Nailed! One more thing to feel guilty about.

The New York Times has been running an exposé on the miserable conditions that New York City manicurists work under.

While I don’t get my mani-pedi work done in The City, my first thought was ‘Swell. One more thing to feel guilty about.’

The Times reported that workers – generally young Asian and Hispanic women, often recently arrived – are badly exploited, miserably paid and sometimes even physically mistreated.

Lawsuits filed in New York courts allege a long list of abuses: the salon in East Northport, N.Y., where workers said they were paid just $1.50 an hour during a 66-hour workweek; the Harlem salon that manicurists said charged them for drinking the water, yet on slow days paid them nothing at all; the minichain of Long Island salons whose workers said they were not only underpaid but also kicked as they sat on pedicure stools, and verbally abused. (Source: NY Times)

$1.50 an hour, huh?

I think my first job paid $1.40, and that was nearly 50 years ago.

How desperate do you have to be to work for $1.50 an hour?

(Free marketers back off: there’s nothing good about this lousy wage.)

In addition to a crappy hourly wage, when they start out on this career path, manicurists typically have to pay the salon owner an upfront fee – and subsist on tips-only until the owner decides they’re worthy of getting paid. (One worker profiled in the article worked for three months for nothing, before getting “promoted” to being a paid worker – for $3 an hour.) Of course, those being groomed would have no way of knowing whether their “girl” is being paid a wage – living or non – given that there’s no price differential whether you’re having your cuticles trimmed by a novice or an old pro.

The juxtapositions in nail salon workers’ lives can be jarring. Many spend their days holding hands with women of unimaginable affluence, at salons on Madison Avenue and in Greenwich, Conn. Away from the manicure tables they crash in flophouses packed with bunk beds, or in fetid apartments shared by as many as a dozen strangers.

Bunk-bedded flophouses? Where’s Jacob Riis when we need him? (Free marketers back off.)

The nail salon workers in NYC are easy enough to exploit – few speak English, many are here illegally. And – in what must be the one and only thing that’s cheaper in NYC than anywhere else – the average price of a manicure is $10.50, about half what it is across the country. So, owners make it up in a combo of high volume and rotten wages.

What’s all very interesting about this is the proliferation of nail salons.

Maybe because I wasn’t looking for one – I clipped my own ragged nails and cuticles – I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing until a decade ago or so. Hair salons often had a manicurist, but that was about it.

But I never had my nails done anyway. Until relatively recent times, I’d never even worn nail polish. The only time I painted my nails was when I was a kid and we’d dip a red pencil in warm water and pretend it was nail polish. Maybe my lack of interest in getting my nails done was a hold-over from having been a nail-biter until I was 20 or so, when the nail-biting just stopped.

Then fast forward a couple of decades and, all of sudden, there were nail salons everywhere. (I can think of four within a two minute walk of where I live.) So I said ‘why not’ and started getting regular manis and pedis.

The proliferation of salons has, of course, made competition fierce – low prices, depressed wages – especially so in NYC, where the growth in the number of nail salons has been especially strong.

The Times article had a companion piece on what mani-pedi seekers can do about the problem of maltreated workers.

Bizarrely, the first suggestion was “interview your manicurist” and ask them about their working conditions.

This sounds like a non-starter for a couple of reason. First off, many of the mani-pedi workers don’t speak much/any English. (Mine speak Vietnamese.) Second, if the owner is on prem, well, I suspect the last thing a mistreated, brutalized (illegal) worker wants to do is blab to a customer about how rotten things are.

The second suggestion was “look around” and see if there’s a punch clock which might be an indicator that workers hours are at least being kept. (And just what a hawk-eye owner wants you to be doing: snooping around.)

The final tip for alleviate worker plight was that we should patronize salons that cost more and, thus, are more likely to pay better wages. I.e., if a price is too good to be true, someone’s getting hurt – likely the worker. Tipping, by the way, does not apparently cut it, as owners keep wages skimpy because their workers make tips. And the tips may, in fact, be skimmed or, if put on a credit card, never passed on to the worker.

The good news is that, as a result of the Times story on nail salons, the State of New York is going to see if they can do something about it. (The bad news is that they’ve set up a task force…)

The other good news is that the Massachusetts nail salon industry doesn’t seem to be the snake pit that New York is.

So I won’t have to resort to dipping a red pencil in warm water and “doing” my nails that way.

And there’ll be no need for me to brush up on my Vietnamese so I can interview the woman doing my nails. (It would be fun to know what the mani-pedi workers are saying. I suspect they always comment to each other on how long and skinny my feet are.)  And I can maybe tip (in cash) without having to worry about whether the tip is going into the wrong pocket.

Happy to have kinda-sorta dodged the guilt bullet on this one.

There’s plenty enough guilt to go around already.