Nail Salon Case Study

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A Nail Salon: Your Local Sweatshop?
Can you think of the last time you got your nails done and what it cost you? Maybe you got a nice deal and were able to get a manicure for $10. Now what do you think it cost your stylist? Maybe just an hour of their time? Well what if I told you that your local nail salon is most likely one of the most dangerous places in your local neighborhood. This is the case for stylists in New York City like 20-year old Jing Ren, the only city where nail salons are more popular than Starbucks. Workers’ days start early, waiting at the corner of a street to get picked up and transported from the outside boroughs of New York into the Manhattan. The new workers start off having to pay for the job, usually a $100 fee and continue to work for no pay for a few weeks or even up to 3 months or whenever the owner feels that they have proved themselves. Even then they earn very little and if they’re lucky they may …show more content…

The chemicals in most nail products found in a salon are unsafe and unregulated and causing despair in lives of salon workers around America. Workers are three times more likely at contracting asthma than those outside the industry and have an increased risk for miscarriages, birth defects, lung diseases, and cancer. Stylists are known to also have skin disorders like having skin discoloration. One stylist, Ki Ok Chung, has been losing her fingerprints after two decades of working. Although this issue has been brought up to the F.D.A., little has been done to regulate the harmful chemicals that are in these products and protect the stylists from the intake of them. When workers have to choose a pay over safety, they are hard-pressed to choose money so that they can pay their bills and support their families for another week. Desperate times call for desperate

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