-maintained diesel engine exhaust.)

com2kid3• 11 years ago

If the nail salon owners all followed the law and paid their employees properly, the average price of service would increase. The race to the bottom is only because of en masse violations of the law.

The state needs to do their job. One year and a thousand or so lawsuits (exactly 0% chance the state has the resources to do this) and the problem will go away. Manicures will end up costing $20 instead of $10, and workers will be able to live like people and not animals.

mynameishere• 11 years ago

How do want the state to do it's job? Because step one would be a whole lot of deportations. There's not much political support for that, especially in Manhattan, and if you have the government selectively enforcing wage laws while ignoring immigration laws, you've got an glaringly corrupt system. So they ignore it...

guard-of-terra2• 11 years ago

"There's not much political support for that, especially in Manhattan,"

Either fix laws or enforce them. There should not be other options save for failed states.

prostoalex3• 11 years ago

The state does its job http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/HowToReportViolationtoBOFE.htm

What makes you think the cosmetologists are not owners themselves (and hence self-employed, exempt from minimum wage), 1099 independent contractors (and hence exempt) or simply undocumented in the United States?

Retric2• 11 years ago

It is very unlikely the IRS would qualify them as 1099 independent. Undocumented workers still qualify for minimum wage laws even if their unlikely to fight the issue.

As to the owner issue, that's possible, but everyone would need a near equil share or minimum wage laws still apply. AKA giving someone 0.1% generally does not let you dodge minimum wage laws.

mason240• 11 years ago

Manicures will end up costing $20 instead of $10, and workers will be able to live like people and not animals.

Are you accounting for the loss of customers that doubling the prices would cause?

davesque• 11 years ago

Maybe that would show that there is no viable market for manicuring services and that people doing that for a living are better off finding another line of work? I'm not saying this is what I think, just a counter-point.

dandelany2• 11 years ago

Demand will certainly decrease. Some nail salons will have to close and we will find out the number of legal nail salons the market bears. Those who go out of business will need to find another line of work. I see no problem with this. It will be a turbulent time for some people but that's not a valid reason to continue to prop up a badly-regulated economy that relies on illegally underpaying its workers.

com2kid3• 11 years ago

Are you accounting for the loss of customers that doubling the prices would cause?

A question that won't be answered without an elasticity of demand curve for good nails.

Given that manicured nails are largely driven by cultural expectations, I'd suspect that a $10 increase won't change much.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

Who cares? Manicures are just about the most useless status symbol product there is.

The ladies doing the manicures will be unemployed, but since they're not getting paid now, they'll actually be better off.

They need to skip the lawsuits and throw the owners in prison. Working for weeks with no pay is practically slavery.

Edit: Now that I think about it, why isn't the IRS looking into this, too? I have a hard time believing the owners aren't paying their workers, but are paying proper taxes and withholdings for them.

guard-of-terra2• 11 years ago

Yeah, plunder some salons, get things fixed.

It is apparent that many societies unlearn how to get things done. Instead we learned to mourn things we can not right.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

Getting things done is politically risky in modern democracies. It's much better to just notice the problem and push the blame around.

srpablo• 11 years ago

It is apparent that many societies unlearn how to get things done. Instead we learned to mourn things we can not right.

We can go to the moon, perform fusion on atoms, but finding an arrangement where large pluralities of hard-working people live better than $30 a day, after months without pay, and a $100 down payment in the most expensive city in the USA is something 'we can not right.' To propose policy that would harm businesses who subsist only by virtue of (by any reasonable definition) exploitation is to 'plunder some salons.'

…I wonder what guides your brain to believe that?

dba7dba5• 11 years ago

Guess what. Some shop owners and workers may be out of work. But the state/city regulators/inspectors that didn't do their job and allowed this to grow will be fine. No punishment of any kind and nice fat pension waiting.

mikejholly• 11 years ago

Hear, hear.

joe51502• 11 years ago

I've never seen an article offered in English, Korean, Chinese and Spanish all at once. Is this more common than I know or does the Times just think this is a really important piece?

disantlor2• 11 years ago

The idea is to include the very people who's exploitation the article describes in the conversation.

joe51502• 11 years ago

That's more or less what I thought as well, but I've never seen them do that before, even for other articles about non-English-speaking ethnic populations. The fact that translators were already involved in so much of the reporting process[0] might have something to do with it, though.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/05/07/something-ro...

dba7dba5• 11 years ago

Quite naive that someone will change their ways (that allows them to make money) after reading an article or 2.

Has Apple or Google or any other mega corporation stopped parking their profit overseas to avoid tax, after all those articles?

Young idealism.

alexggordon• 11 years ago

Well researched and typed article. This is a little tangential, and maybe I'm just now noticing it, but as of late the New York Times seems to have drastically shifted where it's journalistic effort is going. I've always been heavily influenced by Aaron Swartz thoughts on news[0], but as of late the NYT has been directly countering the primary complaint of Aaron, that "none of these stories have relevance to my life". While I don't get my nails done, there have been a significant amount of stories lately that I can directly relate to that have been front[1][2] and center[3][4] of the NYT, and HN.

I've never been that big of a fan of the NYT to be honest, but it really seems that the NYT has made (at least a digital) shift away from scare tactics, and un-relatable news. The first thing I thought of is that this was driven by a campaign or organization (an attempt to saturate HN with NYT articles) but outside of a few regular posters in the last month, it doesn't seem too irregular[5]. However, it is odd that the _whoishiring account (I know it's not official), posted one.

Outside of the conspiracy theories, what I do like about the articles is the long form dedication to researching a topic, visualizing some interesting portions of it, relating it to the reader, and making sure it's interesting and meaningful. This article in particular make me look at nail solons, which I drive past everyday, in a very different light.

[0] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/business/dealbook/bitcoin-...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/magazine/want-a-steady-inc...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/business/dealbook/ex-goldm...

[5] http://pastebin.com/j7m8MD5r

disantlor2• 11 years ago

In this particular case it's a privilege that this article has no direct relevance to your (or my) life and it's good to be reminded of that.

Uhhrrr• 11 years ago

I read the whole article and didn't see any figures on how much they make in tips - only that tips were "meager" and "frequently skimmed".

Given that these women aren't doing this for love, I have to imagine that having a steady clientele allows them to beat minimum wage. But the article makes it hard to tell.

ramy_d• 11 years ago

My impression from the article was that they only matched or beat minimum during sandal season. Didn't see any figures though. Still pretty bad.

stegosaurus4• 11 years ago

The posts here are quite funny to read for me.

Specifically the idea of 'maybe this job shouldn't exist, if it can't pay a fair wage'.

Minimum wage is really not a fair wage. In the UK, double minimum is getting close in some cities. In London, triple minimum wage is still essentially a child's salary, good for renting and playing around but not for building an actual life - state assistance is essentially required.

If you eliminate jobs that do not pay fairly (I think that the faint possibility of ever being able to do anything but work and/or suck on the State's teat is a reasonable definition of fair), there will either be nothing left for most of the population, or huge wage increases. I don't know which. I actually think it's worth the gamble, then we can actually deal with what unemployment (and the euphemism-tastic 'underemployment') actually means.

tjr• 11 years ago

Without taking the time to do actual research, I would imagine that a lot of minimum wage jobs either already are, or easily could be, done part-time. In that case, they would not necessarily be held by people otherwise unemployed.

It's conceivable that someone could hold a full-time office job that pays amply for their living expenses, and work a few nights a week at a retail store to help save up money for luxuries.

Avshalom• 11 years ago

Just of the top of my head, I don't know how reliable the EPI is but:

http://www.epi.org/publication/low-wage-workers-are-older-th...

Bostonian• 11 years ago

"Fair wage" is a meaningless concept. If one person is willing to pay $X for a job and another person is willing to do it for that price, other people should butt out.

whyaduck2• 11 years ago

Define "willing".

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

That's wrong more often than not. Usually, "voluntary trade" is not really voluntary for one of the parties involved.

xnull6guest2• 11 years ago

The problem is when there are confluences of conditions that systemically prevent someone (or their 'class') from having the mobility to exit their condition, even when they have enough merit to otherwise warrant it.

Take for example indentured servitude, or third world sweat shops. Sure, working for $0.28 a day in a (dangerous, unsanitary) factory is better than subsistence farming. But if this opportunity is enough to feed a family but not enough to lift the family from a condition whereby it can exit from needing to work in the factory, how is this so very different from perpetuated servitude?

Take serfs. While serfs were 'bound to the land', the condition of the serf was voluntary and mutually beneficial: Wikipedia reads "Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the Lord of the Manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence."

Certainly it was a better deal for the serf to labor underneath a lord than live in the wild - especially since all fertile lands had already been captured by lords. And indeed, you see the language and argumentation during the time period repeat a variant of your argument: both the serf and the lord benefit from the situation and therefore it is good. Similarly, whites made similar arguments about black slavery throughout the history of American slave trade.

But a situation where both parties have no benefit by changing their 'local' stratety by small amounts represents a local Nash-like equilibria at the best - and not anything one could argue is a 'global' optimum. And in fact, if one truly buys that markets are meritocratic, one should be willing to subsidize the equality of opportunity so that as many people start off on an even footing as possible.

In sum this is to say that, like Braess's Paradox, locally rational decisions lead to local but not global maxima - whose gaps can be seen to be gigantic from history. When we discuss opportunities for labor, wealth and quality of life, this becomes an ethics question.

It is not so clear, at least to me, that the principle of trade (especially given its other major problems not covered here) should be prioritized over ethical considerations. Quandaries like this do lead us to ask what sorts of wages and opportunities are 'fair'.

jaytagdamian• 11 years ago

£18 an hour? Not bad money for London - that's £34k or $57k... More than most.

stegosaurus4• 11 years ago

That's exactly my point. 'More than most'. No-one seems to be able to discuss this rationally because they consider it normal and natural for everyone to be poor, serfs, renting from a lord.

£34k is great, for a child. 25K or so after tax and student loan.

A 1 BR flat costs almost ten times that.

It is a great starting salary. A progression point. Perhaps OK for a couple, both earning the same, just about. (Not really, they still can't afford a flat, never mind anything suitable for a family).

randyrand• 11 years ago

There is a huge misunderstanding of economics in this article.

Companies can not and will not pay more than the market wage. Nor should they. It is the governments responsibility to make up the difference between the market wage, and a living wage, not the companies.

There a numerous benefits to doing it this way. A negative income tax.

com2kid3• 11 years ago

A market wage can only be set if there is equal negotiating possible between employee and employer.

In the case of a power asymmetry, it is up to the government to bring the power back into balance.

Granted the reason for the power imbalance is government interference with the free market to begin with, immigration laws give the employer power over the employee that would be absent without the fear of deportation.

bcoates• 11 years ago

The government is selectively barring these people from lawful work. It is selectively looking the other way on labor and housing law violations as a subsidy to their employers and landlords. This is New York we're talking about, not some hypothetical market economy. The game is rigged and the referees are crooked.

itsnotlupus• 11 years ago

Is it implied that everybody able to read this article has an adblocker installed?

As I try to scroll through it, the page forcefully takes me back to be at eye level with one of several video streaming ads at various heights, making reading the entire article essentially impossible.

dba7dba5• 11 years ago

While I agree about the exploitation and breaking laws is bad, every single one of us in US is guilty of benefiting from slave labor.

The article got me thinking and I did some searching. A worker in Chinese factory assembling $700 iphone makes about $500 a month salary. No tips. Working 60 hours a week.

brc• 11 years ago

The dollar amount doesn't matter. What matters is if that income is sufficient to lead a decent life (shelter, food, leisure time, keeping children in education). Unless you know that, you can't comment on their salary.

If hey he Chinese person is happy with their job, and you're happy with your iPhone, no real harm is being done.

By putting a fantastic piece of hardware in your hand, at a pretty reasonable price, it allows you to be more productive, thus leaving you with more to spend on other purchases. It also enables an entire ecosystem, allowing other people to be productive, and so on.

All these things are infinitely better than the Chinese worker not having that job, and you not having an iPhone.

dba7dba5• 11 years ago

"All these things are infinitely better than the Chinese worker not having that job, and you not having an iPhone."

And all these manicurists would be doing something far worse working as nail-techs.

And the Chinese person is not happy. There were tons of articles about suicides among the workers. I'm sure you read those?

And the lower/middle class ladies paying $20 instead of $100 for a nail treatment has $80 to spend in the expensive city called NYC.

So we agree going after the nail shops is frivilous?

analyst74• 11 years ago

I've done below-minimum-wage jobs, and I'm grateful for them, as someone who just didn't know what all the helps are (or not qualified to get help, like those illegal immigrants), where to find jobs and what are available. Those jobs prevented me from starving, gave me confidence, and eventually lead to better paying jobs.

Although it would suck if I were illegal immigrant and got stuck on one of those jobs, which this article seems to hint. We need to figure out a way to treat illegal immigrants as normal human beings instead of forcing them into urban equivalent of subsistence farming.

Maybe not quite handing out citizenship freely like some of the troubled European countries, but there should be opportunities and hopes to get out of survival mode if they worked hard for it.

theVirginian• 11 years ago

I thought this was like construction nails before I clicked, which is actually an equally interesting topic according to my friend who owns a contract business. Apparently it has been harder to guaranteed high quality nails in recent decades as a result of cheap manufacturing abroad.

kijin• 11 years ago

The fact that most of these businesses are owned by immigrants and staffed by even more recent immigrants is a major factor in how they can operate so blatantly in defiance of the laws.

The article mentions in passing that the Labor Department has a severe shortage of investigators who can speak the languages the manicurists speak (mostly Korean and Chinese -- they have more people who can speak Spanish). But even if they could, what would they find out?

Every major Western city has at least one Korean-run website with an informal classified section (usually just a forum), where employers proudly announce below-minimum wages as if they were doing a great favor to the hapless kids who end up working for them. Ditto for the Chinese, and I'm sure other immigrant communities have them, too. Why aren't people reporting these ads to the Labor Department and/or IRS? Yeah, those posts aren't in English, but nothing a few minutes of Google Translate can't fix.

It's because immigrant kids really have nowhere else to work, with their abysmal English skills and zero knowledge of the American job market. Many of them are international students who are at risk of deportation if the authorities find out that they've been working. A friend or relative probably introduced them to the nail salon, so if they ever betray their employer, the friend or relative will be very disappointed and they'll have a hard time finding another job through that channel ever again.

Moreover, insular communities like Koreatown don't look kindly upon "traitors". Even though Korea itself has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, most Korean communities in large Westerm cities are stuck with the mentality that early immigrants brought with them 50 years ago. That means the employer is doing you a totally undeserved favor by offering to hire you for $3.50/hr, no pay for the first 3 months, and oh, you gotta return the favor by paying your employer a $100 fee when you start. It's seriously backward. It would be difficult to get away with shenanigans like that in Seoul. But in LA, in NYC, nobody questions it. And if you do, good luck walking around Koreatown with a straight face ever again. Your parents will be ashamed of you, etc. etc.

Still, there's some good news. Younger Koreans no longer give a shit about what their parents think an ideal employer-employee relationship should look like, and they can often just go back to Korea if they aren't happy with life in America. The Chinese are still suffering massively, as the article describes at length, because they don't have that luxury. But if an abusive Korean business owner ever hires a non-immigrant kid, which they increasingly do because so many American youngsters are out of jobs these days, that's a ticking time bomb to a massive lawsuit.

The article mentions a Korean nail salon owner who finally got sued and was ordered to pay $474K. A few weeks ago, a Korean restaurant owner in NYC was ordered to pay $2.6M to his abused and overworked employees. More of this needs to happen, and more of it will happen. It's about time the Korean immigrant community stopped giving a bad reputation to Korea.

The Price of Nice Nails

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