What the ‘Times’ Got Wrong About Nail Salons

July 25, 2015 5:53 PM

Rarely does a newspaper story get the kind of response that The New York Times front-page exposé of wage-theft at nail salons prompted this spring.... But was it true?

Previous discussion of the NYTimes articles

posted by Shmuel510 (35 comments total)

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,”

This is otherwise known as "a story too good to check."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:01 PM on July 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

As a former New York Times journalist who also has been, for the last twelve years, a part owner of two day-spas in Manhattan, I read the exposé with particular interest.

Yeah, I bet he did....

For what it's worth, Sarah Nir has posted what she says was the ad on Twitter.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:03 PM on July 25, 2015 [12 favorites]

Would have been nice if she could have posted a legible image. I tried going to the URL but it won't let me select dates back that far.
posted by sbutler at 6:27 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'll admit not getting more than a few paragraphs in before I imagined the author angrily concluding his tweets with "#notallsalons".
posted by phooky at 6:34 PM on July 25, 2015 [20 favorites]

Can't wait for a Vox card stack to Voxsplain all this to me!
posted by batfish at 6:42 PM on July 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

Nir's image of the ad sets off my spidey-sense. It doesn't look like any other ad on that page. No other ad has a dollar-figure placed that prominently (and it's not the $10 she claims -- amateur translators say the $75 is for experienced workers and $10 for "apprentices," which is still less than minimum, but now it sounds like a poorly worded ad, not something nefarious). And rationally, you would put the dollar figure up top like that only if you truly thought it was an attractive figure that would grab eyeballs. So, if $75 is still crap for that kind of work, why advertise that at all?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:44 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's a higher-resolution image now.

It's worth noting that the full Sinosphere blog post that Bernstein cites against the Times exposé, taken as a whole, does more to support it.

On the other hand, Time editor Michael Luo is now citing another article in support, but if you actually read that article, it's similarly wide of the mark when taken as a whole.

So far, all I can tell is that everybody seems to be cherry-picking their evidence.
posted by Shmuel510 at 6:47 PM on July 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

Nir: "and there are dozens more in the back issues of the local papers, which I have, of course. :)" I'm assuming that these are print copies which can't be quickly put online.
posted by maudlin at 6:49 PM on July 25, 2015

Photoshopped ads aside (and boy, does the article devote a lot of space to the ads), the bit at the end where the author says that ok, maybe Ms. Ren was exploited (which she totally wasn't because he and his wife would never do that) but it's ok now because she has a job that pays a legal wage:

In other words, Ms. Ren seems to have made a kind of calculated decision. She’s worked for very low wages in exchange for the experience and training she needed to get a better job, and now she has one, perhaps by answering one of the thousands of classified ads ignored by the Times account. Ms. Ren’s cousin and mother, who, we learn at the end of Ms. Nir’s account, also work as manicurists, are likely following the same route. They might also eventually get licenses allowing them to do massage or facial treatments, in which case their pay will go up. If they pool their money, as many immigrant families do, their combined earnings could be several hundred dollars a day or more. This is certainly not affluence by New York standards, but neither is it the “rampant exploitation” that the Times claims to be pervasive and inescapable.

So in other words, these types of abuses do not happen, but even if they did, it all works out ok if these immigrants just learn the system and keep tugging at their bootstraps. And she was asking for it anyways, with her calculations and all.
posted by bibliowench at 6:50 PM on July 25, 2015 [54 favorites]

If they pool their money, as many immigrant families do, their combined earnings could be several hundred dollars a day or more.

If you add up the salaries of a bunch of people, then pretend it's one person's income, it really starts to look well-paid.
posted by jeather at 6:57 PM on July 25, 2015 [113 favorites]

So very defensive. I've never perpetrated or seen abuse like this, so it couldn't possibly exist!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:02 PM on July 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

This is the worst take-down ever.

Some quotes from the Sinosphere post that Bernstein links to, claiming it redeems the industry:

"There were times when my tips were withheld"

"In nail salons run by Chinese, being verbally abused was commonplace"

"I’ve heard of miscarriages...The main cause of miscarriages among manicurists is that workers have to work 12-hour days when nail salons get busiest in summer, and they have to rush around serving customers all day"

Now, the interviewee being quoted thinks the industry is hunky-dory, but the interview does more to undermine Bernstein's thesis than support it, I think.
posted by univac at 7:09 PM on July 25, 2015 [11 favorites]

He doesn't even deal with part II, which was all about the hazards that workers face from exposure to toxic chemicals. Maybe thinks that's a valid calculated decision, too?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:14 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I read the original article, read a sorta-kinda opposing article by a woman who took a job in a salon (her experience didn't match the NYT writeup, but she was apparently at a fancier joint), and skimmed and will re-read this...
but
This is NYC. There isn't one market. There's the apartment you find listed on Douglas-Elliman, one through full-floor agent-farms in Chelsea, the scrappy startup that aims to be high-falootin' but cuts corners to pay for a new vinyl banner/sign, 3rd generation building owners on craigslist, full-on scams, bait and switches, etc.

That's exactly the kind of multi-tiered dynamic that I expect the NYT to understand, document, and present, and I was disappointed, but this smacks of the privileged trying to refute a narrative instead of clarify, and gets us no closer to any sort of objective truth.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 7:51 PM on July 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

This is NYC. There isn't one market.

Which is kind of a shitty attitude, but just because it sucks that immigrants here illegally are getting majorly screwed monetarily at their jobs, that doesn't justify the NYT making the claim that the vast majority of manicurists are getting screwed over at work.

Except basic economics will tell you that anywhere that has similar volume and similar prices are doing similar screwing, and with nail salons that's pretty much everywhere. There are some exceptions, but it's a highly commodified set of services and is only profitable at very high volumes.

Some super fancy day spas that are not primarily nail salons can get away with charging $50 for a mani/pedi, but even rich women generally won't pay that much for something that they could get for like $20, especially if we're talking acrylics and need quickie fills every so often, because even the places that charge $50+ are jacking up the price by including a lot of crap like fancy soaks and massages that no one will take the time for when they're just getting fills or a polish change over falsies, and also treating it as a throw-in with a bunch of other spa services. People might pay for that as part of a special occasion with the rest of the spa experience, but that's not where the vast majority of women get their nails done the vast majority of the time.

If you are not a person who routinely gets full mani/pedi, ie some kind of falsies (acrylic, sculpted gel, etc) + a long-lasting paint job (shellac, etc) + possible nail art, and who actually understands the maintenance schedule and cost, you really should not be trying to extrapolate from anything else. For the most part it's a lot more like oil changes than it is like hair cuts.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 8:19 PM on July 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

This seems to be the website for the day spas he co-owns. I actually can't find how much a mani-pedi is, but it's $12 for a basic manicure and $25 for a pedicure. That seems ridiculously cheap to me, but I don't think it is by NYC standards.

(Source: "Jade Day Spa In 2003, married couple Zhongmei Li and Richard Bernstein teamed up with Li’s sister, Zhong Qin, to open their first pampering den on the Upper West Side. Six years later, the trio debuted a second sprawling location in Murray Hill, offering even more Far East–influenced treatments.")
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:43 PM on July 25, 2015

The Bernstein doth protest too much, methinks.
posted by bearwife at 8:50 PM on July 25, 2015

50 bucks for a mani/pedi is pretty much standard in three different places i've lived in southern flyovers (with lower prices for acrylic fills). "pretty much everywhere" might be a truthy statement if you look at population density, maybe, but i disagree if we're looking at geography.
posted by nadawi at 9:15 PM on July 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

This seems like a really weird thing for The New York Review of Books to run, even if it seems to be on some kind of blog. It reads like something that should be on the author's personal blog or Medium site instead of under the imprint of a well-known publication.

This story is questioning the truth of a major investigation (actually, just Part 1 of that investigation, as ArbitraryAndCapricious points out) by the Times, the product of hundreds of interviews and over a year's work. He has very little evidence to offer in return and apparently didn't bother to ask to speak to the reporter for clarification; while he did email Times editors two days after the story ran to ask about the classified ads, I see nothing resembling the kind of diligence that is required before you start questioning the basic truth of a story that so much went into.

At the end of the day, his point is basically that some nail salon workers merely have poor working conditions with low pay comparable to fast food workers, except they spend all day dealing with toxic chemicals, and not all of them have to be paid to be hired or are subject to the absolute bottom in labor practices. This frankly says far more about how low our standards for acceptable labor practices and fair pay are in every industry than something about nail salons in particular.
posted by zachlipton at 9:56 PM on July 25, 2015 [14 favorites]

Next up in NY Review of Books, BP oil exec: "Most of the Gulf of Mexico doesn't have oil in it, so I don't know why you're making such a big deal about this."

Sure, it's possible (probable?) that the original NYT article may have gotten some details wrong. But why would we take this guy's word -- someone who admittedly has a vested interest in the perception of the nail salon industry -- at face value? He says that he and his wife reviewed thousands (thousands!) of ads. Sure, ok. But, why should I believe him? Because he was a former NYT journalist? Should the fact that he's a current nail salon owner outweigh that? If anything, his incentives now are completely flipped.
posted by mhum at 10:13 PM on July 25, 2015 [18 favorites]

Needless to say, it is not like The New York Times to get things so demonstrably wrong, or, if it did make a mistake, to show no willingness to correct it.

Opinions vary.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:54 AM on July 26, 2015

This guy's article is basically #NotAllManicures
posted by Metroid Baby at 3:28 AM on July 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is exactly the kind of toxic nonsense that goes around social media, where some person or organization posts an article attacking some group of people with no real evidence behind it, and thousands of people jump on the bandwagon because it make them feel good and "justice" or something. It's all just to drive page view and ad impressions, and in some cases donations or patreons. Never mind if it has any substance behind it or not (in this case, apparently not as they couldn't even supply any evidence of their claims).

Bernstein is even worse in his defense. If he's inspected "thousands" of advertisements, he should have scanned them and put them up online. Why should anyone even take him at his word, as a spa owner?

I swear the whole point of these things sometimes is to create unsolved controversy that will drive even more page views and arguments online, like a snake eating its tail.
posted by xdvesper at 4:54 AM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

What happened here was a mainstream print newspaper doing old-fashioned investigative journalism about labor abuses in immigrant-run-and-staffed sweatshops, followed by consumer outrage and an attempt by owners to discredit the story. This is an episode that would have been much, much more at home in the media landscape of 1915 than the media landscape of 2015. The only difference is that it wouldn't have been the Times publishing the story in 1915, because the Times was overtly reactionary and anti-worker in 1915. The reason that this seems novel to you is that the media has largely abandoned that kind of shoe-leather reporting because of budget cutbacks, and they no longer report much on domestic labor issues, because they think their readers don't care. And the good news is that this episode shows that readers do care, which might convince papers to go back to doing some of the kind of journalism that used to be really common.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:20 AM on July 26, 2015 [55 favorites]

ArbitraryAndCapricious: I would repost your comment using the blink tag if I could.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:35 AM on July 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich writing Nickeled and Dimed and then some forgotten person wrote a long review in a prestigious rag (I'm thinking London Review but that memory is not coming through reliable) which was along the lines of real poor people are way smarter about doing poverty than Barbara was so she can be ignored.
posted by bukvich at 6:52 AM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

This guy's article is basically #NotAllManicures

I think #NotMostManicures would be a more accurate summation.
posted by kisch mokusch at 7:29 AM on July 26, 2015

It's hard to prove either side, really. It's a mostly unregulated industry run by immigrants employing lots of undocumented immigrants, and it's a large industry with a very diverse group of salons operated in diverse ways. It's another issue about which white liberals can wring their hands while detracting attention from their own privilege, and which conservatives can point to and say, "See, they're racist too" while detracting attention from white collar crime. The employers may be immigrants whose native language is not English and are therefore unable to articulate well their own defense, and many of the employees are fearful of being deported if they speak out on either side. But people will find in it whatever they're looking for and not much will change about it, except that people will have another talking point for whatever agenda they are advancing. Meanwhile the working class people at the salons will probably see a huge drop in revenue, maybe even go out of business, because someone wanted to write a juicy investigative piece about exploitation mostly in the interest of advancing his or her own interests but caring fuck all about the consequences.
posted by ChuckRamone at 10:01 AM on July 26, 2015

"It's hard to prove either side, really."

Yep, which is why the NY Times should have done much, much more documentation and made more of their evidence publicly available. It is hard, but it can be done and it can be done well. The NY Times should have done better. The Bernstein piece doesn't even get to the level of the NY Times article.
posted by klangklangston at 12:59 PM on July 26, 2015

My experience with any reporting about Japan, and what I've heard from folks in Korea about any reporting about Korea, is that it usually comes down to "The majority of readers can't corroborate this information because it's not in English, so we can just make up a good story and people will totally go with it". So, on the one hand, a person with a vested interest defends their industry. That sets off bullshit alarms. And on the other hand, someone wrote a great narrative about Exotic Asian Stuff that meets peoples' preconceptions and is largely uncheckable. That sets off just as many bullshit alarms.

There's so much potential bullshit that I'm tempted to believe that there aren't even any nail salons in New York in the first place.
posted by Bugbread at 7:20 PM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh god, the English-language media in Korea is amazingly terrible without even knowing how to read any Korean, and it's worse than terrible if you can. There, and native Koreans should correct me because most of this comes through visiting my brother, the problem seems to be that discipline in access control and a non-liberal conception of the press by the government means that everything gets to the depth of a press release and nothing more. This story would be read as Clinton falling out of favor with the people who own the newspaper, rather than as any collection of reliable facts or narrative.
posted by klangklangston at 10:47 PM on July 26, 2015

"An ordinary worker can start in a nail salon to learn the techniques, and, after three or five years, she can pay around $30,000 to buy a salon and become a boss herself."

I call absolute bullshit on this (one of the many things that makes me want to call complete bullshit on the whole rebuttal article). I make a low middle class salary at a desk job with all the attendant benefits and there's no way I could save that much money in 3-5 years. I mean, I'm not denying that some people could do it, especially if you were able to pool together savings for something that would then become the family business, but the idea that it's a reasonable achievement for most manicurists is absurd on its face.
posted by MsMolly at 2:56 PM on July 27, 2015

MsMolly: The way I read that was that after three or five years, that ordinary worker will have gained all the necessarily skills to manage and run a salon, not that their savings after that time will have amounted to $30,000. It's like saying after you've taken lessons and obtained your drivers license, you can own and drive a car. You "can", but you also need the money to buy or rent the car. $30,000 is large, but not absurdly large to start a business relatively speaking.
posted by xdvesper at 5:33 PM on July 27, 2015

The editor of the piece has been posting defense of the piece. Some bits at the end include: a salon owner (the one who posted the ad) admitting "apprentices" aren't really paid, a trade association president admitting many in the industry aren't paid minimum wage and a summary of state dept of labor investigations that found underpaying in 80% of cases. It doesn't get to whether it's a majority of the industry but it sure seems (esp the DoL stuff) that there is some issue.
posted by R343L at 4:50 AM on July 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Times has also put out a pretty strong defense of its reporting:

Ms. Nir and her team interviewed more than 100 workers over the course of their investigation, visiting salons across New York City and the surrounding region. For months, they showed up at the pick-up spot in Flushing, Queens, where nail workers wait every morning for vans to take them to their salons. A quarter of workers interviewed said they were paid wages that worked out roughly to the equivalent of the minimum wage or better. The rest were paid less. Only three workers were actually paid in a way that adhered to the letter of the law. When the state Department of Labor inspected nail salons over the last few years—a rare occurrence, according to agency data–in 80 percent of the cases, workers were found to be unpaid or underpaid. After the series was published, Gov. Andrew Cuomo created a task force to investigate salons. At last check, inspectors had issued nearly 1,800 violations after inspecting some 755 salons.

posted by zachlipton at 9:06 AM on July 29, 2015