Posted on 07/31/2015 11:14:42 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
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. Profiling at length the experiences of a woman named Jing Ren—a twenty-year-old recent immigrant who was paid no salary for her first three months on the job and was shockingly underpaid after that—the nearly 7,000-word article asserted that “rampant exploitation” afflicts “a vast majority” of the many thousands of manicurists in the more than 3,600 nail salons of New York State. The article said it drew on interviews with more than one hundred salon workers, nearly all of whom “had wages withheld in ways that would be considered illegal.” It also suggested that these practices have been systematically ignored by city and state authorities.
Within hours of the story’s publication on May 10, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a multi-agency task force to investigate all New York salons for alleged mistreatment of workers, and then he signed a new law that, among other things, makes it a crime to operate a salon without a license. Just as quickly, the Internet lit up with expressions of indignation and alarm, reflecting a sudden alteration of the collective conscience. The writer of the Times story, Sarah Maslin Nir, who covers Queens for the paper, said in an interview on the Times website, “Your discount manicure is on the back of the person giving it”; a blog on the website of The Christian Science Monitor used the term “salon ‘slaves’” to sum up her story. A few weeks after the exposé came out, Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, hailed it as a model “investigative story with impact.”
But was it true? . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at nybooks.com ...
Interesting. The couple did a lot of research. I’m surprised the NY Review of Books published it.
Btw, most of the younger workers who’ve done my nails on the Upper West Side are in college, sometimes at night or sometimes by working a part-time schedule, or they’re studying English to prepare for college.
“...wage-theft at nail salons”
Wouldn’t it be LOVELY to wake up one morning and the headline in all the newspapers is:
‘Confiscatory, Unconstitutional Tax-Theft from Taxpayers Prosecuted Under American Constitution. Government Found GUILTY! Refunds Forthcoming.’
You too!
Exactly.
“All the news that fits, we print.”
Teppi Hedren is not amused.
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