Nail Salon Workers Assert Their Rights
On April 7th, a coalition of nail workers (pictured above) gathered in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to demonstrate for a minimum wage, safer working conditions, and for the creation of a “standards council” designed to end the merciless salon parlor competition that hurts both owners and workers. Many of these demands wouldn’t require new legislation, just enforcement of laws already on the books for years.
Their demonstration also was a timely reminder of how the continued misclassification of a wide range of workers, including salon nail technicians, as “independent contractors” in today’s labor market denies them fundamental workplace rights and protections.
In 2015, an explosive New York Times expose laid bare what workers’ advocacy groups had been saying for years: Unsafe conditions, race-to-the-bottom prices, and miserable hourly earnings made conditions in nail salons untenable. A spotlight was shone and New York responded with a flurry of administrative reforms and legislative action.
The State formed a Nail Salon Industry Task Force. As a result of its work, nail salon workers were, on a phased basis, to be covered by State minimum wage requirements; their employers would not be permitted an exemption from the laws provisions based on tips nail workers earned.
In 2016, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo also signed a ventilation law mandating procedures for the safe dispersal of often-hazardous manicure and pedicure chemicals (though some of these ventilation requirements were pushed back at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing salons until April 2022 to comply).
And yet the median earnings for nail salon technicians today remains under $20,000 a year. A statewide survey conducted by Workers United and a Cornell University report both recently showed that wage theft and misclassification of salon workers as independent contractors remain serious problems.
Some 76 percent of nail salon technicians are making less than the appropriate minimum wage. A big reason is the cutthroat pricing that makes it difficult for small businesses to raise wages and improve working conditions even if they wanted to. It’s a problem that’s especially acute in New York City, where the average cost of a manicure is lower than anywhere else in the state.
Nearly half (44 percent) of nail technicians in New York State also are working as independent contractors, despite nearly all such workers lacking the special license required for them to be so classified. In New York City, that portion is even higher; 65 percent of nail technicians in the five boroughs are considered independent contractors, even though a majority work for a single salon and report not having any control over their schedules or setting their own rates.
New York State has created clear rules for nail salons to avoid just this problem of misclassification. For a technician to work as an independent contractor, a worker must have their own “Appearance Enhancement Area Renter” license, as well as a “Nail Specialty License,” and also purchase liability insurance and a surety bond. When asked, most nail technicians have never heard of these requirements.
Misclassification happens when an employer either intentionally or inadvertently identifies a worker as an independent contractor rather than as a standard employee. A forthcoming Center for New York City Affairs report will detail how hundreds of thousands of low-paid independent contractors across many industries statewide, from transportation to educational services, construction to personal care, are denied basic employee benefits and rights. Those include minimum wage protections, access to health insurance and retirement plans, and the right to organize and collectively bargain.
In particular, there is – rightly – mounting public concern about the plight of app-dispatched gig workers. That’s in part because the platforms that rely on these gig workers have had such a profound effect on the way we work, eat, socialize, and get around town, especially during the pandemic. The pandemic’s effects have also highlighted the indignities visited on gig workers.
Nail salon technicians are regularly subjected to similarly precarious working arrangements. And just as delivery workers have recently won the right to use bathrooms at restaurants whose products they deliver, and Uber drivers have gone to court to get unemployment insurance benefits, nail salon workers have coalesced around legislative remedies to their particular problems.
Two proposed State laws could help bring employers in line with existing law and also raise the earnings floor for nail salon workers. The Nail Salon Accountability Act would tie business licensing to labor law compliance. Only businesses with a clean compliance record, without pending cases of wage theft or health and safety violations, would be allowed to renew their State-issued “Appearance Enhancement License.” Because many small business owners (the average size of a nail salon is only four workers) simply are not aware of recent changes to minimum wage laws and other workplace protections, renewal would also be contingent on providing small businesses with training to bring them into compliance.
The recently proposed Nail Salon Minimum Standards Act (S861) could help improve the economic health of salon operators and workers. It would establish a council with representatives from employers, nail workers, and public officials to recommend sector-wide minimum standards, combatting the race-to-the-bottom competition that destroys small business profits and devastates worker earnings.