Nail Salon Industry

Words: 783
Pages: 4

The purpose of this paper is to summarize two articles from Sarah Maslin on the nail salon industry. The first article, “The Price of Nice Nails” outlines low pay wages, abuse, and exploitation of the manicurists. The article focus on the nail salons in New York in Manhattan and their harsh treatment of their workers.
The articles start out with describing the day-to-day activities on these workers. On the corner of the Flushing, Queen’s main road lines the vast number of Asian and Hispanic women since 8:00 am. Among the group of woman was Jing Ren, a Chinese immigrant with her nail tools and $100. The money was for a form of payment to the salon owner as a part of her employment agreement. Jing’s employment consists of intense labor for
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The New York market had tripled, and as the industry grows, the worker exploitation were disregard. The New York Times had conducted interviews of 150 nail salon workers and owners, their findings have shown large quantity of workers are paid below minimum wage or maybe not at all. The level of abuse was evident and ranges from humiliation, tips deduction as retribution for petty indiscretions. The workers were on continuous video surveillance by their boss with constant physical abuse.
New York has the largest market place in the nail salon industry among the American metropolitan area such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Asian newspaper classifies Ads reveal an astonishing truth of among the miniature wages that advertised, initially from $10 per day. Several lawsuits filed in New York courts against the abusers. The accusation that was file indicated a wage violation, verbal and physical abused. There was numerous investigation conducted by the New York State Labor Department. The fines were astonishing indicating 116 wage
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The article highlights the potential health risks suffered by the workers, causing birth defects, mischarges, cancers and painful skin afflictions. The article introduce to us an Ecuadorean immigrant, Ms. Otavalo who had miscarriage the year before while giving a customer a shoulder massage. Monica C. Rocano was a second manicurist, which had five miscarriage and disabled son, Matthew Rocano. Matthew had difficulties speaking and walking independently.
There was numerous stories in the nail industry of special needs children, miscarriage, and cancer and painful skin afflictions. Manicurist have advice younger workers to bear children away from the toxins from the nail polishes. Several research has shown the connection between the chemicals in nail and beauty products causes serious health problems. Whatever the threat the typical customer enjoying her weekly French tips might face, it is a different order of magnitude, advocates say, for manicurists who handle the chemicals and breathe their fumes for hours on end, day after