If the nail salon owners all followed the law and paid their employees properly, the average price of service would increase. The race to the bottom is only because of en masse violations of the law.
The state needs to do their job. One year and a thousand or so lawsuits (exactly 0% chance the state has the resources to do this) and the problem will go away. Manicures will end up costing $20 instead of $10, and workers will be able to live like people and not animals.
Who cares? Manicures are just about the most useless status symbol product there is.
The ladies doing the manicures will be unemployed, but since they're not getting paid now, they'll actually be better off.
They need to skip the lawsuits and throw the owners in prison. Working for weeks with no pay is practically slavery.
Edit: Now that I think about it, why isn't the IRS looking into this, too? I have a hard time believing the owners aren't paying their workers, but are paying proper taxes and withholdings for them.
The IRS is underfunded as a means of inhibiting enforcement because the dysfunctional Congress is unable to make law. The IRS only goes after lucrative targets (big fines and large back taxes) and cannot afford to enforce the law.
Why? The electorate is stupid and being made stupid by eagerly consuming media selling information entertainment, acting on the political and financial will of their owners.
Partisan bullshit, and the willingness to participate in it by citizens on _every_ side, is the major threat to our democracy.
Demand will certainly decrease. Some nail salons will have to close and we will find out the number of legal nail salons the market bears. Those who go out of business will need to find another line of work. I see no problem with this. It will be a turbulent time for some people but that's not a valid reason to continue to prop up a badly-regulated economy that relies on illegally underpaying its workers.
It's disappointing to me that you are choosing to encourage practices that reinforce the bad options instead of thinking about how to grow the pool of good ones.
Sorry, may argument wasn't clear - it wasn't so much that the practices don't need to improve, but that the real problem is that people have to settle for this. It might be more cost effective and provide a better outcome for those involved if we focused on providing them with the skills and the knowledge that they could take advantage of better opportunities and turn these ones down.
I think everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, but I have strong fear about removing the bottom rungs of the ladder - sometimes the value that people provide is well below their cost and they need to get started.
But we're not talking about removing the bottom rung of the ladder, we're talking about fixing said bottom rung and making it stronger. It'll be gone for awhile while we're working on it, which will be hard for people. But it will be better for everyone once we've fixed it.
Maybe that would show that there is no viable market for manicuring services and that people doing that for a living are better off finding another line of work? I'm not saying this is what I think, just a counter-point.
> It is apparent that many societies unlearn how to get things done. Instead we learned to mourn things we can not right.
We can go to the moon, perform fusion on atoms, but finding an arrangement where large pluralities of hard-working people live better than $30 a day, after months without pay, and a $100 down payment in the most expensive city in the USA is something 'we can not right.' To propose policy that would harm businesses who subsist only by virtue of (by any reasonable definition) exploitation is to 'plunder some salons.'
Guess what. Some shop owners and workers may be out of work. But the state/city regulators/inspectors that didn't do their job and allowed this to grow will be fine. No punishment of any kind and nice fat pension waiting.
What makes you think the cosmetologists are not owners themselves (and hence self-employed, exempt from minimum wage), 1099 independent contractors (and hence exempt) or simply undocumented in the United States?
It is very unlikely the IRS would qualify them as 1099 independent. Undocumented workers still qualify for minimum wage laws even if their unlikely to fight the issue.
As to the owner issue, that's possible, but everyone would need a near equil share or minimum wage laws still apply. AKA giving someone 0.1% generally does not let you dodge minimum wage laws.
> It's vary unlikly the IRS would qualify them as 1099 independent.
As I understand it, they often set their own hours, supply their own equipment, control how they do their job, and rent space in which to do it from the establishment in which they do it, which provides services like centralized collection and distribution of customer payments.
I'd like to see the argument as to why, using the actual criteria used to define contractor vs. employee relations, they wouldn't be classed as contractors.
Oddly enough an extended period without any pay is not really a direct issue in terms of minimum wage. But, is a vary strong suggestion that someone is an employee.
1. Fails location test, likely others.
2. A no pay period fails this test.
3. Fails
4. Fails
5. likely fails
6. Fails
7. likely fails. A predefined time to show up counts as set hours.
8. likely fails.
9. Fails
10. (case by case basis)
11. No reports, but direct supervision likely fails.
12. likely fails.
13. likely pass.
14. likely pass.
15. Fail
16. ? depends
17. likely fails.
18. likely fails.
19. Fails
20. Fails
Eh, IT consulting fails a whole bunch of those too but we still do 1099. The 20-point test is a guideline, not hard and fast law.
(Aside: That's probably why BigCos hire contractors by making them go W2 with a staffing agency and contracting the staffing agency to make you available full time.)
What I got from the article was that they did NOT set their hours, train themselves, etc. Workers are picked up in vans by their employers, are trained by their employers, directly supervised (very closely) by their employers, etc. About as cut and dried as it gets.
> It is very unlikely the IRS would qualify them as 1099 independent.
How come? The setup with most hair cutting salons is that you "rent" a station from the owner, and then arrange your own clientele and participate in some kind of rotation of walk-in customers.
Most non-corporate hair cutting places don't have any employees (and the need for higher-level client management led to startups like StyleSeat).
I believe the set-up is similar with non-corporate professional massage therapists as well - the "table space" is rented out, the therapist is then responsible for booking clients.
The transaction occurs on the owner's cash register, as credit cards need to be processed and receipts handed out, but we have no visibility into actual money flows.
That's not to say it has to be that way - Square, Styleseat, Mytime are all targeting this, but we still have cash customers, check customers, etc.
How do want the state to do it's job? Because step one would be a whole lot of deportations. There's not much political support for that, especially in Manhattan, and if you have the government selectively enforcing wage laws while ignoring immigration laws, you've got an glaringly corrupt system. So they ignore it...
The state needs to do their job. One year and a thousand or so lawsuits (exactly 0% chance the state has the resources to do this) and the problem will go away. Manicures will end up costing $20 instead of $10, and workers will be able to live like people and not animals.