Here's the Shocking Human Rights Cost of a Manicure in New York City

The New York Times has spent the better part of a year conducting a fairly groundbreaking investigation of labor conditions for nail salon workers, and the first installment in their “Unvarnished” series is clear, chilling, and heartbreaking to the last word. Reporter Sarah Maslin Nir starts with a scene of young immigrant women standing on a street corner in Queens, ready to be picked up in vans and dropped off at salons where the beginners among them will have to pay salon owners for the privilege of doing manicures—waiting months, usually, before meriting their eventual starting wage, which amounts to tips plus a rough average of $10-30 per day.

The piece is notable for the language hoops its reporters had to jump through—they interviewed more than 150 salon owners and workers, with translators in four languages, carefully navigating the scared, often-undocumented status of the latter category that has made the rampant, typical, customary nail salon rights violations so easy to overlook by the New York Labor Department (which just did its first nail salon sweep last year). “The Price of Nice Nails,” crucially, also comes with three translation options up top—for Chinese, Korean and Spanish.

Of the “more than 100” workers that the Times talked to—many of them working with fake names on their nametags, scrubbing the feet of rich Manhattan women scrolling through iPads without ever speaking to them—only “about a quarter said they were paid an amount that was the equivalent of New York State’s minimum hourly wage.” Additionally, “all but three workers, however, had wages withheld in other ways that would be considered illegal, such as never getting overtime.” There’s a brutal racial caste system (Koreans, then Chinese, then Hispanic workers, the latter of which are openly disparaged by the salon owners interviewed in the piece) and an acceptance of practices like being monitored by video, being verbally berated or physically abused, having tips skimmed, and being financially humiliated:

Qing Lin, 47, a manicurist who has worked on the Upper East Side for the last 10 years, still gets emotional when recounting the time a splash of nail polish remover marred a customer’s patent Prada sandals. When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay. Ms. Lin was asked not to return.

“I am worth less than a shoe,” she said.

Most of the workers interviewed slept in flophouses, unable to afford anything else, and unable—after workweeks that sometimes stretch to near 70 hours—to take the English classes they intended to, or even to take care of their families: “Many manicurists pay caregivers as much as half their wages to take their babies six days a week, 24 hours a day, after finding themselves unable to care for them at night and still wake up to paint nails.”